About the book: Millennia ago, when we first began puzzling over the mysteries of the human body, one organ stood out as vital. The heart was warm, it was central, and it moved as it pumped blood. The ancient Egyptians treated it with reverence, mummifying it separately from the body so that the soul inside it could be weighed. Aristotle believed that it was the seat of consciousness. Over the centuries, science has dispelled the myths, but our fascination with the heart has endured.  

From the origins of circulation, still evident in some microorganisms today, to the enormous hearts of blue whales, we journey with Bill to beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for their life-saving blood, and under the sea to learn about the world’s most natural antifreeze, flowing through the veins of icefish. And we follow him through human history, too, as scientists hypothesize wrongly and rightly about what is arguably our most important organ, ultimately developing the technologies that have helped us study the heart - and now, in the most cutting-edge labs, the tools that will help us regenerate it.

Please join us for a conversation between the author of Pump, Bill Schutt, and the illustrator Patricia Wynne.

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Bill Schutt is a vertebrate zoologist and author of five nonfiction and fiction books, including the New York Times Editor’s Choice, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Recently retired from his post as professor of biology at LIU Post, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has studied bats all over the world. His research has been featured in Natural History magazine as well as in the New York Times, Newsday, the Economist, and Discover.

Patricia J. Wynne’s art has appeared in more than 100 books for children and adults. After teaching art and art history at the University of Windsor and Wayne State University, initiating a gallery career and working as the staff artist for the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, she moved to New York City and began a career as a freelance artist. Her editorial art has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Food and Wine, Cricket and Scientific American. Additionally, Wynne’s illustrations and expertise are consistently sought by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, most recently for The Brain, (Yale) and Dark Banquet: The Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures (Random House).

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks