HOW MUCH OF REALITY HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?

Roughly I divide the real world into myself and the external world.  I have seen x-rays of my chest, counted my pulse, consciously know I am breathing, chewing, swallowing, walking, and nodding off to sleep.  I am aware of the input of food and the output of my excreta.  I have seen my blood, bruising, hair distribution, pores, and the contours of my limbs and body.  I know what I look like mostly from seeing my face and body in the mirror.  Of my 20 trillion cells I have only seen a few hundred of my red and white blood cells from a slide I prepared from a drop of my blood at NYU when I was an undergraduate and learned how to stain, prepare a slide, and look at my blood cells under the microscope. I have not seen any of my other cells.  I saw my chromosomes when they were prepared by Nedra’s cytogenetics laboratory and they are mounted as a photo (with Nedra’s chromosomes facing them on a framed snapshot diptych portrait). I got to look into my lower intestine while having a lower colonoscopy at Stony Brook University and the MD allowed me to look at my inside, the intestine resembling a cave with its farther entrance like a black olive. I saw an NMR of my brain after I fell down stairs in 2008 at my home on Mud Road in Setauket NY and wanted to rule out a tumor as the cause of my falling. My senses, now somewhat impaired with age, made me aware of sounds, experience visual colored views of the external world, aware of pressure and pain, aware of tactile pleasure, and aware of a large variety of tastes.  I know my teeth, tongue, lips, oral cavity.  I am aware of my kidneys and ureters from the passage of kidney stones about a half dozen times in my life.  I am aware of my duodenum from once having an ulcer when I was at UCLA.  I can feel my heart beating when I place my hand on my chest.  Much of my internal anatomy I infer from the many dissections I did in comparative anatomy courses that I either took or visited as a teaching assistant at Indiana University and got to see 90 or more specimens of fetal pigs, cats, frogs, salamanders (mud puppies) or dogfish sharks. 

Of the external world, the portion I have seen is laughably small.  There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and the sun is most familiar to me.  There are hundreds of stars I can discern at night through their association with an earth-based perspective that we call constellations.  There are thousands more that are like pinpoints in a black cloth at night. I  have seen more galaxies and stars as pictures in books than I have seen through a telescope. I am aware that other than the sun, all the other stars I see are light years away from me, the galaxies hundreds of thousands to billions of light years from me.  This means through telescope or printed photos, the celestial reality I see is an illusion because where those objects have moved as stars or galaxies is probably different than this light that was emitted so many light years ago. The very small is also largely hidden from me.  I do not see individual atoms.  Some molecules can form crystals and I can see the relation between the atoms that compose them and the shape that crystals take.  As a geneticist I have seen photos of DNA revealed by x-ray diffraction studies.  I have seen gene sequences revealed by gels that have a bar code like distribution that makes them readable to biochemists.  I have looked at the region of the second chromosome of fruit flies that bore the dumpy gene whose physical structure I helped analyze.  I have induced mutations in that gene.  On an earthly scale, I have flown around the world once and sailed (on a cruise liner) twice around the world while teaching at Semester at Sea.  I have been in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America and have seen the North pole through an airplane window.  I am almost 84 years old so I have experienced four generations of human life.  I have fathered six children, have 12 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.  I have been married twice. The oldest person I have met whose time on earth overlapped mine was born about 1850.  He was a 100 year old Hoosier and visiting his son who worked as a lawyer at 217 Broadway in Manhattan where I was a 19 year old elevator operator.  

USING MUDDLED LANGUAGE TO DESCRIBE REALITY

       There are some phrases that on first reading sound profound but after a few moments reflection are self-contradictory and give a false impression of reality. Take the sentence, “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”  Is it true or false that the water we drink is composed mostly of hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio of two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom?  I find that pretty consistently true and can’t think of a way to falsify it. Is it true that 2 + 8 = 10 on a base ten system (1 to 10)?  Again, I would have difficulty faulting this. On the other hand if you said there is a gene for red eye color in fruit flies and it is dominant over white eye, I could show that the red eye color is actually a product of the action of numerous genes falling into one biochemical pathway producing a brown eye color and an independent biochemical pathway for an orange eye color.  There is at least another system that involves proteins that bind the pigments into the compound eyelets of flies.  Thus the term a gene for red eye is false if one tucks the entire color into a single gene.  Science doesn’t seek truths.  It seeks interpretations that fit the known facts about a process or thing or theory.

      How about the second part of that phrase.  Is everything possible?  How about recreating me and all my thoughts and experience after I am cremated and bringing me back to July 1958 when I got my PhD?  Could you do that?  No.  Why not?  First you’d have a hard time replicating every molecule in my body.  Second you haven’t a clue how to reconstruct my memory, the way I speak, my personality, and my desires, guilts, and fantasies. While you’re at it, bring back my first cat Buddy who lived at the Gnome Bakery on 59^th street at the foot of the Queensborough Bridge in 1940.  

So in a literal sense the two claims don’t make sense to a scientist. If I were to take these as meditative themes to enrich my spirituality, perhaps I could say that nothing lasts, even the universe will eventually age and die, and whatever we believe is everlasting in our culture (even the God or gods of today’s hundreds of religions) may not be so hundreds or thousands of years from now (think of Shelley’s poem Ozymandius).  Or how about saying it’s possible that Hitler was right and Aryan supremacy is a scientific fact and all other races should be eventually replaced by Aryans?  It is also possible to try to rescue that second part of that phrase by invoking the limits of today’s knowledge and many things thought impossible today may be part of a future reality, hundreds or thousands of years from now.

       The problem with both rescue operations is that they can’t be proved today.  But if you have to use tortured reasoning to rescue that phrase, what good is it?  One reason science papers are difficult to read for those not in that science is the ambiguity of our language.  That is also a reason we ask lawyers to write our wills or contracts. What we mean and what we say or write may not be comprehensible to others in the way we intend them.  

A TRIBUTE TO MY FIRST DOCTORAL STUDENT, JOHN SOUTHIN, WHO DIED IN CANADA

       I learned that my first PhD student, John Southin, died in Brockville, Ontario December 29, 2014.  He was in my Biology course at Queen’s University in Fall 1958.  I had just completed my PhD at Indiana University and was settling in to Kingston, Ontario.  John was an exceptionally good student in my course and I invited him to do an undergraduate research project in my laboratory which was in the basement of the Theology building. John grew up in Brockville, Ontario. He enjoyed witty conversation and it was fun when his fellow students dropped by the laboratory. When I married Nedra in 1959, I was also invited to join the faculty at UCLA.  I asked John if he would like to go with us to California and work in my laboratory there.  We drove from Kingston through the highways and old US 66 into the Mojave dessert.  It was an adventure because I was the driver and neither Nedra nor John knew how to drive.  Also our baby Christina, born in Kingston, was in the car. 

     At UCLA,  John flourished as a graduate student and worked on a good dissertation project studying chemically induced types of mosaicism in mutations.  He became progressively disillusioned with American foreign policy and went to Cuba and taught in Havana for several summers. After his PhD he went to McGill University to teach.  He founded an androgynous bookstore for the LGBT community in Montreal.  He set up a teaching program for prisoners in Quebec province.  At McGill he had a very popular course in molecular genetics.  When he became Director of the dormitories he exposed and expelled corrupt dealers of food for the students.  He taught and inspired many students at McGill. When he retired he returned to Brockville. He used his skills to restore old Colonial era stone homes and sold several so he could provide one for himself.  He became active in Brockville health programs for the poor and the elderly.  He lived with his partner of many years and wrote a local news column on local affairs and health issues.  He died of a late onset neuromuscular disease. 

       John had the courage to embrace causes that made him controversial.  When he left UCLA to go back to Canada he became part of the “underground railroad” for war resisters in the US protesting the draft for the Vietnam War.  He helped them get entry and jobs in Canada.  When he volunteered he was gay in Havana he was expelled from Cuba. One of my favorite conversations with John was when I asked him, at UCLA, why he had framed pictures of Queen Elizabeth II and Marshall Tito on his laboratory wall.  He said the Queen was the symbolic head of the United Kingdom and politically powerless, unlike US Presidents who are politically powerful and therefore poor symbols of the government as a whole.  As for Tito, he was the first to break with the USSR, establishing a socialism that was independent of the Politburo in Moscow.  It was the model he hoped to see in Cuba. He enjoyed the irony of helping impoverished Cuban students but carrying his lecture notes in a $400 alligator attaché case he bought in Los Angeles.  Every Christmas John and I exchanged New Years cards with a letter updating our lives.  I did not know he was ill.  I shall miss him.   

REPTILIAN TOOTHED JAWS AND BIRD BEAKS HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

A recent study by Yale scientists used molecular tools to reconstruct the shift from reptile-like snouts to bird beaks.  The scientists first did a thorough comparative anatomy of the mouths of birds, turtles, crocodiles, and lizards and compared those to the bone formation in the mouths of fossil birds and reptiles. They then studied the embryos of chickens, emus, turtles, and crocodiles to identify when the genes for jaw or beak formation took place.  They cloned the DNA from these active genes and used repressor molecules to turn off the genes involved in beak formation of chickens.  This led to the expression of silent genes that were still present in birds.  The major changes involved the shape and state (fused or unfused) of the palatine bone in the roof the mouth and the premaxillary bones.  It also involved the presence or absence of teeth.  Identifying the genes involved in repressing tooth formation and in determining which bones fuse and how the bones are shaped reveals how close the inferred evolutionary sequence of events resemble the experimentally induced sequence of events that can be manipulated with a knowledge of the genes involved.  This was not a sci-fi attempt to produce dinosaurs from birds and cognate animals.  It was an attempt to see how at a molecular level, the events occurred in shaping the jaw or beak and how remnants of those lost processes found in reptiles still exist in the genomes of birds. I enjoyed reading the accounts of the Yale group because it reinforces the importance of experimental science to test predictions and to reveal new knowledge. It reinforces the importance of reductionism in science.  The whole cannot be understood without an attempt to identify the components of complex systems. Without probing, comparing, studying, and using experimental manipulation, complex systems are mysterious and invite supernatural or superficial interpretations. I would not be surprised that a search for genes for tail formation would be found in humans.  It makes me aware that every species is unique in its expressed genes and in its hidden, suppressed (or deleted), genes found in cognate species.  We are genetic palimpsests of our past ancestors. The history of science reveals the piece by piece way theories evolve.  The search for our ancestors using census and birth records or genealogical repositories shows us  branches of our family we did not know existed.  The study of languages show how they evolved and the older the literature, the more difficult it is for us to read it as we go from Victorian prose to Shakespeare to Chaucer and to Beowulf.  Everything changes and scholars can use reason to reconstruct the changes that lead to the present.   

VICARIOUS AND ACTUAL EXPERIENCES IN OUR LIVES

A good portion of our knowledge we know from our own experience of having lived and been aware of what happened to us or to the places we have been.  But much of our knowledge comes from what we have read, heard about, or were taught.  Of the world’s countries I have lived in two (US and Canada), and visited 22 (Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Bahamas, Cuba, England, Scotland, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Union of South Africa, Kenya, India, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Japan, Vietnam, Seychelles).  I have flown over the North Pole, twice circumnavigated the world by teaching on Semester at Sea, and driven coast to coast eight times.  We have driven through most of the states or I have given lectures at most of the states (with the notable exception of Hawaii). I have lived in the US in Massachusetts, Mississippi, California, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Utah, and Minnesota.

I have experienced living in slums, in middle class comfort, but never in luxuriant wealth.  I have taught at Indiana University, Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada), UCLA, San Diego State University, Tougaloo College, the University of Utah, the University of Minnesota, and Stony Brook University.  I have worked with the Danforth Foundation and the Lilly Endowment for shorter stints of lecturing and consulting universities in Colorado, Missouri, and Illinois.  I have been a teacher (genetics, biology, human genetics, reproductive biology), researcher (6 students received their PhDs with me), and writer (13 published books).  I was an administrator twice (Associate Dean of Graduate Division at UCLA; Master of the Honors College at SBU).  I was the Premedical Advisor at UCLA and served on the Medical Admissions Committee at SBU. 

I have been married twice (four years with Helen; 56 years and looking forward to more with Nedra).  I have had six children (one with Helen, five with Nedra, including a daughter who lived only 4 days).  I have 12 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren.  I am an atheist (in the theological sense of having no god concept), Unitarian (in the sense of enjoying a creedless religion), and Humanist (in the sense of helping others), seeking justice and fairness, desiring the benefits of human diversity (we can learn a lot from each other) and a tolerance of views with which I disagree. I believe that virtue is its own reward. I entertained being an artist, I chose science instead.  I was an elevator operator for three summers in my youth and learned a lot about the importance of labor unions, the hard life of low paid unskilled labor, and the dignity of work.  I grew up with a schizophrenic mother and learned that she could be loving and caring despite her paranoid moments. I grew up with two cultures. My father shared memories of his Swedish boyhood, his lapsed Lutheran faith, and his work in the merchant marine before he became an elevator operator.  I learned to appreciate his loyalty and his joy in listening to music and reading widely.  My mother grew up in New Jersey with immigrant Orthodox Jewish parents from what is now Ukraine and she played her violin at home and liked to paint in the style we call primitive art.  Although both would be judged failures by slipping from middle class to poverty, both were successful in stressing for their children the importance and pleasures of culture and education. I have had the good fortune of enjoying most of my life and learned early to turn discontent into acts of creativity and learning.

DO YOU KNOW THAT YOU ARE A DEUTEROSTOME?

Imagine that your father or mother had a sibling you never knew about and you suddenly found yourself becoming acquainted with numerous cousins.   That is how I felt when reading a collection of articles in Science volume 520 (April 23, 2015).  They were on the origin of vertebrates.  The articles covered the history of classifying vertebrates, the comparative anatomy involved, and the DNA sequences of genes shared in common among the vertebrates and their nearest relatives. We are vertebrates because we have a spinal column consisting of a number of vertebrae. That we all know.  But do you know that as an embryo you had gill slits like a fish?  Did you know that as an embryo you had a notochord, a cartilage-like rod that ran from your head to your tail region?  Did you know that most other phyla have a ventral (belly side) nerve cord instead of a dorsal (your back) spinal cord?  I knew that from my course in comparative anatomy that I took as an undergraduate at NYU and that got reinforced when I was a teaching assistant at IU watching students dissect and follow the organ systems of different types of animals from worms to fetal pigs. When I last took coursework in zoology as a graduate student I knew that I was a deuterostome, but didn’t reflect on its meaning. It means we have a second mouth.  The first mouth is a hole in the embryo during its formation when a hollow ball of cells gets dented at one end and what is pushed in becomes the future gut and the opening becomes a mouth.  This is the real mouth that worms, mollusks, and arthropods (crustaceans, insects, and spiders) have.  But in vertebrates like us, the mouth comes about from a second opening when a gut-like tube extends forward and downward in the future head and punches through. That makes your outer lips derived from skin (ectoderm) and the inner part of your mouth is from endoderm.  I used to tell my students that if you give a dutiful lip to lip kiss it is ectoderm to ectoderm, but when you get really passionate and enjoy deep kissing, it’s ectoderm on endoderm that thrills you. If we are deuterostomes, what are worms, insects, and clams?  They are protostomes (using the first mouth).  Who is “we”?  We deuterosomes include some strange bedfellows, including echinoderms (starfishes and sea urchins), hemichordates (acorn worms), cephalochordates (lancelets), tunicates, jawless fishes, and jawed vertebrates (that’s us).

So now you know some family secrets.   Your closest ancestors were not annelid worms, insects, or octopuses.  They were echinoderms.  That’s sand dollars, starfishes, sea urchins, and crinoids (extinct members of that phylum echindermata who are known as sea lilies or whose skeletal remains are mostly “Indian beads” found scattered in the limestone of the local quarries and lakes in southern Indiana).  The next time you stand on a sandy beach and look out to the ocean to commune, remember that your closest relatives, fellow deuterostomes like you, are the starfishes, sand dollars, and sea urchins.   

THE PRIVILEGE OF EXISTENCE IS ITS OWN REWARD

First, there is consciousness, especially the human kind.  I mean recognizing myself as an individual, unique, with no one on earth now, the past, or tomorrow exactly like me (assuming we are not invoking infinite universes with unlimited repetitions of all life on earth).   I am self aware.  I believe I exist and am not someone else’s dream.  If you are reading this, I believe you, too, exist, and you are not a figment of my imagination.  I prefer reality to fantasy or the supernatural.  I accept a material universe devoid of gods, miracles, and spirits.  The world of science and the knowable universe is plenty for me.  This leads to a second privilege.  We can use our reason to interpret the world.  Do dogs, cats and other mammals have self-awareness?  I don’t know.  They may or may not know of their mortality.  They may or may not know how big their universe is. How big is the world of a bacterium?  Does an ant have a sense of a universe outside a reasonable distance from its colony?  Do worms know there are stars?  The privilege of knowing for me is insatiable.  I learn a lot and in my old age, I continue to seek new knowledge. Here are a few things I have learned about my universe. We are some 93 million miles from the sun, a star. The nearest star, proxima centauri,  is about 21 trillion miles from our sun (about 4.2 light years away).  Our sun is one of about 200 billion stars in our galaxy that we call the Milky Way.  The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is about 1.5 million light years from us.  There are about 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.  The known universe is about 14 billion years old.  Our sun is about 5 billion years old. Life on earth is at least 3.5 billion years old. Dinosaurs went extinct about 60 million years ago.  The genus Homo is about 4 million years old. Our species Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old.  The oldest civilizations are less than 10,000 years old. Most of what we know about the universe was learned in the past 100 years.   

Here’s the problem.  If we are one of 200 billion solar systems (2 times ten to the 11^th power) among 100 billion galaxies (1 times ten to the 11^th power), then there are likely to be 2 times ten to the 22 power solar systems.  If each has one planet in a habitable zone to sustain the evolution of life, the maximum number of earth-like planets would be about 2 times ten to the 22 power.  Let me write that out: 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Even if the odds of an earth-like planet around a star in the habitable zone (not too hot or cold) are one in trillion (that’s fairly rare), there would be 2 billion earth like planets, many them far more advanced than life on earth today. That pessimistic assumption would make intelligent life (self aware) present in only one out of every 100 galaxies. Eventually astronomers will be able to detect oxygen in the atmospheres of some of those planets in other stars of the Milky Way.  If they are fairly common (instead of rare), there might even be life sustainable solar systems within ten light years from our sun. 

Religion does not offer me any comfort or wisdom in thinking why a god would make so many galaxies in the universe and single out one of them, the Milky Way, and single out from that one star (the sun) to make intelligent life a unique event not present anywhere else in the universe.  Nor would it locate a heaven for me. Is it in our galaxy?  Is it near our sun? Is it millions of trillions of miles away, somewhere in intergalactic space favoring no single galaxy?  If intelligent life evolved on other planets in the Milky Way do they share a common heaven?  If the forms of these other intelligent beings do not look like vertebrates, do they have their own heaven?  Those speculations have no data behind them.  The best we can hope for is data from nearby stars (within a hundred light years) to seek evidence for such intelligent communication.   Think of the accomplishments of these other civilizations in other galaxies or other stars thousands of light years from earth, if they do at all exist.  We know nothing of their lives or deaths or accomplishments.  But in our solar system, on this earth, we are privileged to have lived a brief moment in the universe’s history and sampled many of the talents of our species, Homo sapiens.  These may be small potatoes to some, but to me it is a gift I continue to appreciate.