Hey, Einstein!
A novel about nature and nurture
"Poignant and savagely funny… Wanjek has pulled off the impossible, a morality tale wrapped up in a prehensible science lesson with, oh yeah, a war parody thrown in for good measure." — Dan Dunn, author of Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour
Publisher's description: Nature versus nurture. What would have become of Albert Einstein had he been raised in any other setting? The CIA didn't think that one through when it set out to clone him... five times. Budget cuts for Project Einstein meant the clones were raised in less-than-ideal environments, from the Bronx to Bartlett, Nebraska. Now, 30 years later, the CIA must round up its lost Einsteins to save the world from an evil genius. The clones, they find, do have one thing in common: They're no Einstein. Author Christopher Wanjek, a Harvard-trained science journalist and international health lecturer as well as a contributing joke writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, is uniquely suited to tell this tale of a genetics experiment gone wrong. Hey, Einstein! is funny science fiction with serious overtones about nature versus nurture, politics and war. The novel combines the scientific acumen of Michael Crichton with the irreverent humor of Hunter S. Thompson into a James Bond-style adventure where good triumphs over evil, more or less, and complex phenomena are intertwined with a cleverly crafted plot.
About the author: Christopher Wanjek is a health and science journalist and author. He gained international notoriety as the health writer with his 2005 book Food at Work, written for the U.N.'s International Labor Organization, about workers' nutrition. The book project, since presented in over 20 countries, has led to laws in several countries to improve workers' access to healthy food. His first book, Bad Medicine, from 2003, continues as a weekly health column for LiveScience.com. As a freelance journalist, Wanjek has written extensively for The Washington Post and Sky & Telescope, as well as Smithsonian, Forbes, and other U.S.- and European-based magazines. His books and magazine articles have been published in seven languages. From 1997 to 2007 he was the senior writer for NASA's Beyond Einstein Program, which focused on general relativity, high-energy astrophysics and the Einstein legacy. Also since 1997, Wanjek has been a contributing joke writer for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He is a graduate of Harvard School of Public Health, and he resides in the Washington-metropolitan area with his wife and daughter. Hey, Einstein! is his first novel.
