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.   

NAOMI ORESKE’S MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

NAOMI ORESKE’S MERCHANTS OF DOUBT

We went to the second of Naomi Oreske’s Patten lectures at Indiana University.  She discussed her book Merchants of Doubt.  In the 1970s a coalition formed between two political economists, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hajek and four physicists Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz,  William Nierenberg, and Frederick Singer.  The economists were Ayn Rand type libertarians who believed that government regulation led to government control led to socialism led to communism and loss of freedom. They favored laissez faire capitalism, a powerful military, and a fear of liberals, environmentalists, and critics of government (especially of the conservative government they favored). As Cold Warriors they joined and formed think tanks with the financial backing of millionaires and billionaires who shared their outlook.  One of these was the George Marshall Institute.  Its members included the four physicists, two of whom (Seitz and Singer) had been consultants to the tobacco industry.  The tobacco industry funded research which favored the tobacco industry’s position that tobacco had no bad health effects on the respiratory or circulatory systems or the induction of cancers. They came up with the strategy of casting doubt on the critics, especially in the medical field, who claimed tobacco was the major cause of these diseases in smokers or in persons exposed to second hand smoke exhaled at home or in the work place.  These four scientists used the same strategy and their institutes to deny that coal heavy in sulfur caused acid rain, that fluoridated hydrocarbons used as refrigerants and propellants were the cause of the ozone hole widening in Antarctica, and that human produced carbon dioxide was the cause of global warming leading to dramatic climate change.  They did so not because they were financially dependent on the industries causing the pollution but because of their ideology as cold warriors and libertarians favoring the interests of industry and the military.  

Even earlier the chemical industry used the strategy of casting doubt on the role of DDT in the disappearance of birds from widespread spraying of insecticides.  During the Vietnam war the same strategy of doubt was used to deny any ecological or health problems associated with the spraying of herbicides (Agent Orange, especially) to destroy crops sand to clear areas used by the Viet Cong.  Even earlier, my mentor, Hermann Muller, was assailed by those using radiation in the military, industry, or health for suggesting low doses of radiation were cumulative and that that society needed protection from avoidable exposure of radiation and excessive release of radiation.  Even earlier than that, if you read Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People, you will see that Norwegian policy in the 1800s was against those who raised fears of contagious diseases from the slovenly habits and neglect that was tolerated during the infancy of the public health movement.   I would not be surprised it can be traced even further back to classic Greek drama where messengers with bad news were neither welcome nor tolerated (think of Oedipus or think of the way prophets were ignored in the Old Testament).  Wishful thinking goes with ideology of the left or right.   Those with power are not willing to give up their privileges when criticized by findings that bad outcomes can arise from the activities of the powerful. It is not just dictators but anyone who lives by wishful thinking that favors denial to regulation in the public interest. We may no longer kill the messengers, but we sure like to cast doubt, scorn, or denial on their concerns and warnings. 

Is there a role for the uses of science besides crying wolf or fiddling while Rome burns?

Nedra and I enjoyed the presentation of Naomi Oreske at Indiana University’s Patten lecture.  She discussed why scientists become controversial over certain issues regardless of whether they endorse, reject, or ignore the applications of science to society.  She argued that from 1865 to 1945 science was largely regarded as championing reason, responding to social needs such as public health or helping farmers and manufacturers and promoting the idea of progress and civilization.  She calls his the Aspirational Era. It ended in 1945 because science, for the first time, had developed weapons of mass destruction that entered a worldwide arms race.  She called this the Existential Era of science. It led to efforts by scientists to speak out, Einstein and Nils Bohr were its major advocates.  By 1950 a third effort emerged that she calls the Select Committee Era in which presidential science advisors, and agencies of government were used to advise Congress on legislation.  It was the era that banned DDT, enabled legislation on acid rain, and pitted “truth to power.”  The present era, which began in 1973, she calls the Assessment Era,  It began with President Nixon abolishing the Presidential science advisor position because he resented the scientific criticisms of the use of napalm , carpet bombing, and Agent Orange spraying in the Vietnam War.  It has forced science to criticize government individually or through its own science organizations.

The distancing of government from science advising creates a tension between “crying wolf” and “fiddling while Rome burns” among scientists.  If they fail to advise they are blamed for their cowardice.  If they do advise and their fears do not come to pass, they are accused of being extremists or hysterical.  In her discussion of climate change, she showed why the ban on fluoridated carbon  compounds used as refrigerants and in can sprays worked to lessen the ozone hole at the south pole that was associated with these compounds in the stratosphere.  It was relatively minor in its economic impact to ban these compounds.  The manufacture was almost entirely done by one company (DuPont).  There were alternative chemicals that could be used.  And DuPont made hundreds of other products that were profitable.  But climate change is largely directed at fossil fuels and the companies that extract them only do that and most of the world feels economically tied to fossil fuels for its cars, utilities, airplanes, and a substantial part of the economy.  That is why these companies hire scientists to present their views as legitimate science.  They have the money to hire many scientists to publish papers that are contradictory and they will keep submitting peer review rejected papers until they find a journal that will publish that work. 

Scientists in general try to avoid going public with the implications of their work because they feel they lack expertise in politics, they fear loss of credibility,, and they prefer to be in their laboratories.  Oreske feels scientists need to add a moral dimension to their science. If their work can lead to harm and they see this, they should speak out.  She feels they should enlist the support of moral leaders, like the Pope or the leaders of most of the world’s religious community who favor a stewardship role of mankind for nature.  She argues that a major role of science is to improve out lot and this includes being a whistle blower when bad outcomes are recognized by scientists through their work.  

WHY DO WE AGE? HERE ARE EIGHT REASONS WHY EXTENDED LIFE IS STILL A PIPE DREAM

I had a discussion with a colleague at a forum I attended.  He claimed it will be possible to extend human life expectancy so that we die at 120 or even 150.  Length of life is tricky because there are several life expectancies.  Our present mean life expectancy in the US for a newborn is about 85 years.  When I was born in 1931 it was about 65 years.  When my father was born in 1901 it was about 55 years.  For a baby born in 1776 it was about 35 years.  Most of that gain came from a reduction in infant mortality.  In 1776 about half of all babies died in their first year of life.  Pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, and tuberculosis were the most common.  By 1860 public health measures were becoming standard.  After the germ theory of 1880 became widespread, pasteurization of milk, chlorination of water, and vaccinations became common.  Infants and children lived.   If we excluded infant mortality the differences in survival to old age are not profoundly different from biblical times (about 70 years) for most of human history until the twentieth century.  In that century antibiotics, antiseptic surgery, and numerous medical processes (hormones, blood transfusions, prescription medications for high blood pressure) could extend length of life. That is why a baby today can live to about 85 years. The maximum length of a human life, based on birth certificate evidence, is about 122 years. 

We have no problem on the causes of aging of the cars we drive. Every part of a car experiences wear and tear with usage, no matter how often we bring our cars in for servicing.  If we are foolish and don’t routinely service our cars they break down much faster. It could be problems with the engine, the transmission, the radiator, the electrical system, the body frame, or a rusting through or crystallizing of the metal components. No one would look for a single cause of what makes an old car on its last years of usefulness.  Yet many people like to seek a single cause of aging in all of cellular life.  At least eight major reasons have been identified on why we get old and die.  First, our DNA in our chromosomes undergoes breakage from background radiation, chemical agents we consume or inhale, or the by-products of our metabolism in our cells.  Chromosome breakage in dividing cells often causes cell death. Second in importance, our DNA is vulnerable to gene mutations arising from the same type of agents when they alter chemical components of the DNA in our genes.  We have repair enzymes to stop most of this damage which occurs every day of our lives, but as we age cells get less efficient and the damage accelerates.  Third the tips of our chromosomes are capped by telomeres.  Each time a cell divides the telomeres shorten. Human cells in tissue cell cultures can only divide about 30 times and they stop.  The one major exception to this is certain cancer cells which can keep on growing decades after the death of the person whose cells are in tissue culture.  Fourth, genes are temporarily turned on or off by coating with proteins or attachments of methyl groups.  This is called epigenetics. As we age different chromosomes get coated (methylated) and thus functions can shut down in those cells.  Fifth, our mitochondria are found in all our cells and they do the real breathing, taking oxygen brought from our lungs to our cells and they convert digested food into carbon dioxide and water and produce abundant energy molecules for other activities and generate the heat of our bodies.  They have their own DNA and the oxidative processes can severely damage their genes.  As we age our mitochondria are fewer in number and less efficient, which is one reason old people feel colder and have icy hands and feet.   Sixth our proteins as they are synthesized by our genes undergo folding.  In older people that process of folding becomes less efficient and the impaired folded proteins form tangles and this can lead to Alzheimer syndrome in some and diabetes in others as important proteins in the brain neurons or the pancreas are misfolded.  Seventh stem cells are used to regenerate red blood cells, white blood cells, the lining of our intestines, and several other issues that are subject to mechanical wear and tear.  As we age stem cells lose that capacity and become fewer in number so we wrinkle and our bones deform with aging.  The eighth reason why we age involves the communications from cell to cell throughout our bodies.  There is “cross-talk” locally by diffusion and cross talk at greater distances, especially by hormones.  These communications break down and become unreliable as our bodies age.

While some have argued that we are programmed to die, I favor the interpretation that , like old cars, we just wear out from these eight known processes of aging.  I am skeptical we can extend life to 120 years for the majority of adults without considerable years of ill health.  All eight of these processes need to be addressed and just having the right diet and the right exercise and right attitude is no guarantee for indefinite life extension anymore than the well pampered car can last forever if driven to work every day.  So far, I am 83.  The oldest person on my father’s side lived to be 93.  None of my maternal grandparents descendants has lived to be 90.  I’m not complaining.  Those 83 years have been filled with adventure, love, learning, and creativity.  I have also been lucky.  I have never been hospitalized as an inpatient for a major illness. But I know I am old.