EP 1,206B - MOST DELICIOUS POISON: The Story of Nature’s Toxins-from Spices to Vices

A deadly secret lurks within our spice racks, medicine cabinets, backyard gardens, and private stashes. Scratch beneath the surface of a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a magic mushroom cap, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), cure our infections (penicillin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them? Based on cutting-edge research, MOST DELICIOUS POISON: The Story of Nature's Toxins—From Spices to Vices by Noah Whiteman (October 24, 2023; Hardcover) reveals the origins of toxins produced by plants, mushrooms, microbes, and even some animals, the mechanisms that animals evolved to overcome them, and how a co-evolutionary arms race made its way into the human experience, forever changing the trajectory of humanity. This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth but is also intimately tied to our own successes and failures as individuals and as a species. You will never look at a houseplant, mushroom, fruit, vegetable, or even human history, the same way again. Among other topics, the following surprising phenomena are discussed:

• Pain – caused by toxins – activates a circuit deep in our brains, subsequently creating feelings of pleasure and generating a feedback loop associated with addiction.

• Endorphins are opioids made in the brains of all animals, including our own. These opioids evolved to alleviate pain and are triggered by spices like black pepper and wasabi.

• Many toxins mimic our own hormones and neurotransmitters. These include caffeine, cardiac glycosides, opioids, psilocybin, and THC, which bind to receptors needed to run our brains and hearts, twisting a molecular logic born into our animal ancestors 500 million years ago.

• Nature’s toxins did not evolve with us in mind at all – plants, fungi, and microbes compete to evolve the next best defense, which their animal enemies eventually overcome and may co-opt as weapons.

As deadly fungi make national headlines, our current reality eerily resembles a sci-fi movie in which evolutionary biologists like Noah Whiteman are essential in demystifying the unknown and revealing the origins, mechanisms, and nature of toxins. Furthermore, the sensational reaction to The Last of Us and books like Entangled Life, I Contain Multitudes, and Wicked Plants demonstrate a strong curiosity and appetite for tales about hidden (and sometimes gruesome) aspects of the natural world, and how they shape the human condition.

Previously featured in The New York Times, Nature, Science, Scientific American, and Popular Science, Noah Whiteman received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 to write this book. In his own words, “In my mind, I am scientist, colleague, brother, son, uncle, husband, and friend first. But I am also a gay, first-generation college student with rural, rust-belt roots. To my knowledge, I was the first out LGBTQIA+ tenured faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and the same is true now at the University of California, Berkeley, in Integrative Biology.”

https://www.mostdeliciouspoison.com/

EP 1,206B - MOST DELICIOUS POISON: The Story of Nature’s Toxins-from Spices to Vices

Featuring:

Noah Whiteman

An uncle, husband, naturalist, and award-winning professor, Noah Whiteman was raised in northeastern Minnesota, first at the edge of Lake Superior in Duluth along southern reaches of the boreal forest and then deep in the Sax-Zim Bog.

Most Delicious Poison is Whiteman's first book and the hardcover was published in North America on October 24, 2023 by Little, Brown Spark.

He is Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley where he runs a basic research laboratory that studies plant-animal coevolution. At Berkeley, he is also affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, Center for Computational Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and Jepson and University Herbaria, and is Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2016, he was Assistant and Association Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

In 2020, Whiteman received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write Most Delicious Poison and in the same year was elected to the Royal Entomological Society, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America.

He received a B.A. cum laude and with Distinction from Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota in 1998. In the summers during college he worked as a naturalist guide at Gunflint Lodge on the Minnesota-Ontario border and for a northern tallgrass prairie restoration project in Collegeville. He then received his M.S. in aquatic entomology from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2000. For his doctoral research in tropical biology, he studied coevolution between the native birds of the Galápagos Islands and their parasites with Patty Parker, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2006. He was Head Teaching Fellow for Animal Behavior at Harvard University in 2006 where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award. From 2007-2010 he completed a joint postdoctoral research fellowship in genetics, genomics and molecular biology at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology with Professor Naomi Pierce and at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with Professor Fred Ausubel.

Whiteman has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition and PBS's Genius by Stephen Hawking and his pathbreaking research has been featured in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Scientific American, and Popular Science. He lives in Oakland, California with his husband.

https://www.mostdeliciouspoison.com/