A deadly secret lurks within our spice racks, medicine cabinets, backyard gardens, and private stashes.
Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), 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 science in the fields of evolution, chemistry, and neuroscience, Noah Whiteman’s Most Delicious Poison 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.
This perpetual chemical war not only drove the diversification of life on Earth, but also is intimately tied to our own successes and failures. You will never look at a houseplant, mushroom, fruit, vegetable, or even the past five hundred years of human history the same way again.
Book sale and signing
--
Noah Whiteman is a professor of genetics, genomics, evolution and development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. He studies the ancient chemical war between plants and animals—and why humans can't seem to stay out of it.His laboratory uses CRISPR gene editing to do something remarkable: replay evolution itself. By experimentally recreating the precise genetic steps that allowed monarch butterflies to evolve resistance to toxic milkweed, Whiteman's team retraced adaptation in real time, illuminating how life evolves using tools Darwin could only dream about.
His book Most Delicious Poison follows toxins through four billion years of history, from the first bitter compounds that shaped early life to the morning coffee that shapes ours. It's a story about how poisons became pleasure, medicine, and power—and how the molecules that can kill us also help make us human.
A Guggenheim Fellow, Royal Entomological Society Fellow, and winner of the Genetics Society of America Medal, Whiteman lives in Oakland with his husband.
