My grandfathers

 

If you were born in a different time, with the same aptitudes, skills and interests, what would your life be like? If your chosen career did not yet exist, what would you do? My own profession has existed for 60-70 years, the way I spend my days (staring at a computer) a way of life for 20-30 years, with most of the scientific specifics possible only for the last 10-15. 

My grandfathers' dreams are lost in the pre-digital cloud. If they ever wrote letters expressing their plans and ambitions, I have not seen them. No journalists or bloggers described their noteworthy accomplishments. My sister has recorded the critical dates of births, marriages and deaths in the family genealogy. Otherwise, there are only black and white photographs in the albums downstairs, vague recollections of the few days I ever spent with them, and the deeper memories of my few surviving aunts and uncles.

My father's father emigrated from Germany to Canada with a woman who may have had another husband or may have been a widow, and her (not his) daughter. They combined their Saskatchewan land-grant quarter-sections into a larger farm. My father was born there. They grew wheat without much help from the sciences of plant breeding or pesticides or soil chemistry or crop rotation, through the rust epidemics and dust bowls that were the Great Depression. The farmers then were scientists, as they are now, experimenting from year to year, checking what happened if they changed this or modified that. They were also engineers and mechanics, taking pieces from one machine to keep another working, designing and assembling goofy gadgets to amuse the young at heart. My grandparents retired to the coast. After my grandmother died, my grandfather took one long, last walk in the cold Vancouver rain so that he could forget.

My mother's father was a Minnesota Swede, who emigrated to Canada and found an ex-patriot Briton for a wife. He did not graduate high school and never learned to write cursive, so his signature was printed. He repaired refrigerators, another experimental, engineering mind. Together, he and his youngest son (my uncle, who eventually earned a PhD) built a six inch reflector telescope that led my uncle and eventually me into the stars. My grandfather ended up in an old folks' home before Alzheimer's had the name, when senility was just a normal, unexplained consequence of old age.

Farmer, refrigerator repairman, then a next generation with an architect, another farmer, a radio recording engineer, a test pilot and rebuilder of crashed aircraft, a research physicist, and then eventually my own generation with its PhDs and MScs and BScs. Actors beget actors, musicians musicians, but there were fewer professional scientists back then to lead their children along their own paths. The aptitudes were there for my grandfathers, but not the opportunities. I know a few multigenerational scientific families, but not many. What might my grandfathers have done in today's world of possibility?

If you were born in a different time, with the same aptitudes, skills and interests, what would your life be like? If your chosen career did not yet exist, what would you do?

Restaurant review: Petri's Dish

105 Research Park, Science City, XR

With the popularity of molecular food and its gases, foams, lipids and polymers, it was only a matter of time before a truly science-themed restaurant appeared on the scene. A group of retired professors and ambitious graduate students have joined forces to give us Petri's Dish, an eatery catering to scientists and those interested in science, conveniently located for the nutritional pleasures of the biotechnologists, hi-tech savants, and venture capitalists of Research Park.

There are two obvious approaches to such a concept. You could devise cute names for familiar dishes, perhaps Jello Electrophoresis or GenFranks and Beans. Or you could echo Planet Hollywood and its movie star memorabilia, substituting images of iconic scientists like Einstein for the posters of James Dean, and suspending telescopes from the ceiling instead of the tail-ends of Chevies. Petri's does both, describing their gustatory creations with complex mixtures of Latin names, chemical formulae and technical jargon, and basing their decor on obsolete equipment from biology and chemistry labs.

Customers are greeted by servers wearing white lab coats and safety glasses, with reservations noted on iPads concealed in hollowed out hardback lab notebooks. If you have to wait for a table, there are stacks of scientific supply catalogues and back issues of Science and Nature in the lobby, along with an anachronism, reprint request cards. Customers can use the photocopier/scanner between the rest rooms if they want to carry or email copies back to the lab.

In the dining room, your table might be the carcass of a decommissioned ultracentrifuge or HPLC or a lab bench balanced on a burbling fermenter. Meals are served from lab carts (just like Dim Sum!), and most entrees are served on large crystallizing dishes. You can ask for standard utensils, but initially you are faced with forceps, scalpels and spatulas (Knife lickers: Do not lick scalpels!) Beverages come in beakers. Drip coffee is prepared at the table using Büchner funnels and filter paper and water warmed in an Ehrlenmeyer flask over a Bunsen burner. Salt is identified by its chemical formula, pepper by its Latin binomial, and both come in jars from a commercial chemical company, decorated with MSDS hazard labels. If you order salad, it is delivered with a finger vortexer to blend the dressing.

So how is the food? In a word, great. Many have remarked on the similarity between chemistry and cooking. Throw in talented biologists and physicists, and precise analytical tools, and the result is surprisingly delicious. But if you have a psychological aversion to knowing what chemicals or microorganisms you are eating, you might want to go elsewhere. 

Is this a restaurant for scientists or for the scientifically curious? Wannabe's will be curious, wondering how all the mysterious machinery could possibly have been used. Lab rats will drown in nostalgia meditating on the glassware and technology, recalling the times before so much of it was replaced with failsafe kits and hightech computerized boxes with expensive service contracts. Those were the days.

Open seven days a week for lunch, supper and midnight snacks. Reservations recommended for midnight snacks.