Inside You: How Your Body Makes it Through Every Day

  • Mark Hamilton
Dorling Kindersley: £12.99 9781405318723 | ISBN: 978-1-4053-1872-3

In the film Fantastic Voyage (1966), a group of doctors are miniaturized and sent into the body of a defecting scientist to clear an untreatable blood clot. They witness close up processes at the heart of life — the oxygenation of a red blood cell, an electrical impulse in the brain. Journeying around the body is also the theme of Inside You (8–14 years), a book and accompanying CD-ROM. A futuristic 'nanocam' patrols the body providing “breaking news from the front lines of the body battlefield”. It shows what happens when we get stung by a bee, vomit, squeeze a spot and urinate.

It is a laudable attempt to convey science to children aged 8–14 years. The implicit assumption is that exposure to the beauty of science will encourage the young to find out more and learn new things.

Yet the landscape of science education is more complex than is sometimes appreciated. It has been tempting to see the promulgation of science as a linear causal process in which specialist knowledge is transmitted to lay audiences who are blank slates that learn and become positively disposed to science.

This view is now seen as a caricature. There are a multitude of stakeholders with different, and not necessarily compatible, agendas: scientists keen to share their enthusiasm; advocates promoting positive attitudes to science; public-engagement professionals stimulating dialogue and debate; politicians concerned with national competitiveness; and audiences that are active interpreters of the information they receive.

Moreover, it is not just facts but the nature and process of science that need to be communicated. UK schools now include a course on 'How science works'. Arguably, it is better to know the principles of a randomized controlled trial than the names of all the vertebrae.

Mediators end up being pulled in different directions. Take science centres — their funders may have clear ideas about what they should promote, and they have to attract visitors to survive. Hence the proliferation of exhibitions on Star Wars and The Hitch-hikers Guide, and the accompanying cries of dumbing down. Publishing is little different. It is a commercial activity and will survive only if it can make a profit.

Where does Inside You fit? The digital world provides great opportunities for communicating dynamic processes, and biology is nothing if not dynamic. The animations on the CD-ROM succeed admirably in bringing body processes to life, even if the abstraction at times borders on the psychedelic excesses of Fantastic Voyage.

Translated to paper, though, some images take on a strange quality, caught between vague forms and elaborate, confusing textures. The text is mostly clear and simple, though sometimes quite technical. In a book that uses 'breathes in' instead of inhales, it is odd to see 'conjugation', 'scolex', 'proglottids' and 'protists'. If Stephen Hawking can avoid equations, can't biologists avoid unnecessary jargon?

Despite its high-tech premise, there is something old-fashioned about Inside You — the subject matter is practically Fantastic Voyage era. Hardly any recent developments in medical science are included. Readers get no sense of the innate and acquired immune responses, or the revolution in genomics. The notion of microbial communities is barely touched upon — every microbe is an enemy out to do us harm. If you are hoping to find out something about science or scientists, forget it. The book's fascination with the uglier side of the working body will no doubt appeal to its target audience. As a visually striking package it will engage children and they may well learn some facts.

The rumour mill suggests that Fantastic Voyage is being remade. Presumably, it will be another computer-generated spectacular. It may even be educational and tell us something about science — or is that asking too much?