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.

The seminar

 

Public speaking is part of a scientist's life, presentations at conferences, impromptu introductions for other people's talks, lectures to students. Recently, I met a PhD student who delayed grad school for years because she was terrified of speaking to groups of people. I could relate. I was a complete ham in grade school, once standing in front of the school with a photograph of the chipmunk in the back yard, the subject of my speech, buttoned onto my sweater. By high school, nerves and shyness had taken hold, and when I made a presentation to my grade eleven class, my knees were literally knocking together. It was years before I could give a talk without severe gastrointestinal distress or the loss of a night's sleep.

 

Fortunately, it is part of our training. In the last couple of years of university, there are a few seminar courses in which students teach the subject matter to each other and the professor merely hands out the grades. We are taught various tricks:

• If you are afraid to make eye contact with the audience, look over the heads of the people in the back row.
• Effective talks follow this structure: tell the audience three things you are going to say, say those three things, and then repeat the three things you have just said.
• Always check your fly before going to the podium. 

My first seminar course introduced me to a recurring risk for any public speaker, the snoozing audience member, in this case the professor. My topic was industrial microbiology; I couldn't blame the prof for nodding off. Another local colleague was famous for sitting as close to the speaker as he could manage because he was hard of hearing, then snoring loudly when the lights went down. People don't just fall asleep in my presence when I am at the podium. At my first international congress, one of the most famous Japanese scientists in the field dozed off using my shoulder for a pillow.

 

Hecklers aren't normally an occupational hazard in science. Wolves sometimes emerge during the question period at conferences, but most questions are polite. After my first conference talk, though, I was savagely attacked by an older colleague who was offended that I had inexplicably overlooked a paragraph on terminology in a 400 page book he had published six years earlier. Fortunately, I was so relieved that the talk was over that I didn't notice his aggression until listening to the recording a week later.

 

An engaged audience makes for a good seminar. One of my colleagues loves to sit in the front row, right in front of the speaker. He nods and smiles and smacks his thighs and makes twinkling eye contact and he is just so into it that the speaker always feels like the most charismatic, witty and brilliant of intellects. He is like those people that comedians hire to prime the laughter in the crowd. If only there were more like him.

Christmas and the laboratory

I like Christmas on Wednesday, because the 'natural' last day of work is ambiguous. The last days before Christmas are like a coastline, where we stop and stare across empty space at the horizon, taking stock of what can safely be left behind and what we need to carry into the new year. December is filled with parties; institutional parties, directors' parties, departmental parties, lab parties, parties in the labs of collaborators, home parties, restaurant parties. Optimistic grad students hang plastic mistletoe over laboratory doors, which are decorated with Petri dishes, bubble wrap, tubing, wires, glassware, styrofoam peanuts, disposable plastics, arranged into Christmas trees, snowmen, candy canes, reindeers or sleighs. Who should get a present? The boss, the supervisor, the alpha colleague? The students, the technicians, that lady who looks after the accounts, the guys in the storeroom, the person who sorts the mail? The IT guys who rescue you every time something interferes with your destiny of spending eight hours a day staring at a monitor, the janitorial staff who mop the halls every night, the people who run the cafeteria? Will there be an institutional Christmas card? Must we pay the postage ourselves? It's a business expense, right? Students catch the bus or the train or a plane or drive their cars held together with duct tape onto icy roads and visit their families and old friends who don't quite understand this mysterious world called the laboratory. 

We want to spend December cleaning up the lab and sorting out messes but it never happens. Everyone tries to clear their desks by finishing what needs to be finished. And then they send it to someone else who is trying to clean off their own desk. Most years, there a few hours on my own before going home, trying to decide what can be rescued from neglect, what needs to be written down so that I will remember it when the break is over. Each year, the time needed is longer, the time available shorter. Around the world, colleagues who follow different religions or perhaps no religion at all, know that everything stops in The West for two weeks and they take part in this collective deep breath. Then, like winding up a stalled clock, we all start to plan our work for the coming year, and the white boards by our office doors are covered with optimistic, colour coded to-do lists. 

Last year, one of the items on my hidden list was this blog. It's difficult to decide if I am satisfied, because I didn't know what would emerge from my own imagination and memories, or from the readers who stumble across my words. We'll see how this modest ripple behaves and if it survives after passing over the sandbar between now and the new year.

Getting things wrong

Comet ISON stumbles on after its closest encounter with the Sun (public domain, NASA, from Wikipedia).

As this is written, we are waiting to see if Comet ISON will come out from behind the sun. Two nights ago on our national news, the comet was declared dead and disintegrated, based on images taken from satellites orbiting at appropriate angles as it made its closest pass to the sun. The comet disappeared. Then a few hours later, like the dead man in Monty Python's Holy Grail who announces he'd like to go for a walk, the comet popped out of the solar glare, dimmer but at least somewhat intact. It was fascinating to watch the scientific press in the months leading up to this event.  Pessimists were adamant that the comet was doomed, while optimists anticipated the Comet of the Century. 

Is it surprising that people are confused when scientists disagree? It doesn't bother scientists much, because we live in a culture of controversy, criticism and differing interpretations of the same data. This is lost when our musings are translated for retransmittal by the media. Uncertainty, chaos and risk are elements of modern science, but much of modern society, including many science journalists and their readers, seems stuck in a binary world of plus or minus, black or white, right or wrong.

A few months ago, I read a book by Matthew Cobb called Generation, and was struck by a paragraph that accused scientists of only telling stories of success and omitting the false turns and dead ends they encounter in the pursuit of the truth. This leads to the impression that science is invariably a triumphant progression from one discovery to the next. Generation is the story of how science figured out where babies came from. It is an alternately horrifying and hilarious read, centred around two 17th century Dutch scientists, Reinier de Graaf and Jan Swammerdam. They were best buddies as students in Leiden, but became terrible enemies as they competed to work out what contribution ladies made to procreation, what Fallopian tubes and ovaries were for, and what those newly discovered squiggly sperm cells made by male mammals were about. Some scientists of the time suspected ladies might make eggs, but they imagined eggs like those of chickens, and they couldn't find anything like that in there. The vicious rivalry between de Graaf and Swammerdam shows us that 'scientists behaving badly' is not just a modern phenomenon. Both men made huge contributions, both made lots of mistakes, and they never missed an opportunity to try to squash each other.

There are many books intended for the general audience built around mistakes made by famous scientists. They tend not to illuminate the scientific process, but rather mock 'so-called geniuses' for making 'bone-headed mistakes.' John Glassie's book, A Man of Misconceptions, is a biography of the seventeenth century German Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher, a polyglot and polymath who lived most of his life in Rome. He wrote huge volumes of natural philosophy before the scientific method was widely understood. Among his many interests was the mathematics of music, and he is often associated with the notorious cat piano (in German katzenklavier), a keyboard that pricked tails of restrained cats who were selected to howl in pitch. Kircher was controversial even in his own time because of his wild claims about magnetism (his explanation for most phenomena), his dubious translations of hieroglyphics on Egyptian obelisks, and his monographs on China, produced without the tedious necessity of actually travelling there. My favourite Kircher creation is his theory of everything, which states that there are 371,993,326,789,901,217,467,999,148,150,835,200,000,000 possible concepts. He derived this number from a formula involving the nine essential attributes of God, i.e. goodness, magnitude, duration, strength, wisdom, will, power, truth and glory; the nine universal subjects, namely God, angels, heaven, elements, man, animals, vegetables, minerals and numbers; and nine principles of relationship, being difference, agreement, opposition, beginning, middle, end, majority, equality and minority. He did this without an electronic calculator or computer, of course; it must have taken awhile. The book is predictably ironic and mocking, but not as funny as one might expect. The best joke is a cover blurb characterizing Kircher as a cross between Leonardo da Vinci and Mr. Bean. The book needed less da Vinci and more Mr. Bean.

Just as in life, making mistakes in science is an important part of getting things right. We usually don't go around bragging about our failures in life, and scientists usually don't dwell on failed experiments or half-baked ideas. Is this dishonest? Is this concealment? I don't think so. We tell our children about some of our false steps along the path of life, hoping to protect them from some pain, and scientists tell their students about the flasks that exploded, acids accidentally spilled, or experimental controls that were poorly conceived. We just don't talk to reporters about it.

The media don't consider that making mistakes in science is part of the routine. It is far more exciting to cast innuendos about competence, deception, or (hold on to your hat) fraud. In such an environment, throwing Italian geologists in jail for failing to predict earthquakes actually makes sense. But revised understanding is rarely a correction of fraud, incompetence or stupidity. It is usually compensation for incompleteness, sometimes because of laziness, but more often, limits imposed by existing technology. Each generation exceeds the achievements of the previous, not because of superior intellect, but because of refined technology. My most esteemed colleagues did not get everything right; some major breakthroughs were mostly wrong. But these inspired, energetic leaps brought us much closer to the truth, and emphasizing that they missed the target by a few percent misses the point. The story, as always, is ingenuity, insight and creativity. We get things right by first getting things wrong, just less wrong with each step.

PS. Sadly, regarding Comet ISON, the pessimists prevail and most of us will not have a chance to see its ghost in our evening skies this December. Unless, of course, we have access to some highly refined, modern technology.

Sacred literature

When I was a kid, my brother-in-law the chemist would often refer to "The Literature." He gave the phrase a reverent emphasis that at first I attributed to his British upbringing. He was disinterested in the mundane, lower case literature that most people associate with the word. He only read books of facts and hadn't read a novel since high school. I now know that when you mention The Literature to a scientist, or any academic, it means journals and books they absorb while drinking coffee or sitting on the toilet. Normal people cherish real literature that is read and reread, bought in hardback after first reading in paperback. Scientists have The Literature that is never reshelved because it is always being used. For each of us, there is the bible of our brand of biology or physics or chemistry. You might expect these to be well-known theoretical works such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but they are usually textbooks used for introductory courses, or reference books used in the lab.

In my undergraduate years, the bible of biochemistry was the textbook by Albert L. Lehninger called Biochemistry, then in its 2nd edition, succeeded by the title Principles of Biochemistry, now in its 6th. The most recent editions are no longer actually written by Lehninger, who died in 1986. Such is the power of his name that it is now incorporated into the title. Lehninger was an unusual textbook because you could actually read it; the man wrote good prose. Having had a childhood interest in real literature with a touch of dyslexia with peoples' names, when I picked up this textbook, I always thought of the famous short story Leiningen versus the ants. I imagined Albert L. Lehninger chasing giant ants, threatening them with biochemistry, or perhaps crushing them with his book. My own copy of Lehninger followed me faithfully for years, despite its heft, until I finally left it behind on one of my transatlantic moves. Then I bought another copy in a used bookstore for $1.50. It is still in the lab.

One science bible you definitely could not read was The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, now in its 94th edition. Its merit is proportional to its weight, now 8 pounds for all its 2668 pages. Owning a personal copy was a badge of honour for chemistry students. You could use it to look up, for example, the melting point of sodium chloride, or the molecular weight of molybdenum, to seven or eight decimal places. If you had this book full of tables and graphs, you might use it two or three times a year for class assignments and save yourself some trips to the library. A new edition is released every year, but I don't know anyone with two copies. Somewhere in the United States, there must be a house made entirely of copies of the so-called rubber bible. 

The absence of a big biology bible on my shelf is surprising. There are bibles for subfields, but for the broad subject, nothing. I can hardly remember the textbooks we used. They were uniformly tedious, turgidly written with boring grayscale illustrations that captured none of the glory of the living world. Biology always had a reputation for its heavy emphasis on memorization. You had to just know the answer for a test, and couldn't work it out with formulas or logic. Nowadays, with colour digital photography, ebooks and lavishly illustrated websites, the potential exists for a biology bible that is something other than a book. But first biologists need to escape their database rut and find a format that lives and breathes.

Many scientists hope to write their own bible some day. Most of us shuffle along scribbling scientific pamphlets and comic books, or obscure blogs. But the ultimate dream is to produce such a staggering work that our successors continue to update it in perpetuity, including our name as part of the title as they have done for Prof. Lehninger, ensuring our productivity from beyond the grave.

Lack of control

Randy's desk was closest to the lab door, so he had the first chance to say, "Hi!" to anyone who peaked in. There were many female visitors attracted by his skillful, equal opportunity flirting. He believed in the seductive possibilities of backgammon, introducing each new challenge with, "Surely there's time for one game. You can be white for purity and innocence. I'll be black."

One unusual day, the visitor was male. "Are you Randy?" he asked.

"I could be under certain circumstances."

The man held out his big, worn hand. "I'm Fred. Gerry McIntyre gave me your name." Randy relaxed, relieved that this was not a slighted boyfriend in search of revenge. "I've recorded an album," Fred said. "I need someone to do an experiment to prove my music is good for plants."

The university was famous for its population of young people who liked to involve themselves in experiments with biology and chemistry. Fred was older, at least fifty, with a grey ponytail, a tie dye T-shirt, dull eyes, an unsmiling mouth, and long delays in his conversation.

"I recorded the album myself," Fred continued. "I played all the instruments. I can think like a plant, man. All that time, I was thinking about plants and sunshine, and the plants growing towards the sunshine, making flowers. The music captures the spirit of plant growth, man. If I can get a scientist to endorse it, it will sell like crazy. Can you help me? I need a quote for the back cover."

"Why don't you leave the album with me and I'll give it a listen?" Randy suggested, hoping for a quick escape.

"No way, sorry. I've only got one copy."

Randy sighed, realizing there was no easy way out. "How do you think we should do this?" he asked. "Have you thought about the experiment?"

"Just grow a plant with the music, man, and you'll see how great it grows."

"What kind of plant?"

"I was thinking beans. Scientists are always doing experiments with beans. I think I could get some."

"Beans would be good. But how many replicates do you want? And you'll need some kind of control."

"Replicates? Just one, man. Anything more would be a waste. I don't want to waste the beans, man."

The conversation degenerated into a circular argument. There was no way that Fred was going to waste resources on a control, and replication was a hard sell. He finally reluctantly agreed that two plants would be acceptable. Randy tried to convince Fred that without controls, that is, plants not exposed to music, it would be impossible to interpret the results. Nor could he understand the need to measure the dry weight of the plant as a measure of growth. "It's enough to just see if the plants grow better," he insisted. "Use a ruler!"

"Better than what?" Randy shouted. "How will you know the music worked?"

"Don't dry the plants," Fred concluded. "I want to make a salad with the beans."

Satisfied that he had made his point, and that we would do the experiment the way he wanted, Fred left the album behind. It was unlistenable, full of random flute sounds, bongos and what appeared to be singing. Fred was tone deaf with a indefinable sense of rhythm. But of course my opinion was irrelevant; I am not a plant.

Eventually, we found an empty growth chamber (a refrigerator-like chamber with controllable light, temperature and humidity), plugged in a record player, and put the album on automatic replay. We planted the two magic beans, grateful that Fred didn't require a second, music-less growth chamber for controls. The plants started to grow. Then they died.

"I can only conclude that your music killed the plants," Randy told Fred. 

"Did you even remember to water them, man?" Fred hollered. He grabbed his album and stomped out, mumbling that he would find another scientist to do the experiment properly, or better yet, endorse the album without wasting any more beans.

Controls are the trickiest part of experiments. If you follow research on human health, disease, or diet, the most common criticism of published studies is inadequate controls. Proper controls allow the interpretation of results to be unequivocal and unassailable. Improper controls leave you wondering whether you have proven anything at all. In science, to use a cooking analogy, if you want to be sure you've improved the cookie recipe, you have to make them the old way too so you can compare the original and the modified version side by side.

Poor Fred. We never heard from him again, and there were no rumours of a fortune from marketing his record to enhance plant growth, whatever kind of plants it was he was really interested in.