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.