NOTHING LASTS BUT IT’S STILL WORTH DOING

 From about age 10 to 75,  I would read the daily comic strips in the newspapers, like The Daily News,  PM, The Los Angeles Times, or Newsday.  Every once in a while a strip would disappear.  I learned later that was because the cartoonist died or retired and the syndicate did not hire another artist to take it over.  I was fond of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby in PM (having a fairy godfather whose cigar was a magic wand had a terrific appeal) when it suddenly disappeared. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner also disappeared as did virtually all of my favorite strips over the years. What they shared in common was the silence accompanying their disappearance.  For reasons I don’t know, there is no “obituary” notice for a dead comic strip or dead newspaper column.  Sometimes a columnist is lucky and can write a final farewell to faithful readers of some 20 or 30 years but more often it is just the sudden unexplained disappearance.  I would sometimes realize a strip was gone and check back a few issues and realize I had not noticed it gone on the day of its disappearance.  A day or so later I would feel as if something is gone but wouldn’t immediately recall what was missing. These are tricks of the mind and even more insidious is our tendency to let the past go.  Just traces of the hundreds of strips I read over the years remain in my memory (Dinky Dinkerton, Gasoline Alley, the Bungle Family, Brenda Starr). The same thing happens with colleagues who die or who move on to other institutions.  Their memory fades from day to day conversation.  I once pointed out in a Life Lines column that there was a short life to fame for Nobel laureates.  Most people can name only a small handful of Nobelists.  I used  my grandfather’s employer in Stockholm, a physicist named Gustav Dalen.  Who on earth remembers him now? 

I experienced the same disappearance for my column Life Lines which began in March 1997 and disappeared from the print version of the TBR [Times-Beacon-Record] newspapers of Long Island. They carry a supplement called Arts and Leisure and my column appeared every other week until 2015. That comes to about 430 columns published.  They were about 500 words in length. I have shifted to posting what would have been new Life Lines columns to Bloggerelof Blogs at bloggerelof.blogspot.com and I usually let readers know of new postings on Facebook.  I have done about a dozen of these since the demise of my Life Lines column.

I t would be hubris to believe that a comic strip or newspaper column can go on indefinitely.  Tastes change. Fresh outlooks are always in demand. Without our being aware, our values, interests, style, and topics subtly permeate our comic strips or columns. Just as subtle are the new ways a younger generation looks at writing.   If I pick up a book written in the 1660s like Pepys’ diary it is strangely different in its vocabulary or sentences (“betimes”, “my Lord”).  Victorian novels have a heaviness and wordiness in their long sentences. A century from now what you write will look quaint and dated to your descendants. Who signs off a letter with “your obedient servant”?  But the pleasure of writing and communicating to one’s own generation is sufficient justification to go on writing or drawing cartoons. It is also a way, in our little victories in a difficult life, to say, like a cave dweller some 20,000 years ago, blowing ochre pigment to reveal his or her hand held against a wall, whether intended or not, “Look at me, look at me, I existed.”   

WISHFUL THINKING OR IS IT WORSHIPFUL THINKING OR IS IT JUST PLAIN OLD SELF INTEREST THAT GUIDES US?

            I met my alter ego, Foley, while placing a box of oatmeal in my shopping cart.  “Crummy weather,” he noted.  This was our nineteenth day of rain, snow, slush, or grey clouds as the winter was beginning to yield its grip in southern Indiana.  I told him, “It’s likely due to the global warming that is causing more frequent extreme weather than in the past.”  “I don’t think so,” Foley came back, “I heard on Fox News that global warming is a liberal myth.  Weather is constantly changing. There was no Industrial Revolution during the Ice Ages.”  Foley felt he had me there.  I told him that “The Ice Ages were due to the wobble of the earth as it shifted its axis every 24,000 years.  The current climate change is due to green house gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.” 

        Foley was not impressed. He claimed the earth was pretty big. “You could pack all of humanity in a container that is about two miles in height, width, and length.  Whatever humans do, earth will repair itself. That’s what nature or Providence does.”  Foley went on to explain that after the biblical flood that wiped out most of humanity, God promised he wouldn’t do a punishment like that again. “Either way, God or nature, we are protected.”  I was not reassured.

       “Nature showed its stuff in 1815 when Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted.  It was a bigger blast than Krakatoa in 1883.  So much volcanic gas and dust was emitted that crops failed in temperate zones because of global cooling. The year 1816 was called the year without a summer.”   Foley scoffed, “How can you have global cooling if you are dumping all that gas into the atmosphere?”  I told him that in those gaseous discharges was millions of tons of vaporized lava that dimmed the sunlight for two years.  “It was great for artists painting spectacular sunsets,” I told Foley, “but it led to a massive immigration of Germans to the United States after their crops failed.”   

Foley scoffed. “Nature can do spectacular things but humans can’t.  It’s arrogance to think we’re that significant in changing the earth.”  I told Foley to look at some satellite photos of earth at night.  “You’ll see the industrialized countries lit up like the US, lower Canada, coastal regions of Australia, Asia, and most of Europe, but dark areas for central Africa, central South America, Greenland, Siberia, or the polar regions.”  

        We made little headway discussing what we should do about climate change and global warming.  “Do nothing,” reassured Foley. “Do you think industries want to go out of business by drowning our coastal cities or turning the southeast into a huge desert?  The invisible hand of capitalism has worked in the past and it will work in the future. Why should they spend sums of money on a problem that doesn’t exist?” 

“What would convince you”, I asked?

“When I hear it on Fox News.” Foley smiled as he rolled his cart to the checkout aisle.

  

THE REINCARNATIONS OF A CARBON ATOM

I was born in a star that expelled me some five billion years ago and I was swept up in debris that orbited a new star that you call the sun.  That debris coalesced and I ended up as a carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere of a planet you call the earth.  I liked being in the “habitable zone” where I had more options than being frozen in an outer planet or dispersed into space from a hot as hell inner planet. I also felt like being one of the elite among the other atoms in the periodic table.  I could do lots of partner switching because of my outer valence shell. I could dance with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.  And did I ever form combinations in my youth on planet earth some four billion years ago.  I formed carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, cyanide, methane, alcohol, acetate, and even inserted and twisted myself into a ringed molecule, like I was dancing a hora in a benzene ring. I loved being a pentose or hexose sugar.  I became a nitrogenous base.  I also did some time as an amino acid.  Sometimes it was an acid that splashed me.  Sometime it was a base like lye that made me shape shift into another molecule.  Sometimes it was heat, like being sucked into a hot lava flow.  I crackled with many a lightning bolt.  I baked in the sun’s ultraviolet light. But I loved being part of a chain of nucleotides and helping that molecule replicate. I learned early that there was nothing permanent about these associations.  I was pretty indestructible although any one of my molecules was up for grabs in an uncertain environment.  As life evolved I sometimes was in someone else’s food and sometimes I was blown out as a gas or seeped out as  the watery urine of a worm, mollusk, crustacean, fish, or frog.  I preferred land to the sea but did a good share of my life in the oceans.  But even the sea was better than floating in a cloud and wistfully hoping I’d someday enter a plant’s stoma and getting fixed by photosynthesis and ending up in some leaves and getting munched by a grazing animal, like a brontosaurus.  Those molars were something else.

              I got around when I entered a primate. I liked swinging in a tree or scampering down to forage for nuts and fallen ripe fruit.  When the genus Homo came along, I spent a good part of my time associating with them.  It wasn’t as much fun being in the bowels or inner organs of the abdomen.  I loved it when I was located in a neuron, my favorite location, as I eavesdropped on forming thoughts. Among the tens of millions of people I inhabited over the past million years of Homo sapiens on earth, were some pretty famous people.  I was in a Sertoli cell of Amenhoteps’ right testicle.  I was in Socrates’ tonsil.  I was in Nero’s anal sphincter (not the most pleasant place for a carbon atom to reside). I was in a nasal mucosal cell in Cleopatra’s nostril.   I lodged in one of Dante’s tongue papulae. I was in a hair follicle in Leonardo da Vinci’s eyelid.  I was in a muscle cell in Shakespeare’s thumb.  I did time in Darwin’s ear, residing in a bit of cartilage of his outer pinna. I felt happy in a kupfer cell in Lincoln’s liver.  It was disgusting to be in Napoleon’s hemorrhoid especially when he was riding on horseback.  Fortunately I escaped when he breathed me out at St. Helena and I was transported back to Europe in a sardine’s vein and caught off Norway, packed in olive oil, and eaten as a snack on a cracker by Louis Pasteur. This time I was in an amino acid and ended up in Pasteur’s gum surrounded by obnoxious bacteria busy dumping out tartar on one of his lower right molars. My next human sojourn was in Margaret Sanger’s vaginal mucosa as she stirred up a storm setting up her birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  I am presently residing in a nucleotide in Elof Carlson’s right ear, making ear wax while he churns out another of his dithering articles. 

MAKING CONNECTIONS IS A FEATURE OF HOW SCIENCE WORKS

Once in awhile our bathroom sink doesn’t drain properly.  In the past I would pour some scouring powder into the slowly draining sink and that usually improved the flow of drainage.  But recently that didn’t work so I used a plunger and after a few pumping efforts, some flaky black gunk emerged.  My initial response was disgust, as it drained away and I soaped the sink and cleaned it, the flow now normal.  Then a thought came to me.  What turned the food and toothpaste that went into the drain and converted it to this black material?  Is this what goes on in soil turning it into humus (often black) or into peat (dark brown or black) or coal?  Is the initial process carried out by bacteria?  If so, why does carbon form from the food particles?  Why doesn’t it disappear through oxidation to form carbon dioxide?  Perhaps in the trap and the pipes there isn’t much oxygen from the air to do this.  I looked up articles on coal formation and most of those describe how in the long run (millions of years) the peat is converted into “soft” coal and finally into anthracite coal.  Anthracite coal is about 95% pure carbon.  Thus former swamps and forests that got turned into coal required a lot of compression as runoffs kept adding more soil on top of the decomposing lower layers with the pressure and higher temperatures degrading the lowest organic material leaving only the carbon and some trace elements behind.  That takes millions of years.  A similar process takes place when an insect drowns and gets covered by mud and over millions of years it becomes an impression fossil.  Often that moth or fly consists of a film of carbon exposed when the rock is cracked and opens up into two fragments.   If I pressed a moth between two pieces of polished marble, how long would it take before it carbonized?   If it takes centuries or millennia, it’s not likely such experiments can be done.  Who would remember it being set up thousands of years from now? But I do know that something transforms the washings of teeth into black flaky material in a matter or two or three years.  Sometimes the association between one event (the material the plunger released from a sink trap) and another event (the formation of coal) may have a common explanation.  Sometimes it may be a coincidence that the flaky material is as black as coal (perhaps it is not carbon but a chemical product from the lining of the drain pipes).  Science tries to solve such relations by doing experiments.  The flakes could be chemically analyzed.  If they are mostly carbon, then my initial interpretation would be more likely. I would also have to see what type of bacteria are changing the food particles into carbon, assuming that my interpretation is correct. Science often involves a series of tests to find answers.  Sometimes it takes decades or centuries to work out an interpretation that answers the alternative ways a finding is interpreted.  

BLOG -- A FEW THINGS I FOUND WORTHWHILE LEARNING OVER A LONG LIFE.

This is what I have learned from a life of 83 years:

1.        Sometimes luck saves our lives. I once slipped on a wet elevated subway station as the train pulled in.  I was dodging the spokes of an umbrella carried by a very short woman.  I once was running as fast as I could, head down chased by a classmate in a park.  At the last second I saw my head inches from a tree trunk, swerved, and avoided dashing my brains out.

2.       Education lifted me out of poverty. If I had not excelled in K-12 I would not have gone to NYU on a scholarship or obtained fellowships at Indiana University to get a PhD. 

3.       We can repair many of the errors we make.  My first marriage failed because I had avoided dating until my senior year in college and my courtship with my first wife, Helen, was by correspondence from IU.  Helen was still at NYU finishing her senior year. After a divorce, I waited six months before dating again and when I met Nedra we waited a year before getting married. Fifty six years later, I enjoy her love and personality.

4.       We can do many things with our lives.  I have enjoyed teaching genetics,  doing my own research, running a laboratory with graduate students, publishing my scholarly findings, shifting to teaching biology to non science majors, shifting to human genetics, shifting to history of science, and writing full time.   In each transition, I made the choice and used the opportune time to make it.  Academic life is not a straitjacket and there is considerable flexibility for those who have the talents and interests to make them. 

5.       A lot of fundamental beliefs are questionable.  I was brought up without a religion.  This allowed me to look at all religions without fear or prejudice. I prefer living in a natural world and not a supernatural one. I learned to be tolerant because a lot of people have a supernatural view of existence.  I distrust ideology in all its forms, left ot right, religious or atheistic.  I distrust patriotism that is self serving (like politicians who wrap themselves with the American flag) or when used to discredit criticism of domestic or international policy. Pragmatism, not ideology, governs my response to injustices.

6.       Incremental change is more likely than revolutionary change.  Scientific and social revolutions are relatively rare.  The US has experienced only one overthrow of its government as it shifted from Colonial status to an independent federation of states within a Constitutional nation.  We have had only one Civil War.  The rights of African Americans required decades of an abolitionist movement and the Civil War to end it but it required another century to give civil rights to African Americans.  Incremental changes allowed African Americans to vote, to eat and shop where whites did and  to marry a person who is not of the same race.  These changes were done by the courts, by federal laws, and by social pressure of a younger generation.   So too in science.  Most changes involve new add ons, new connections, new tools and technology, and new theories that improve or extend the insights of a broad finding.

7.       It is difficult to live life without contradictions.  I consider myself patriotic, but I acknowledge that our treatment of Native Americans was unjust, sometimes genocidal, and filled with insincerity and aggression. I depend on industry and its wealth of goods and services and appreciate it for those gifts.  But I know many are motivated by greed and are indifferent or hostile to the rights of labor to organize and bargain for wages, job safety, and pensions.  Many industries are resentful of efforts to expose the damage it can do to the environment or human health. I consider myself in favor of capitalism as an economic system but many human needs are better served through socialism where government regulation, resources, and participation are needed, especially for health and retirement.  I consider myself an atheist, a Humanist in my social concerns, and yet I go to a Unitarian Universalist church because I enjoy its lack of a formal creed, its strong commitment to social justice, and its tolerance for a spectrum of views.  

WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW TO LIVE IN A SCIENCE DEPENDENT WORLD

WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW TO LIVE IN A SCIENCE DEPENDENT WORLD

For more than thirty years I taught a course that I called Biology: A Humanities Approach.  This was not a “physics for poets” class in which I sought a literary way of teaching science. It was a liberal arts way of asking what a democratic society needs for its people to engage in discussion about the life sciences and their lives.  I felt it was important to know how cells divide, how traits are transmitted, how mutations arise, how a single cell becomes a new born baby, how we live out a life cycle of some 80 years, and how we change the environments in which we live and how those altered environments change us.  The humanities are filled with pleasures, setbacks, tragedies, and struggles and they fill our novels with the tortured lives of their heroes.  Nature does that too.  Civilization does that too.  Whatever type of life humans find themselves in, they encounter both personal crises of their own doing and societal or worldwide changes brought about by human activity.  We help create deserts, floods, climate change, and ecological change on a massive scale.  Where are the forests of yesteryear?  How did gorgeous lakes become saturated with oil slicks and void of the fish that were once abundant? How could Lake Erie have actually burned in the 1960s?  How does strip mining alter the landscape and leave waste dumps in its place?  How does bad agricultural practice lead to dust bowls?  How do colonial and economic domination of weak nations lead to destruction of their natural resources?  How does our exposure to ionizing radiation lead to gene mutations for future generations to experience?  How does our capacity for warfare lead us to make weapons of mass destruction?  How does the industrial revolution create a class of subsistence laborers?  How does it lead to urban epidemic diseases?  How does the germ theory lead to a population explosion?  How does that lead to the birth control movement?  How does that lead to a conflict of science and religion?  How does that lead to corruption of the democratic policy and who will represent the poor, the uninformed, and the neglected?  Is it in our genes to be aggressive?  To be racist? To be sexist?  To blame the victims for their personal miseries?   Do we solve our problems with bad science, using eugenics and sterilize the ones we call unfit to reproduce?  Do we use bad science to extract gas and oil from the farms and prairies and dump toxic wastes into the rocky layers just below our groundwater with no deep understanding of the long term effects of what we do? 

              If this sounds like Ecclesiastes, it is intentional.  We repeat our errors generation after generation.  Fortunately some changes for the better do emerge and replace the errors of the past.  Slavery is gone in the industrialized world.  Child labor is gone.  The deliberate subjugation of women is gone.  We do not burn heretics at the stake.  We do not kill women who are believed to be witches. We spend too much time arguing ideology and seeking power through politics.  We spend not enough time seeking to address the problems that can potentially affect our health, affect our environments, and affect our opportunities for education, work, and enjoyment of what is left of the natural world.  We live in a science saturated world and we elect science deniers and representatives ignorant of how science can identify the harms that science can cause by abuse or by neglect.