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.

Punch drunk

In high school, scientists-in-training learn that the alcohol they drink to become silly is really called ethanol, often abbreviated as EtOH. They stop speaking of alcohol with lust and veneration and start admiring ethanol instead, as if the new word was a passcode to a secret world. A career in science can expose you to a vast supply of the stuff, and all the temptation that implies.

 

Because of its taxation potential when sold for human consumption, laboratory use of ethanol is heavily regulated in most countries. When sold to labs, it is subject to fewer of the taxes that make liquor so expensive. We use it to sterilize surfaces, preserve specimens, dissolve substances, and because it is highly flammable, as a fuel in portable burners. Many restrictions are imposed to prevent it from being consumed by students, technicians or professors. It is sometimes cut with rubbing alcohol (methanol), which as any educated adult knows, can make you go blind. Such toxified ethanol used to be dyed blue to indicate its added danger. But for many scientific uses, ethanol must be as pure as possible and then what do you do? Previously in Canada, control was at the gallon level; now, the jugs are locked up and we account for every millilitre used.

 

Even if ethanol is altered with something more poisonous, talented chemistry students or professors who know some chemistry can easily redistill and purify it, and formulate a drink far stronger than anything possible with mere vodka. Of course, you have to trust the technical acumen of the distiller and the cleanliness of the lab glassware. 

There are many urban myths about drinks made with lab ethanol. To my knowledge, I never consumed any such liquids, perhaps only because I never liked fruit punch. Coworkers, well... a female colleague once tried to pull my pants down at a Christmas party after she had a bit too much. Karaoke sessions become boisterous and incoherent, but what's surprising about that? Most students don't have cars anyway. The biggest danger is getting lost, either by getting on the wrong bus or falling into a snowbank.

 

I've lost a few colleagues to alcoholism. We can't blame spiked lab punch. The phrase 'punch drunk' refers to the disorientation battered boxers experience as they stagger around the ring after losing a fight. Sometimes life and the working world feels like that. Drink numbs the pain; sometimes drink becomes the pain. With its demands for creativity, productivity and the accompanying criticality, sometimes a career in science feels like a battle. We all feel a little punch drunk at times. 

Leaving the lab

The other day, I was going through old correspondence and found a few goodbye cards from labs I left behind. This was bitter sweet. Many of the remarks were the routine "Good luck with your future endeavours" kind of thing. Others were sincere expressions of good will and recollections of happy memories from people I knew as real friends. Some are still friends. Many I thought would be friends for life, but somehow they evaporated.

A truly odd card in the collection is one found in a parking lot decades ago, addressed to a person unknown to me. The picture is Santa Claus placing presents under the tree, with his butt crack showing. Missing inside are the usual affectionate messages; there are just signatures, written for a stranger. I don't know if the recipient deliberately tossed the card away in anger or disinterest because of its impersonal content, or whether it just slipped out of a pocket or briefcase into the snow. I always planned to send it anonymously to my former university roommate, whose sense of humour matched the tone, but he has also faded away.

My guess is that most scientists work in about ten different labs during their careers. We start out as undergrads, become grad students, then postdocs, junior researchers then senior researchers. There is usually some shifting around to different labs within the institution, more space, less space, upgraded facilities or closets with a one way door leading to the pasture. As we move from lab to lab, from situation to situation, we leave people behind. Sometimes it seems quite calculated, as if the work and our ambitions are more important than the relationships. 

Nevertheless, here we go...

Lab 1. Charismatic English professor, deeply introverted yet passionate perpetual post doc, one idealistic male and one feminist female grad student, intense undergrad having an affair with an older professor, and me a complete intruder, stealing time when the lab instruments are available...

Lab 2. One senior scientist and one junior scientist sharing an office, a grandfatherly lab technician doddering about, another sarcastic lab technician sceptical of it all, a delightfully happy technician who one summer has a miscarriage but the next summer a baby, students thrilled to be there, including me, working like a dog for the love of it...

Lab 3. Hierarchical thesis professor demanding respect, insecure lab technician afraid of computers, three grad students, one a gay activist who happens also to be a genius, another an obsessively happy heterosexual and then me, working late into the night and loving it...

Lab 4. A European institute that was much like an Institution, offices along hallways like a hotel, a dictator director ostracized in his office, a business like supervisor, covens of part time technicians, everyone married with adult lives, working nights and weekends out of obsession and a lack of a social life ...

Lab 5. Hypersocial group of beautiful young professionals and students in a pseudo industrial environment, led by a charismatic psychopath in a company run by dullards, a few undergrad students and term technicians desperate to hang onto their jobs, a 9-5 life of 5 day weeks..

Lab 6. A week in a lab in Japan before a conference, working 11-13 hours a day, but 5 or 6 tea breaks each day that arose spontaneously and lasted as long as they lasted, students from Venezuela and Korea and Africa sharing stories, then returning to the solitude of lab benches to continue work, beer and edame and yakitori instead of supper, then back to the lab again...

Lab 7. A growing lab with grants, temporary employees and summer students, a Russian volunteer trying to learn English without much success, a little society growing up around me but excluding me because I am the Boss ...

Lab 8. A mature lab with post docs and grad students and technicians and undergrad students, holding it all afloat with grants and more grants, no time at the bench anymore, my most intense relationship is with the computer...

Lab 9. The pasture door awaits...

I don't remember many of the events celebrating my departure from these labs, when I was presented with these goodbye cards. There are just little blips, incomplete, badly edited videos without sound. There was a party thrown by my house mates when I finished my masters, attended by their friends because I didn't have any of my own. And then, three years later, I said goodbye to the institute in Europe after finishing my PhD, trying to convey my gratitude, speaking the local language for the only time in public. On the goodbye cards, most touching were the fond, heartfelt messages from lab mates who I never realized held me with such affection or esteem. Their signatures and warmth remain on the cards, bringing back the memories of all those labs. In the social world of science, we blunder around bumping into people to their annoyance or delight, just as we do in the real world. 

The Endless Bicker

More than 20 years after their last collaborative output, and to the surprise of many, the Cambridge Chemists Collective (CCC) has released a new monograph on Quantiplutonic Neurotectonics. Missing as a coauthor, to the surprise of few, is troubled Nanospectroscopist Robert Walters, who left the Collective in 1985 after a dispute about sharing credit for a now outdated method for quantifying sphingopinoids in Tremendulous exudates. Also missing is penduloeconomist Mitchell Flight, who died in 2008. Flight was fired from the Collective by Walters, then hired back at an hourly wage to do statistical analyses. When Walters left the group, Flight was invited back, and the Collective produced two monographs with Flight but without Walters, who dismissed the works as, “Insipid, uninspired duplication of previously published results, shoddily executed by a bunch of hack technicians.” After Flight’s death, the remaining scientists in the Collective, Aenid Filmore and Dick Maystone, completed some of their friend’s unfinished simulations and performed some validating experiments. The result is The Endless Bicker.

If you are unfamiliar with the field of Quantiplutonic Neurotectonics, you may find this monograph puzzling. In layman terms, a 'bicker' is an infinite molecular regression series mediated by neuroprotonic spin, which transforms the metatectonic semiplasma state of geobiological intermediates and stabilizes their interior sphingoskeletons until quantum collapse is no longer observable. In common with the early works of the Collective, this book features extended sections of prose. In fact, only the last chapter has illustrations, which cast an ironic shadow as the saga of these influential scientists draws to a close.

The work itself is divided into four sections, each reflective in some way of different phases of CCC's career. The first section includes three chapters, the first a brief preface, followed by an extended paper that revisits one of the Collective's most beloved works, "Prion displasia diamonds." The chapter recapitulates familiar themes and motifs, as if the group was rehearsing for a seminar based on work from decades past reproduced with modern technology. The subsequent sections and chapters take us on a journey through the scientific history of the group, and if you are an admirer of their work, it is like visiting a favorite museum with new but somehow familiar paintings on the walls. But if you prefer modern animals to dinosaurs, or if you don't understand the jargon, the experience may be tedious and dusty.

It is interesting to compare The Endless Bicker to a monograph published earlier this year, Experiments of Inner Science by the Dublin-based Uranium Duo. Equally classic in form, equally appealing to admirers of their past work, those authors seemed truly concerned about whether their experiments were relevant to modern science or just pale embers of their unforgettable fire. The difference is that CCC doesn't care about trends and never have. Even when they led the field with spectacular pyrotechniques, they were never desperate to please. Their results always display an inner beauty, unique to the way they investigate science. It seems that many scientists agree; this offering had more pre-orders than any science book in the history of Amazon.com. It is wonderful to read their stylish work anew again for the last time.

In the darkroom

Northern lights in northern Ontario, circa 1974

Last week, my treasured print drier was fondly dispatched to the dumpster at the electronic recycle. It hadn't been touched for twenty years and I could not invent an alternative purpose. Back in the day, wet, washed prints were squeegeed onto one of its two shiny, curved, stainless steel surfaces. Then the canvas cover was stretched across to sandwich the photos in place as they were grilled to dryness by the heating elements within. This was supposed to give the print a glossy surface but it was never quite as perfect as the results from real labs. If there was dust or little spots of rust on the platen, if you didn't squeegee the paper perfectly, there would be pock marks, dust or amoeba-shaped dull areas. If you dried the print too long or not long enough, it would curl into a tight cylinder that required reflattening in a heavy book.

I got interested in photography in high school, but never joined a club. It was an expensive hobby if the drug store did all the developing and printing. But the astrophotography I was doing at the time did not lend itself well to commercial processing. The automatic machines and the humans that ran them assumed there must be something wrong with a photo that was almost entirely black. No one could possibly want those little specks and clouds of light to be printed. My father had a talent for satisfying my material whims through the classified ads in the local newspaper. He bought a portable enlarger that disassembled into parts that fit into the small suitcase that was also the base for the stand. A fellow science nerd initiated me into the darkroom arts, the chemistry of developing film and the optics of making black and white prints. It was in theory much cheaper than paying for professional developing, but there was so much waste because of over-exposures and under-exposures and experiments with filters and different papers.  The mixing of solutions in narrow plastic cylinders marked like measuring cups, calculating concentrations, pouring liquids into trays or tanks where they would work their reactions, nourished the incipient chemist in me. 

Exposed film had to be handled in complete darkness. My father and I chose his workshop, covered the windows with heavy blankets and stuffed towels under the door. We worked only at night, but there was always some faint glow. Sometimes I retreated into a closet. Hiding in the darkest possible corner, I pried open the film with a can opener and pulled out the roll, hoping not to drop it onto the floor. Film had to be wound onto the developer spool following the generally imprecise clues provided by fingers and imagination. I cut off the end of the film and tried to feed it into the outer slot, then pushed it through the spiral track towards the centre of the spool. If you messed up, loops of film would stick to each other, the chemicals wouldn't penetrate evenly, and the film would be spoiled. 

At the university residence, there was a well equipped darkroom beside the auditorium. The dorm was my first opportunity to interact with girls away from the judgmental eyes of my parents and older sisters. Girls were terrifying and I had no idea how to talk to them. I practiced imaginary conversations, but real conversations somehow never went as they were supposed to. A few girls were intrigued enough by the process of DIY photography to enter the darkroom alone with a tutor and watch a demonstration. Perhaps they misunderstood the meaning of the term 'safe light', the bulb that lit up the room with a wavelength invisible to print paper. It allowed us to see what we were doing in a flattened, red tinged black and white sort of way, as we made our prints. My room mate had the charm to pull off, "Let's go into the darkroom and see what develops," without causing offence. He also had a telephoto lens on his camera, which he used to take photos of girls in bikinis on the beach in the summer. For me, it was stumbled and mumbled invitations to equally shy girls and avoidance of any eye contact. At least I didn't have to think much about what to talk about and under the red light no one could tell I was blushing. "This is the developer," I would say, as I slid the sheet of paper exposed in the enlarger into the first bath. And then we would share the wonder as the image emerged, like a ghost coalescing from the liquid and solidifying on the paper. Poetic words were unnecessary. The magic was in front of us. And then the print went into the stop bath with its urine colour and vinegar smell.

At my first lab job, there was a professional darkroom connected to the electron microscope centre. It took some persuasion to be allowed to use it, but I was writing my first scientific paper and had a plate of black and white photographs to prepare. The electron microscopy technician supervised, a tall man with owlish glasses, who seldom said anything. We made the prints and began the finicky process of cutting them into perfectly squared pieces of exact sizes. To assemble the plate, the five individual pictures were attached, one at a time, to a piece of double sided waxed paper using an iron, so that the white spaces between each photo were perfectly even. It took forever and luckily we had lots of duplicates of each picture. I thanked the technician profusely for his help. "I'm an alcoholic," he told me. "Every day is a struggle." Then he demanded an acknowledgement in my paper because it was important for his job security. 

Nowadays, most lab darkrooms are used for transilluminators, with ultraviolet lamps to light up strands of DNA in gels, to be photographed by ultra-sensitive digital cameras. Most students have never used a darkroom for its original purpose. I love digital photography and the marvels of computerized editing, and don't miss gluing plates of photos together for publication. My enlarger-in-a-suitcase sits in the basement, along with brittle plastic graduated cylinders, oversized forceps, and expired bottles and sachets of chemicals. But I miss the chalky smell of fixative and the comfort of the reddish black shadows. Just as purists insist that digital music is inferior to vinyl, the dwindling population of darkroom enthusiasts prefers analog. But not me. The illumination that photography brings to our world no longer emerges from darkness, but from computer monitors. But the journey of the our imagination stays the same, as we snap images and shape them into visions that we share with the world.

The dissection kit

In second year, all biology students had to buy a dissection kit. It was sold at the campus book store, alongside the texts, notebooks and pens and cost about $25. Engineering students bought complex calculators or slide rules, chemistry students the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but for us it was scissors, scalpels, blades, tweezers and plastic-handled needles. One enigma was the 'probe', a metal handle with a bend near the end, with a rounded or recessed tip. What was it for? The word 'probe' was so provocative.

We all carried our identical baby blue plastic cases full of identical tools, in a time when permanent laboratory markers were still imperfect. Students customized their boxes with unscientific magic markers and stickers. My sister, a veteran of the same course, sewed me a custom case of lurid red vinyl-like material, which rolled closed and was held together with strips of Velcro, and ensured that my tools would stay separate from everyone else's. There were abundant narrow slots for additional implements, so I could stock up if the opportunity arose. I don't remember permanently borrowing anything from anybody, but somehow the kit expanded with pins and clamps, holders and blades, simply because there were spaces for them.

This was the final year that premeds mingled with those who only wanted to be biologists. They shoved us aside in the teaching labs, eager to hone their tissue slicing skills while the rest of us tried to avoid opening the velvety bellies of white mice. We started with earth worms and frogs and graduated to cow's eyes, stiff, plank-like mink and eventually dog fish. Several companies sold preserved cadavers specially prepared for the classroom, with veins injected with rubberized blue paint and the arteries with red. Larger animals were preserved in formaldehyde, a stench that bonded to hair and clothes. Dissecting these elastic, oozing tissues was tricky despite the sharpness of the scalpels and the power of the scissors. There was only one time that we were required to handle warm tissue. Lab rats were 'sacrificed' in the name of science, so their livers could be harvested in a physiologically active state and we could isolate mitochondria. Teaching assistants did the deed in another room, away from our sensitive eyes; one TA admitted that he hated his job that day. I let my lab partner, a curly haired blond named Steve, remove the rat's liver with his own scalpels and scissors so that my own would remain innocent.

The end of the term featured the dreaded lab exam. We circulated from one bench to the next, allowed two or three minutes per station to answer a few questions about ducts or muscles indicated by coloured pins. The premeds sometimes slyly shifted the markers around so that no one after them would get the right answer. 

Although it did not often serve its intended purpose, my dissection kit has now followed me for 37 years, mutating as I've moved from lab to lab, adapting to what I really need it to do rather than what it was originally intended to do. The original scissors are now used to trim my finger and toe nails, cut paper, and prune plants. I guard them ferociously because they are fantastic and I would never be able to find a better pair. Like any good biological system, they have reproduced and there are now two pairs of scissors, one at home and one in the lab. I'm not sure where the second pair came from or which is the original. The forceps also multiplied, overflowing the original case into trays in the lab and racks in the workshop downstairs. Sometimes I use the scalpels and forceps on myself, sterilizing them with alcohol, taking advantage of the high quality microscope optics at my disposal to remove slivers from my fingers.

As students and post docs filter into my lab from different cities, provinces and countries, it is fascinating to to see what their dissection kits hold. The collections all start out the same, but evolve in symbiosis with the interests, needs and manual dexterity of their owners. One colleague mounted his own thick, oriental eyebrows in metal handles for handling fragile microscopic structures. One student donated special microscalpels used for retinal surgery to my own kit. 

The first paintbrush and colour pallette, the first violin, the first baseball mitt, these are all tools that take us from a world of dreams and possibility to a world of work and accomplishment. My dissection kit and its tools are extensions of my hands and my mind. May you find the same.