- Even in America, books are frequently challenged and removed from schools and public libraries.
- Every year, the American Library Association puts on Banned Books Week to draw attention to this fact.
- Some of the books they include on their list of most frequently challenged are some of the greatest, most beloved, and entertaining books there are.
Book censorship in the United States has a long and ignoble history. The Puritans burned books they disagreed with, Darwin was banned in Tennessee classrooms, and in 1992 41% of all attempts by censors to remove books from libraries had some measure of success. To help bring attention to this shameful phenomenon, the American Library Association puts on Banned Books Week every year to draw attention to some of the most frequently banned and challenged books in the United States.
Here, we have ten of the most frequently challenged books in the United States, why they are challenged, and why you ought to read them.
Harry Potter (series)
A copy of a Harry Potter book burns in a bonfire during a protest outside the Christ Community Church December 30, 2001 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Photo by Neil Jacobs/Getty Images)
Topping the list of the most frequently challenged books for the first decade of this century, the Harry Potter novels are among the most beloved works of children's literature of the last few decades.
Why are they challenged? Attempts to remove the books tend to invoke the book's use of magic to claim that they encourage witchcraft or bad behavior. These allegations also prevented J.K Rowling from getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom during the Bush years. Other attempts to keep the books off the shelves argue that the books are too scary for children.
Why should you read it? Not only are they fun books to read, but a study revealed that people who read the book are more empathetic towards stigmatized groups than those who do not read them are. They are frequently used to help encourage children to read more, and even adults will find the later books worth their time.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Shoppers read about a Chicago program involving the 40th anniversary edition of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird' (Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)
Another challenged book which often appears in the top ten most challenged books list, To Kill A Mockingbird is a heavyweight contender for the title of The Great American Novel. Published during the civil rights movement, Harper Lee's masterpiece continues to inform discussion of racial issues today.
Why is it challenged? The book is challenged for its "offensive language," "racism," and being "unsuited" to the age group schools tend to offer it to. In 2016, the public schools of Accomack County, Virginia successfully removed the book from classrooms over the use of racist language.
Why should you read it? The book is a classic and shows us a side of American history most of us would like to pretend never happened in intimate detail. It explores themes of innocence, racial justice, hypocrisy, class, social norms, courage, and morality in a way few other novels can. It does this in a very readable style with unforgettable characters, including a young Truman Capote.
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume has the honor of being the author with the most books on the frequently challenged list. This book, her third, focuses on a young girl named Margret who is struggling with issues of faith, family, and growing up. It was placed on Time's list of the top 100 English language novels of the last century.
Why is it challenged? The book deals frankly with Margret's religious issues and her concerns over menstruation. As such, it has been dubbed "sexual," "amoral," "anti-Christian," and "profane" by would-be censors.
Why should you read it? Judy Blume has a knack for approaching difficult subject matter in a way that young adult readers can fully appreciate without dumbing it down or glossing over unpleasant concepts. It is well written and addresses issues that are perpetually relevant.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' fish on the river Mississippi, near the childhood home town of Mark Twain (1935 - 1910), Hannibal, Missouri. (Photo by George Pickow/Three Lions/Getty Images)
Another one of the leading contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, Huck Finn has found itself in the middle of controversy since the day it was published.
Why is it challenged? When it was first published, libraries refused to stock the book because of its crude humor and realist style. Twain himself recorded that "the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums." Today, the chief complaint against the book is its frequent use of racial slurs and stereotypical depictions of several characters.
Why should you read it? Huck Finn is, without a doubt, one of the greatest American novels ever written. It turns a critical eye on American culture, racism, and personal identity with results that are both scathing and often hilarious. It shows Mark Twain's brilliance at full tilt, and you can't really hope to understand American literature without reading it.Goosebumps (series)
R.L. Stein's series of spooky children's stories is the second-best selling book series of all time. They are fun tales that never get too scary or serious, and purposely avoid instances of death, drugs, or depravity.
Why are they challenged? The supernatural elements of the stories and scary tone have gotten the books challenged by buzzkills ever since they came out. The controversy has begun to die off though; it fell from the 15th spot on the 1990s list to 94th for the early 2000s list.
Why should you read them? They are entertaining kids' books that can give a good fright without relying on anything too terrifying or offensive. The series is also an excellent tool for encouraging children to read.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Poet Maya Angelou reads a poem during a ceremony to present Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, South Africa the William J. Fulbright Prize for International Understanding November 21, 2008. (TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Maya Angelou's autobiographical coming of age story has captivated millions since it was first published in 1969. It is the first of a series of autobiographical books she wrote, and easily the most well-known. It is a gripping story of struggle and personal development that can inspire any reader.
Why is it challenged? The book is often called sexually explicit, includes references homosexuality, and includes the use of racist language.
Why should you read it? It is one of those rare biographies that also reads well as a piece of literature. It confronts issues of racism, sexual assault, illiteracy, personal identity, and growing up in a difficult environment with all the beauty of Angelou's prose.
Bridge to Terabithia
Katherine Patterson's classic story of two children who invent a magical kingdom to play in, Bridge to Terabithia has appeared on countless middle school reading lists since it was first published in 1977.
Why is it challenged? The bizarre list of reasons for challenges to the book includes offensive language, violence, Satanism, and the promotion of secular humanism.
Why should you read it? It is an excellent children's book, it won the 1978 Newbery Medal, that brilliantly deals with issues of death, grief, and friendship in a way that is neither patronizing nor sanitized.
Brave New World
English novelist Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel of hedonism, genetic engineering, conformity, and mass consumption has been knocked off countless times since it was first published in 1931. Based on what he thought the America of the 1920's would decay into, it remains a haunting vision of things that may still come to pass.
Why is it challenged? It has been most frequently challenged for its depiction of drug use and sex. The school district of Miller, Missouri banned the book for making promiscuous sex "look like fun."
Why should you read it? The book shows us how what we love can come to control us if misused and investigates the dark side of genetic engineering and modern technology. It forces the reader to confront questions of what utopia actually is and at what price we are willing to accept a world where everybody really is happy all the time.
It’s Perfectly Normal
Author Robie Harris' children's book on sex, puberty, and relationships was perhaps doomed to appear on the most frequently challenged list. It is an extremely detailed book that covers a wide variety of topics, much to the irritation of the puritanical.
Why is it challenged? The book is quite detailed, and many challenges relate to it being rated as appropriate for children as young as ten. Its use of cartoon illustrations has also drawn ire, and it has occasionally been called "pornographic" as a result. It also references the existence of homosexuality.
Why should it be read? Given the rather pathetic state of sex education in this country, the book's honest and detailed explanations offer a needed alternative to the abstinence-only programs which tend to be inaccurate and unable to achieve their goals.
Of Mice and Men
US novelist John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968). (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
John Steinbeck's 1937 book about migrant farm workers in California predates his other classic, The Grapes of Wrath, by two years. It is technically a novella, as it weighs in at a mere 30,000 words.
Why is it challenged? The book's ability to present profound ideas in an accessible manner makes it a staple of many high school reading lists. It has been scorned and banned for profanity, using the Lord's name in vain, sexual themes, racism, being depressing, and being anti-business.
Why should you read it? If you want a work of classic literature that is also easy to understand, you can't do much better than this. It hits many of the major themes in Steinbeck's later work inside of two hours reading time. It is also an excellent work onto itself that is worth the time of any reader.
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Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
David Schmidt, a geology professor at Westminster College, had just arrived in the South Dakota Badlands in summer 2019 with a group of students for a fossil dig when he received a call from the National Forest Service. A nearby rancher had discovered a strange object poking out of the ground. They wanted Schmidt to take a look.
"One of the very first bones that we saw in the rock was this long cylindrical bone," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "The first thing that came out of our mouths was, 'That kind of looks like the horn of a triceratops.'"
After authorities gave the go-ahead, Schmidt and a small group of students returned this summer and spent nearly every day of June and July excavating the skull.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"
Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about 8.2 feet long.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a Triceratops prorsus, one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the Tyrannosaurus rex. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made headlines after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.
Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the New York Times.
Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
The Badlands aren't the only spot in North America where paleontologists have found dinosaurs. In the 1870s, Colorado and Wyoming became the first sites of dinosaur discoveries in the U.S., ushering in an era of public fascination with the prehistoric creatures — and a competitive rush to unearth them.
Since, dinosaur bones have been found in 35 states. One of the most fruitful locations for paleontologists has been the Morrison formation, a sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rock that stretches under the Western part of the country. Discovered here were species like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, to name a few.
Triceratops illustration
| Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
As for "Shady" (the nickname of the South Dakota triceratops), Schmidt and his team have safely transported it to the Westminster campus. They hope to raise funds for restoration, and to return to South Dakota in search of more bones that once belonged to the triceratops.
Studying dinosaurs helps scientists gain a more complete understanding of our evolution, illuminating a through-line that extends from "deep time" to present day. For scientists like Schmidt, there's also the simple joy of coming to face-to-face with a lost world.
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "You don't ever think that these things will ever happen."
In recent years, our team at Iowa State University has found a way to make pigs an even closer stand-in for humans. We have successfully transferred components of the human immune system into pigs that lack a functional immune system. This breakthrough has the potential to accelerate medical research in many areas, including virus and vaccine research, as well as cancer and stem cell therapeutics.
Existing biomedical models
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency, or SCID, is a genetic condition that causes impaired development of the immune system. People can develop SCID, as dramatized in the 1976 movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble." Other animals can develop SCID, too, including mice.
Researchers in the 1980s recognized that SCID mice could be implanted with human immune cells for further study. Such mice are called “humanized" mice and have been optimized over the past 30 years to study many questions relevant to human health.
Mice are the most commonly used animal in biomedical research, but results from mice often do not translate well to human responses, thanks to differences in metabolism, size and divergent cell functions compared with people.
Nonhuman primates are also used for medical research and are certainly closer stand-ins for humans. But using them for this purpose raises numerous ethical considerations. With these concerns in mind, the National Institutes of Health retired most of its chimpanzees from biomedical research in 2013.
Alternative animal models are in demand.
Swine are a viable option for medical research because of their similarities to humans. And with their widespread commercial use, pigs are met with fewer ethical dilemmas than primates. Upwards of 100 million hogs are slaughtered each year for food in the U.S.
Humanizing pigs
In 2012, groups at Iowa State University and Kansas State University, including Jack Dekkers, an expert in animal breeding and genetics, and Raymond Rowland, a specialist in animal diseases, serendipitously discovered a naturally occurring genetic mutation in pigs that caused SCID. We wondered if we could develop these pigs to create a new biomedical model.
Our group has worked for nearly a decade developing and optimizing SCID pigs for applications in biomedical research. In 2018, we achieved a twofold milestone when working with animal physiologist Jason Ross and his lab. Together we developed a more immunocompromised pig than the original SCID pig – and successfully humanized it, by transferring cultured human immune stem cells into the livers of developing piglets.
During early fetal development, immune cells develop within the liver, providing an opportunity to introduce human cells. We inject human immune stem cells into fetal pig livers using ultrasound imaging as a guide. As the pig fetus develops, the injected human immune stem cells begin to differentiate – or change into other kinds of cells – and spread through the pig's body. Once SCID piglets are born, we can detect human immune cells in their blood, liver, spleen and thymus gland. This humanization is what makes them so valuable for testing new medical treatments.
We have found that human ovarian tumors survive and grow in SCID pigs, giving us an opportunity to study ovarian cancer in a new way. Similarly, because human skin survives on SCID pigs, scientists may be able to develop new treatments for skin burns. Other research possibilities are numerous.
The ultraclean SCID pig biocontainment facility in Ames, Iowa. Adeline Boettcher, CC BY-SA
Pigs in a bubble
Since our pigs lack essential components of their immune system, they are extremely susceptible to infection and require special housing to help reduce exposure to pathogens.
SCID pigs are raised in bubble biocontainment facilities. Positive pressure rooms, which maintain a higher air pressure than the surrounding environment to keep pathogens out, are coupled with highly filtered air and water. All personnel are required to wear full personal protective equipment. We typically have anywhere from two to 15 SCID pigs and breeding animals at a given time. (Our breeding animals do not have SCID, but they are genetic carriers of the mutation, so their offspring may have SCID.)
As with any animal research, ethical considerations are always front and center. All our protocols are approved by Iowa State University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and are in accordance with The National Institutes of Health's Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Every day, twice a day, our pigs are checked by expert caretakers who monitor their health status and provide engagement. We have veterinarians on call. If any pigs fall ill, and drug or antibiotic intervention does not improve their condition, the animals are humanely euthanized.
Our goal is to continue optimizing our humanized SCID pigs so they can be more readily available for stem cell therapy testing, as well as research in other areas, including cancer. We hope the development of the SCID pig model will pave the way for advancements in therapeutic testing, with the long-term goal of improving human patient outcomes.
Adeline Boettcher earned her research-based Ph.D. working on the SCID project in 2019.
Christopher Tuggle, Professor of Animal Science, Iowa State University and Adeline Boettcher, Technical Writer II, Iowa State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Volcano erupting lava, volcanic sky active rock night Ecuador landscape
How can modern technology help warn us of impending volcanic eruptions?
One promising answer may lie in satellite imagery. In a recent study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers used infrared data collected by NASA satellites to study the conditions near volcanoes in the months and years before they erupted.
The results revealed a pattern: Prior to eruptions, an unusually large amount of heat had been escaping through soil near volcanoes. This diffusion of subterranean heat — which is a byproduct of "large-scale thermal unrest" — could potentially represent a warning sign of future eruptions.
For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis of changes in surface temperature near volcanoes, using data collected over 16.5 years by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The results showed that eruptions tended to occur around the time when surface temperatures near the volcanoes peaked.
Eruptions were preceded by "subtle but significant long-term (years), large-scale (tens of square kilometres) increases in their radiant heat flux (up to ~1 °C in median radiant temperature)," the researchers wrote. After eruptions, surface temperatures reliably decreased, though the cool-down period took longer for bigger eruptions.
"Volcanoes can experience thermal unrest for several years before eruption," the researchers wrote. "This thermal unrest is dominated by a large-scale phenomenon operating over extensive areas of volcanic edifices, can be an early indicator of volcanic reactivation, can increase prior to different types of eruption and can be tracked through a statistical analysis of little-processed (that is, radiance or radiant temperature) satellite-based remote sensing data with high temporal resolution."
Although using satellites to monitor thermal unrest wouldn't enable scientists to make hyper-specific eruption predictions (like predicting the exact day), it could significantly improve prediction efforts. Seismologists and volcanologists currently use a range of techniques to forecast eruptions, including monitoring for gas emissions, ground deformation, and changes to nearby water channels, to name a few.
Still, none of these techniques have proven completely reliable, both because of the science and the practical barriers (e.g. funding) standing in the way of large-scale monitoring. In 2014, for example, Japan's Mount Ontake suddenly erupted, killing 63 people. It was the nation's deadliest eruption in nearly a century.
In the study, the researchers found that surface temperatures near Mount Ontake had been increasing in the two years prior to the eruption. To date, no other monitoring method has detected "well-defined" warning signs for the 2014 disaster, the researchers noted.
The researchers hope satellite-based infrared monitoring techniques, combined with existing methods, can improve prediction efforts for volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions have killed about 2,000 people since 2000.
"Our findings can open new horizons to better constrain magma–hydrothermal interaction processes, especially when integrated with other datasets, allowing us to explore the thermal budget of volcanoes and anticipate eruptions that are very difficult to forecast through other geophysical/geochemical methods."
