Mentor

One of my most important mentors died unexpectedly a year ago. It should not have been unexpected — he was 82. He died in the exact place he would have chosen, apparently almost instantly. His passing left some surprises.

He died intestate — no will — and his widow was suddenly left to deal with a part of his life that she knew little about. She co-hosted hundreds of evenings with his colleagues and students over the decades and knew as much about his work as she cared to know. Now there was all this stuff — rooms full of notes, books, reprints, specimens and equipment. She wanted to sell the house. She wanted it all out.

Although technocrats obsess over intellectual property, academics don't worry about it so much. The body of knowledge, and all that surrounds it, seems clearly to belong to us. But in reality, part of it belongs to our employers. But what part? And what do you do with it if your employer doesn’t want it? My mentor was always a dogmatic, forceful man and when he retired, he never accepted that he had lost much of his influence and power. He was forced out of his office and took everything home. Who does it belong to now? What has value? What is irreplaceable? The task of deciding what is worth saving and who should have what has fallen on three former students, each of us living in a different country. Unless his employer unexpectedly intervenes and makes demands.

I've been trying to reduce my own similar, but much smaller, scientific footprint for years. It is a combination of ensuring that all this scientific detritus is not a burden for someone else to sort through, and that the unique facts, notes and observations are captured in some way. As I work through my own pre-digital legacy, other colleagues have passed their notes and photographs on to me, hoping I will know what to do with them. We can never pass on all of our unique knowledge. The connections between all these unpublished data points exist only in our brains, have never been written down, and will have to be resynthesised by the next person who needs them.

My mentor was the grand old man of my micro-field and we took it for granted that he would be with us forever. He's not here to give advice or instruction anymore, so I will only be able to discuss things with him in my imagination. I was a little boy for a long time with him around to guide me. Here is the real shock: I am the grand old man now.

Produced and directed by...

Among many other pop icons, George Martin died in 2016. A classically educated man, he is credited with taking four raw, unformed lads from Liverpool and mentoring their transition into world-shaking originals. Although many tried to convince Mr. Martin to take more credit, his label was always producer and never creator. He recognized talent, did his best to nurture it and helped it into the world. Sound familiar? There are many parallels between this proven process in the arts and mentorship in the scientific world.

In science, everyone wants to be an author on as many papers as possible and many of us feel this is getting out of hand. I have colleagues who are 'authors' on more papers each year than most of us read in that time. Journals have complex guidelines to define contributions warranting authorship and everyone ignores them. The joke is that the guy who picks you up at the airport only does so if you agree to make him a coauthor. And he often is. Acknowledgements  seem not to be enough anymore.

Maybe we can learn something from George Martin and the Beatles.

Composers, performers, producers and directors. They are all involved in generating scientific research and publications. Maybe it is time to diversify credit for published research. It might satisfy everyone.

Unfocus, unzoom

In his first six months, our puppy was hyper-observant as he explored his new world, decoding the details relevant to his new life. He's a retriever, a bird dog, and on his first walks he lifted his head to the flocks of geese on their Arctic migration, evaluating nuances in their honking and flapping wings far beyond my perception. He often snapped at flowers dangling in front of his baby blue eyes and quivering nostrils. The world was fresh and exciting.

Because we were a bit older and less energetic, and because he was a more hyperactive creature in general, we succumbed early to the fetching game as a system of energy management for this puppy number two. It did not take him long to teach me how to throw the ball, and to demonstrate the correct procedure of placing it directly between my feet, where the balance of the universe would be improved if the ball were thrown again. The meaning of life is very simple. Together, we strived for perfection.

Eventually the animal world of creatures and plants faded for him. He paid no attention to birds. One day, a chipmunk ran directly across his paws without being acknowledged. The squirrels learned that he was no threat but also that he could not be harassed. They stopped chirping and throwing pine cones at him out of the trees. Their worlds had diverged. Only flying spheres or disks of plastic or nylon were relevant.

This contracting awareness of the broader world resembles what happens as scientists transform from undergrads with broad interests into grad students increasingly obsessed with a specific discipline then into professionals and experts. Laser-tight focus tunes out distractions and helps us zoom in on the unknown. But on many days, my preoccupation with my own corner of the microbial world feels delusional. I only care (or insist I don't care) about the opinions of other scientists with identical compulsions, and disdain or ignore others who have strayed from that true path, or those so misguided that they never found the true path at all.

As we get older, our senses dull and we can't always maintain the intensity of youth. Special skills and knowledge remain, but more and more it feels like we are retrieving the same ball and the dropping it between the same feet, over and over again. The creativity that once burned so brightly fades, we feel more like technicians than scientists, more like craftsmen than artists.

I often point at the birds or the moon or the stars for the dog as I try to zoom out and refocus and re-perceive the broader world. He's respectful and happy that I talk to him, but his attitude is clear: he has no use for the sky. He feels sorry for me. None of of my concerns are important. There are objects to be thrown and objects to be retrieved. Nothing else matters, at least to him and me.  Some of my colleagues react the same way when I express scientific ennui. And they feel the same pity for me that the dog does.

Insulin

We all sometimes wonder what it might be like to live in a different time. The past and the future somehow seem more exciting than the present, or maybe just more survivable. 

My mother was born at the right time. It was 1922. Insulin had just been discovered and was being isolated and chemically characterized at the University of Toronto. They experimentally injected it into dogs who had been 'depancreatized'. After I was born, my mother developed type-1, or adult-onset, diabetes and by then, medical researchers had figured out an effective dosage regime to replace the insulin her body no longer made. 

This was a daily ritual: She sterilized her glass syringe and steel needle in boiling water in a saucepan on the stove twice each day. The fridge door always held a supply of serum bottles beside the eggs. She held the bottle up against the light of the window, stuck the needle through the rubber cap and drew up the liquid, tapping the barrel to release air bubbles. She sat on her padded stool with its fold-out foot rest, wiped her arm or her leg with rubbing alcohol and efficiently injected the drug under her skin. When I was older, we would chat about my day at school while she went about her preparations. I looked away when she injected herself. It was so normal. 

She carried a flat, round plastic case in her purse that rolled out a strip of paper that turned blue or pink when she wiped her pee. If it was time for an injection, she would mentally re-calculate her dosage to keep her blood glucose and the drug in balance. Strips of used test paper sometimes were forgotten on the counter top, like cigarette butts or coffee grounds, distasteful by-products of adult life.

When her glucose and insulin were badly out of balance, my mother had what we called 'a reaction'. With a mild reaction, she developed a demented grin, slurred her words, and forgot to close her mouth as she chewed on the carbohydrate-rich snacks my father stuffed into her in an attempt to correct the imbalance. When the reaction was more severe, she would stumble and giggle like a loopy drunk. Although my mother had a wicked sense of humour, there was something about her at these times that was totally out of character, a lightness of spirit that I found quite engaging. I did not know then that these were physiological crises, that fainting or a coma would have been the next stage, to be avoided at all cost.

The arrival of pre-sterilized, disposable syringes simplified my mother's life and made everyday life simpler. I sometimes wondered what people thought when they saw the needles in her purse or if anyone noticed the needle marks on her arm. To most people even then, needles meant drugs and drugs meant addiction. 

We use these same syringes in the lab for adding antibiotics to flasks, and sometimes buy chemicals or enzymes that come in serum bottles. The smell and texture of cotton balls soaked with rubbing alcohol still brings back memories of her daily life-saving injections in the kitchen. 

Today's diabetics benefit from more sophisticated monitoring, superior physiological understanding, and a variety of delivery mechanisms that means fewer need daily injections. But my mom was born at the right time. After her diagnosis, she was able to continue her life, getting some things right and some things wrong, as the medical system followed her and her cohort, the first generation to survive diabetes. 

Doggerel 4

4 - Peer review

Everyone loves

Reviewer no 1

The positive criticism

And profound sense of fun

The work is fantastic

But could be improved

And would be just perfect

If this one word were moved

We can't say the same

For reviewer no 2

Whose sarcasm declares

That nothing is new

The work is derivative

Misguided at best

We thank him for saving

The world from this mess

Previous Doggerels

Folk singers of science

A few summers ago, I stood in the dark of a courtyard at Yale University with my travel guitar, part of a loose circle of scientists about to break tentatively into song. It was a hot, humid night. The dorms were not air conditioned and no one wanted to be indoors. There were little gaggles of students and conference delegates around, serepticiously sipping beer, engaged in quiet conversation. 

I had never played music with these people, didn't know their styles, and was a bit apprehensive. They came from all over the U.S. and Canada with instruments tucked into trunks or overhead bins to take part in a song circle with people they saw just once a year. Profs and students and post docs, the hierarchy was gone and replaced with a collaborative, sharing vibe. One or two were professional musicians, others were strummers like me, but the idea was to teach each other a simple song, figure out some vocal harmonies on the fly, and pass the chord progressions around the circle for those who wanted to improvise on top. What songs would we have in common? My assumptions of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Neil Young turned out to be wrong. They played the blues, bluegrass tunes, what they called Old Time music. My contribution of U2's I still haven't found what I'm looking for fell flat. I was like an undergrad student, entering the lab for the first time.

There are lots of musicians in science and all kinds of analogies between music and research. The Principal Investigator as conductor, the lab as a band. I once spent an evening with a composer of modern music, more or less my age, and he insisted that composition and research were exactly the same thing. You have an idea, implement it piece by piece, experiment until you've got it right.

I once accompanied an elderly mentor to a chamber music recital in a church in Europe, and watched him read  the score of the string quartet, sliding and tapping his finger along the notes as they were played. A fellow grad student had a weekly show on community radio and spent one of his evening each week getting vocal lessons; he has now released two CDs. The leader of this Yale song circle had also released a CD or two. My apprehension was partly related to remembering that a few years before, at this same conference, the police (but not The Police) had been summoned to an outdoor jam session that involved an accordion and a Russian with an electric guitar. There might have been a bit of rock 'n' roll that night.

There is a tendency to promote prominent practitioners of anything as Rock Stars, and indeed, there is a group of professors who call themselves the Rock Stars of Science. People use that label for Neil deGrasse Tyson too, although I can't imagine him replacing Mick Jagger. Perhaps there really are rock star wannabes in science, who behave outrageously to draw attention for themselves. I've seen a few such performances. It's as if we need flamboyance to promote a cause, that celebrity is required to bring credibility to an idea. In biology anyway, there seem to be more folk singers than rockers, more researchers taking time to write a good lyric than those shouting it out with hysterical emotion.

A year later, I was back with some of these same guys on a hotel balcony in Austin, Texas. My only contribution that night was the Beatles' homage to Dylan, You've got to hide your love away and it matched the mood. I was feeling mellow, there was some nice harmony, a harmonica kicked in at the right moment. It was a successful experiment. I'll take that.

Street dogs

Last summer I visited Bangkok and had my first exposure to street dogs. Thousands of stray dogs are part of every day life in this chaotic city, trotting along the congested sidewalks with pedestrians, crossing the streets in traffic. Some are loners, some are in packs. We passed the same pregnant, old dog lying at the base of the stairs of a Metro station every day, and then one day she was gone. We didn't want to ask anyone why she was missing. Outside the city, packs of 10-20 dogs colonize the highway service centres, snoozing among the gas pumps and fast food restaurants.

I've just returned from India, where street dogs are also part of the landscape. In Goa there is not the nightmarish, Blade Runner like disorder of Bangkok, but with no traffic lights and most street signs ignored, it seems more confusing. Herds of cattle intermingle with cars, scooters and pedestrians. The dogs stride down the sides of the street with an intense sense of purpose and nap in shady spots with their legs stretched out onto the road. They react with indignation to the constant the warning beeps and toots of horns, subtly altering their course to avoid being hit.

They are smart, these dogs,  and socialized in a quite different way than pets. They have adapted to the speed and heat of life in a tropical city, a life without a human alpha or a regular source of food. They are mixed breeds, none overweight, mid sized, mostly 40-60 lbs, mostly sand coloured with short fur, sometimes brown, some with attractive splashes of colour on their torsoes or on their faces: hybrid vigour. One can imagine that left to their own inclinations and freed from the genetic manipulation of ‘pure breeding’ that dogs everywhere would end up looking something like this. To my naïve western eyes, they have happy smiles. But they force me to question my ability to recognize a happy dog. In this alternate version of the dance between our species, these clans of our best friends lead their own lives without overt training or support from people.

The street dogs are all abandoned pets, or the offspring of abandoned pets. Females with swollen nipples and udders are common but you don't see any puppies. If there are fights, they are conducted in private. You don't approach street dogs, although I frequently spoke to them in friendly tones in both cities. Their health and vigor is an illusion. Look closely and you see scars, compulsive scratching at fleas, and for many, patches of inflamed, naked skin caused by mange.  

The Thais are mostly Buddhists and the Goan Hindus are also compassionate people. In western societies, these dogs would be probably rounded up and euthanized. Or they would be tortured by psychopathic teenagers. But something about the respect for the sanctity of life in these places allows the street dogs to survive. In Bangkok, I watched an old dog sleeping outside the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, visitors stepping over his apparently oblivious body. Then he got up and sauntered through the crowd with a warm smile on his pock-marked face. A tourist tried to say hello and he warned her off with three deep barks. A monk arrived and the dog nuzzled into him. The dog loved this monk, and the monk loved this dog. It was clear. No food was involved.

In Goa, they are mostly referred to as beach dogs. They hang out on the ocean side with the tourists, sometimes howling or barking at the legendary sunsets, optimistically nosing about the shacks and shanties that spring up during tourist season. Sometimes you see them playing with a bit of rubbish washed up on the beach by the tides, looking for all the world like carefree puppies. Then the tourists leave, the monsoons come, the beaches empty, and the dogs starve.

In both cities, there are charities to assist them, mostly run by ex patriot westerners. It is hard to know who to trust with your charity dollars, though. The organization I was considering for my left over rupees in Goa had their PayPal account shut down without explanation. The charities arrange veterinary care and neuter the animals as they work with them. Some of the dogs find new homes. Others are re-released to the streets, healthier but still having to face the dangers of cars, rotten food, and each other.

It's complicated, this situation with street dogs. It is easy to romanticize and recall when dogs were not attached to leashes and roamed our rural neighbourhood freely, just as kids played in the streets and walked their own way to school. I was tickled for some of my days in these sweaty, foreign cities, seeing these happy looking dogs going about their business. Then eventually, I was angry.

Like many scientists, I indulge in pseudointellectual, co-evolutionary speculation about the nature of the social relationship between dogs and humans. Interspecific communication, anthropomorphism, zoopomorphism, alpha males, and symbiosis all colour my rationalizations. The street dogs don't have the personal relationship we have with our pets, whether it be fulfilling, neurotic or delusional. There is a relationship between a society of dogs and a society of people, but the humans are not alpha, and the costs and benefits to both parties are ambiguous.

During my final days in Goa, I noticed a news item about a contraceptive vaccine for dogs, developed as a possible solution to the 'social problem' of street dogs in Chile.  Four times cheaper than surgical neutering, it is reversible with hormone treatment; chemical castration, in other words, with the confused double standard emotional reaction included. The solution to the street dog problem is to have them go extinct, to reverse the social Darwinian phenomenon that allowed them to prosper in the backstreets the world. No more packs of smiling, feral dogs sharing our world, no more reminders of the connection between the artificial urban life and our pre-agricultural nomadic origins. 

It used to be common for parents to coax their children to eat vegetables by reminding them of starving children in India. Now, I am home with my own dog, who is loved and spoiled, and smart in an entirely different way. He couldn't live as a street dog; with no experience with city traffic, he wouldn't last long. But I wonder if he would like the chance. Pundits often claim that we make life too easy for our dogs, that they are stuck in perpetual adolescence and never become the mature domestic wolves of their potential. But having seen this alternative life for animals that look so much like him, and for all he may be missing of a truly free life, I will be reminding him often that he is a lucky, lucky dog.