Baby brain

 

You have to be cautious when talking with scientists about art, or with artists about science. My opinion is that they are actually the same thing, expressions of the human quest to expand our understanding of the universe.

This photograph is the plaque at the entrance of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University commemorating its 1953 opening. It seems about perfect to me, as art or as science. The motto beneath it: Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding?

Road kill

A peculiar complacency overcomes many scientists after a time. Lab safety is drummed into us from the beginning. There are basic things, like don't pipette deadly pathogens by mouth, don't add water to concentrated acids. Most of us pay close attention to hazards that might affect our reproductive success while we are still of the age when it matters, but otherwise a subconscious slackness slides in, as if we have been exposed to certain dangers so often that we are now immune. One of my colleagues swims in the slimiest water imaginable and has no hesitation about harvesting dead animals from the side of the autobahn for his evening meal. As a microbiologist, perhaps he expects that the passion he feels for the natural world will prevent it from attacking him. The same man watches birds as he drives along winding roads and alongside cliffs, confident that because he loves nature, crashing into a tree or into a lake full of fish would be impossible.

A cloud of regulations surrounds labs so that workers aren't exposed to explosions, noxious gases cannot escape to threaten the general public and toxins do not ooze into the environment. Ethical protocols ensure that humans and other animals are treated compassionately when they are the involved in research. To get around these awkward restrictions, some scientists experiment on themselves. When I was a grad student, one prof who clearly had no hesitation about investigating the effects of certain botanicals on his nervous system, extended these prosaic tendencies into his research on light-activated compounds with potential for cancer therapy. He scratched his arms with novel chemicals and climbed onto the roof of the biology building, holding his arms up towards the sun as if he was on a crucifix. He recorded the rashes and itches and boils in his lab book, along with happier results where he had no adverse reaction at all.

These memories returned as I listened to a radio interview last week with a graduate student at Cornell, who experimented on himself to find out which parts of the body hurt the most when stung by a bee (it is the tissue dividing the two nostrils). The interviewer (in common with most of the scientific press) was most interested in discussing why this man allowed a bee to sting his genitals, apparently unaware of the proud, if loopy, scientific tradition of self-experimentation. Sir Humphry Davy, for example, the man who gave us what eventually became the first medical anaesthetic, nitrous oxide or laughing gas, was systematic in studying the effects of breathing in various gases on his own body. He almost killed himself trying to establish the toxic dose of carbon monoxide.

Undoubtedly, many scientists have done themselves in or doomed themselves to disability in the pursuit of knowledge, out of sheer laziness, or in attempts to bypass bureaucracy. As for me, I've had a few accidental pokes in the skin that I'd have better avoided, and probably inhaled a bit too much benzene in my student years. But I haven't had much interest in using my own body as an experimental apparatus. This might label me a coward, but I'd rather be safe on the narrow path of science than road kill in the ditch.

Dry run

It was a lab rule that anyone giving a talk had to have a practice run with the prof. This was supposed to be one on one but when my turn came, it didn't work out that way. Dr. L. was in deep denial about computers, but always wanted to impress colleagues with his state-of-the art knowledge of the latest technology. My talk had to use some LINUX presentation program with vertigo-inducing animation capabilities that Dr. L. found on a CD-ROM in some old magazine. And this meant that Dennis had to be there for the dry run. He could run any program on any computer. He had bytes in his fingernails.

          "Now Peter," Dr. L told me as I was ready to start. "This is your first conference presentation. I want you to be well prepared. Don't be frightened, but the crowd at some of these meetings is like a hoard of vultures, just waiting to tear meat from your limbs. Especially Kowzlowski... that cow. You've got to look sharp."

          "Uh, okay," I said, glancing over at Dennis, who gave me his finest gap-toothed smile. "Can I begin?"

          "Please do."

          The computer was balanced on a stool wheeled in from the lab. "Well, here's my first slide."

          "Is that how you're going to start?"

          "No, I was just..."

          "Say it how you're going to start."

          "Good afternoon, ladies and germs. My topic for my presentation..."

          "Hold on. Ladies and germs?"

          "They're microbiologists. It's a joke."

          "No it isn’t. Don't tell people what the topic is. They can read."

          "I'd like to talk about the results from my first year of thesis research..."

          "Dennis, I don't like the background on that slide. Is it green?"

          "No, it's red," Dennis answered.

          "Let's try it blue."

          "No problem." Dennis clicked the mouse around on the stack of journals that was the most uncluttered horizontal surface in the room. I realized then that the dry run of my ten minute talk would last at least two hours. None of the slides were right, they either had too much text or not enough. He didn't like the bullets... we had a ten minute discussion on whether they should be round or square. And he wanted me to refer to more of the lab's previous results in the discussion.

          "Okay, that's not bad, Peter," he said when I finally reached the end. "Now, let's see if you can handle the questions. Let's see... Dennis, can you think of anything?"

          "No," Dennis answered. He looked so much like some hippified version of Alfred E. Neumann, I had to laugh. He often used imaginary words and made cartoonish sound effects. This time he just gave me a wink.

          "What kind of question would that Kowzlowski ask?" Dr. L. wondered. "That cow. I know. In your fifth slide, weren't the correlation coefficients too low for you to make such sweeping statements about the relationships between your variables?"

          I glanced warily at Dennis. In addition to his Luddite approach to computers, Dr. L. was known for his utter ignorance of statistics. "That's a principal coordinate analysis," I told him. "I didn't do any correlation analyses."

          It was nearly four when we escaped. "I don't know what I'm going to do," I told Dennis. "He made you change every slide. I’ll have to relearn the talk, it's all different and I'm speaking tomorrow."

          "Don't worry. I saved the originals. You could never use the new ones... he's colour blind, didn't you know? I was just humoring him. Have you ever seen him talk? Holy neeble. You'll be fine as you are. But Kozslowski's going to have you for breakfast."

          "Is she really that bad?"

          "I've never met her but he's been ranting about her for years. The happiest I've ever seen him is the day he got one of her manuscripts for review. As far as I can tell, her lab does exactly the same work that we do, but they use a different bug."

          "I don't know, Dennis. I just want to concentrate on presenting my data. How bad can she be?"

          Celia and I handled the registration table the next morning. It was strange to suddenly have faces to match the names I'd known only as authors of papers. No one looked like they should. Dr. Needles was short and balding. Dr. Reid, who often wrote long, ponderous sentences full of vaguely alien syntax, turned out to be a woman. I half expected Dr. Kozslowski to be a rotund lady with a large nose, corresponding with Dr. L's nickname for her. Perhaps she would even be wearing a white dress covered with large, black spots.

          "Peter!" Dr. L. half-shouted at me, panting and red faced. "It's getting hot in here. Go see if you can find some air conditioners. Celia can handle the desk."

          Dr. L. was notoriously frugal and had booked the cheapest room on campus. He hadn't anticipated a heat wave at the beginning of June. I searched from lab to lab, accompanied by some undergrad muscle. No one wanted to part with their portable air conditioners, but we scrounged four units from our own lab and one of the teaching labs. When we got back to the conference room, the first session was already underway. They had opened the windows and turned on some fans to set up a cross breeze. A nervous little man with an Australian accent was finishing what had obviously been an awkward presentation. He was using overheads for visuals; gusts of wind kept blowing them off the projector onto the floor.

          "How's it going?" I asked Celia.

          "Kozlowski lit into Dr. L. after his opening monologue. Claimed he didn't acknowledge her as the first discoverer of the Q factor."

          "Which one is she?"

          "I don't see her now."

          My talk was first after the coffee break, and I tried to simultaneously calm and psyche myself with all that familiar advice about giving seminars:

          a) Check your fly before going to the podium.

          b) Check your hair in the mirror for cowlicks.

          c) Don't wash your hands in case you accidently splash water on your trousers.

          Dr. L. introduced me and there I was, trying to remember my opening lines. They had forgotten to plug in the laptop, of course, and the battery died just as I was about to begin.

          d) Always smile at the audience.

          All my Milton Berle jokes evaporated as I waited for the title slide to appear. Two or three people fussed around the computer while two or three others rushed over to stop one of the air conditioners from tipping out of the window. At last, the screen came to life, and I launched into my maiden speech. I can hardly remember anything I said. It seemed like someone else speaking. I watched the overheated, jet-lagged delegates struggling to stay awake, a few rocking side to side, suffering the diuretic effects of too much coffee.

          A hand was up in the audience. The chair nodded, and the woman asked, "Can you relate your results to the oppression of the women in patriarchal societies or the fall of the Berlin Wall?"

          "Pardon me?" The questioner was a petite woman with a strong New York accent. Short brown hair, kind of pretty beneath the thick glasses.

          "What I mean is, is this work actually relevant to anything? Does it have any significance to the plight of humanity on this planet? You haven't shown us anything we don't already know..."

          "This is only preliminary data. I'm just starting my thesis, there's still two more years to go..."

          The woman snorted and folded her arms. Everyone seemed to be alert and embarrassed. Finally, someone at the back of the room put me out of my misery with a banal question about the number of replicates in one of my experiments.

          I sat down. I had lost my scientific virginity. Instead of feeling excited and fulfilled, I had been a sacrificial lamb to a vampire cow.

Parking for the elite

Today, I'm on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, number six on the list of institutions with the most Nobel Prize winners. I wanted to know if there were statues or monuments to honour these famous people. The reply was that laureates are offered a choice of having a building named after them or their own permanent parking place, and that they all choose the parking space. Here are some of them are in front of the Physics Building on Oppenheimer Way. Notice that the display of a parking permit is required to prove status. Such permits probably don't help them find parking at the grocery store, where expectant mothers are far more important. Very few of the laureates are at work today. They must have heard I might be dropping by.

Sitting ovation

Perhaps as an expression of some latent compulsive behaviour, I tend to count things. So I can tell you with certainty that at a typical scientific conference or seminar in my field, audience members clap their hands an average of 13 times as their contribution to the applause. It may be a coincidence that the average grapefruit has 13 segments. Perhaps a fully developed grapefruit should have sixteen segments (the sphere divided by 2 by 2 by 2 and then 2 again), and three tend to abort. Whether there is a correlation between applause for scientific presentations and grapefruits segments, I leave to your imagination and creativity with freakish statistics to explore.  

We were at a concert recently in a small club, and the warm up act got about 26 claps after every song. This is twice as many as a seminar and it happened after every song, so every five minutes or so. Last night, the main act got 26-36 claps after most songs, and as many as 50 to reward those special moments. The only logical conclusion is that if you crave generous applause, be a musician and not a scientist. Imagine a world where the audience claps at the ends of the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion of every research presentation, and goes wild over a particularly astonishing graph. This could be disruptive, but we'd get used to it. 

Research seminars range from about six minutes long in intense specialist conferences to 45 minutes for keynote or banquet speakers. My longest talks have been university lectures, where I might drone on for 80 minutes while students surf the Internet or send Tweets that I fortunately never have to read. I'm just a guest lecturer and nothing I say ends up on their exams so all they need to do is sign the attendance sheet. They sometimes applaud out of some sort of vaguely perceived pity. About six claps, twice as many as that most sarcastic of applause, three staccato claps.

A scientific analysis of applause was published last year. The authors compared the spread of clapping to a 'social contagion'. In other words, applause spreads like a virus, with one or two people infecting everyone else, and after the appropriate time, the applause dissipates in the reverse way. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before some scientist employed by some megalomaniac politician engineers a virus that can be released on unsuspecting crowds to increase clap counts. 

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.