The Plague Documents

I've made some additions to my much-neglected reading blog, You Are What You Read. New entries are notes on:

The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore.

Living Dangerously; The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong by Mark Cotta Vaz.

and

Imaginary Weapons; A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld by Sharon Weinberger.

Also, I wanted to mention a round-table discussion on biological sciences in science fiction organized and published by the journal Nature. Write-up available here Participants were:

"Ken Macleod took a master’s in biomechanics and worked as a computer programmer before becoming a full-time writer based in Edinburgh. He is the author of the Engines of Light novels, the Fall Revolution novels and most recently of The Execution Channel.

Joan Slonczewski is a microbiologist and a professor of biology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She is the author of six science-fiction novels, most recently Brain Plague.

Paul McAuley has been a full-time writer, almost exclusively of science fiction, since the late 1980s; before that he was a lecturer in botany at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His latest novel is Players.

Peter Watts says he has a spent much of his adult life trying to decide whether to be a writer or a scientist, ending up as a marginal hybrid of both. Having done research in marine biology, he is the author of the Rifters trilogy and most recently of Blindsight."