“Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied,” wrote Emily Dickinson, America’s most famous female poet of the 19th century, uncannily foreseeing how inscrutable a subject she herself would turn out to be. Rather like Emily Brontë, with whom she identified, Dickinson shrank from contact with the world, scuttling off in her signature white dress as soon as a visitor appeared at the door. Reluctant to share her pared-down, laser-sharp and sometimes terrifying inward poems through publication—only seven were printed in her lifetime—she neverthelessrelied on an iron core of self-belief, quietly prophesying that posterity would recognize her genius.        

    Dickinson’s externally uneventful life has been chronicled before, but Brenda Wineapple finds a new way in by focusing on her relationship with the man who would eventually help to bring her to the public gaze after her death. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has usually been patronized as a second-rater who bungled the transmission of Dickinson’s work by allowing too much editorial tempering, a man whose bourgeois conventionality tried to silence a woman poet’s true voice. Yet Ms. Wineapple responds to him with compassion and respect, and in doing so makes her book much more than a biography—rather, a sweeping cultural and political history of the lead-up to the American civil war and its aftermath.

As the concept of human rights is based on fairness, the exposure of so many people in poor countries to hazardous industrial processes and toxic wastes violates their rights. This is the view of many experts. In 1994, a group of experts met in Geneva to compose a more general document: “Draft Declaration of Principles on Human Rights and the Environment.” It proclaims, among other things, a universal human right to a “secure, healthy, ecologically sound environment.” 

But many economists give priority to economic growth because it leads to generally higher salaries and more spending power for average individuals. Market exchanges generally promote economic growth, except where public goods are concerned. In those cases, economists use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to identify new rules of market exchange that maximize growth. 

We note problems with this approach. Economic growth does not improve human welfare if it merely reflects higher prices and longer working hours stemming from the increasing scarcity of essential items, such as land to grow crops. When governments use CBA, they give equal consideration to each dollar rather than to each person. This goes against the ideal of equal government concern for all citizens. Also, CBA discounts the lives of future generation, as if people living later have few human rights than those living now. 

CBAs put all variables in dollar terms so that optimal policies can be identified mathematically. Shadow prices are assigned to whatever is not traded in markets, including human lives. Economists estimate how much people value their lives in monetary terms from how much they spend on life insurance and medical care, as well as how much extra pay they demand for dangerous work. Also, when people are killed in accidents caused by negligence, jury awards suggest common estimates of a life’s monetary worth. The problem is that on such measures an average human life in a poor country is worth much less money than an American, European, or Japanese life. This denies an equal human right to life.

    Experiments that go according to plan can be useful. But the biggest scientific advances often emerge from those that do not. Such is the case with a study just reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When they began it, Hector DeLuca of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues had been intending to examine the effects of ultraviolet (UV) light on mice suffering from a rodent version of multiple sclerosis (MS). By the project’s end, however, they had in their hands two substances which may prove valuable drugs against the illness.

   Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease. This means it is caused by a victim’s immune system turning on and destroying parts of his own body. In the case of MS the targets of these attacks, which may continue for years, are the fatty sheaths that insulate nerve cells and thus help nervous impulses to propagate. People suffering from MS are often weakened, and sometimes physically disabled by it, and may also become blind.

   What drives the immune system to behave in this way remains mysterious, but in the 1970s researchers uncovered a promising clue when they noticed that MS is rarer near the equator than it is at high latitudes. The first hypothesis proposed to explain this observation was that vitamin D (a substance created by sunlight’s action on precursor molecules in the skin) might be helping to prevent MS. That made sense, since those living in the tropics receive more sunlight than those in temperate zones. Sadly, follow-up experiments failed to support the notion. Those experiments did, though, lead Dr. DeLuca to discover that the preventive effect is associated with a particular sort of sunlight—UV with a wavelength of between 300 and 315 nanometres (billionths of a metre). His latest experiment was intended to dig deeper into this observation, by using this type of light to irradiate mice that had been injected with chemicals known to cause the rodent equivalent of MS.