ScienceOnline2012 – interview with Kathryn Bowers

Author: Bora Zivkovic Source: Scientific American

Note from the editor: Evolution: This View of Life is glad to welcome Kathryn Bowers as the new associate editor of the biology section. The following interview from Scientific American demonstrates Kathryn's expertise and talent. We are looking forward to her contributions to ETVOL.

Every year I ask some of the attendees of the ScienceOnline conferences to tell me (and my readers) more about themselves, their careers, current projects and their views on the use of the Web in science, science education or science communication. So now we continue with the participants of ScienceOnline2012. See all the interviews in this series here.

Today my guest is Kathryn Bowers (blog, Twitter).

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?

I’m a writer and editor and have just finished a book, called Zoobiquity. It explores a simple but provocative question: how would our health improve if human doctors talked with animal doctors? After all, animals and humans get many of the same diseases—from cancer, heart disease, and obesity to mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, and eating issues. Yet physicians and veterinarians almost never consult one another. Exploring comparative medicine quickly brings up issues of shared physiology, shared biology, and shared genetics. And so the book also is informed by a healthy dose of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology.

I co-wrote it with Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, who’s a cardiologist and psychiatrist at the UCLA Medical Center. A few years ago she began volunteering her time at the Los Angeles Zoo. Mornings she can be found performing heart procedures on human patients at UCLA hospital; on some afternoons, she might be examining a chimpanzee, sea lion, condor, or python. She was telling me about the many crossovers she was seeing between human and animal patients, and we were both surprised by how surprised we were. Obviously humans are animals, and intellectually we understand that we share not just many “raw materials”—bones, blood, hearts, nerves—but also environments (and in some cases behaviors that evolved to respond to those environments). The fascinating ubiquity of the overlap between human and animal health spurred us to research and write the book, and also gave us the idea for our title, which combines the Latinate “ubiquity” with the Greek root for animal, “zo.”

Read more at Scientific American