OCEAN GROVE, NEW JERSEY -- NEDRA’S QUILTING RETREAT

              Nedra’s sister Sonya and her husband, Ted Weiss, bought a Victorian “ginger bread” house that used to be a bed and breakfast residence in the early 1900s.  It is in Ocean Grove New Jersey on a street called Pilgrim Path about four houses west of the Great Tabernacle.  Ted Weiss was born in Hungary, raised in South Amboy, NJ, and served 16 years in Congress representing the west side of Manhattan.  This was their “get away” house from Manhattan where they could relax on vacation and invite family for holidays.  Ocean Grove was a Methodist meeting grounds and the Great Tabernacle invited Chautauqua circuit speakers and famous preachers to stimulate the hundreds of weekend or summer visitors.  It was a dry town and so strict for its behavior that no motor cars were allowed to enter, leave, or be driven on Sundays.  One of my colleagues at Stony Brook University said in his youth it was called “Ocean Grave.”

              Now it is like most small towns and has its gay community, its revelers, its secular attractions linked to a gorgeous Jersey Shore, a board walk, and numerous musical performances at the Great Tabernacle.

              Nedra and I go at least twice a year to Ocean Grove because Sonya hosts Nedra’s quilters from Long Island, NY.  About 11 of them come and they call themselves “The off the wall quilters.”  They enjoy each other’s company and use those twice a year week of quilting to work on their projects.  I have been the resident drone because I use that opportunity to read books and write.  In this latest retreat I read and wrote reviews of two books for the Quarterly Review of Biology, one a biography by George Brownlee  of two time Nobel Prize winner Fred Sanger and a book by Nessa Carey on Junk DNA.  I then read Frank Close’s biography, Half Life, a scholarly study of Bruno Pontecorvo’s contributions to atomic physics (especially slow neutrons to induce nuclear fission and neutrinos and their role in cosmic events).  Pontecorvo is more popularly known for his defection to the USSR in 1950 and his possible role as an atomic spy.  I also read Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Flight Behavior, which uses global warming as its theme.  I also read Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel’s comic novel, Lunatics.  In my spare time I wrote a few Blogs for my bloggerelof site.  It is nice to read in the parlor or sit on the porch and read.  It is also nice to sample a different cook for each meal. Two are assigned each day.  Nedra and I prepared chicken Jerusalem for our culinary contribution.   

MISPLACED FAITH IS NOT LIMITED TO RELIGION: THE STRANGE LIFE OF BRUNO PONTECORVO

              I was given a copy of Frank Close’s biography of Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) entitled Half Life (Basic Books, 2015).  Dr. Shari Cohn Simmons, a former student who now lives in Edinburgh sent it to me.  She remembered talking with me about Muller’s life when he was in Edinburgh (1937-1940) after fleeing the USSR where two of his students were executed as alleged Trotskyites and genetics was condemned as a science.  One of the students getting a PhD with Muller was Guido Pontecorvo, the oldest brother of Bruno.  I knew Guido Pontecorvo professionally and interviewed him in London when I was writing Muller’s biography.

              I also knew, from newspaper accounts, that Bruno Pontecorvo defected to the USSR and was considered an atomic spy who passed on nuclear weapons secrets in Canada, the US, and England. Close writes a history of both the Pontecorvo family and Bruno’s involvement in the working out of atomic physics, a story that begins in the early 1930s.  Bruno was one of eight children born in Pisa to a wealthy manufacturer of textiles.  Their father was a non-observant Jew whose wife was Protestant.  The children were raised without a religious identification. Of the eight children, Guido became a geneticist, teaching and doing research mostly in Glasgow.  Bruno became a physicist and Gillo became a motion picture director (The Battle of Algiers is his most famous picture).

              Bruno studied physics in Rome with Enrico Fermi, but after Mussolini formed an alliance with Hitler, Jews were no longer permitted to hold university positions because Jews were defined by fascist ideology as a biological condition and not a chosen religious belief.  Bruno went to Paris and worked with the Joliot Curies until Paris fell to the Nazis.  Bruno escaped and found his way out with other refugees to Lisbon and to the United States.  He worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma devising instruments to detect atomic signatures in drill holes for the presence of radioactive heavy elements that were found in oil shale but not in limestone or sandy rock formations.  Bruno Pontecorvo was well known among physicists in the US for his discovery that slow neutrons were effective in inducing fission in atomic nuclei and for his skills in devising instruments to detect the products of nuclear fission.

              Bruno worked in Chalk river in Canada in the early 1940s.  He was interested in nuclear reactor construction, an idea developed by his mentor, Enrico Fermi.  One product he hoped to study from the use of nuclear reactors was the production and detection of neutrinos.  His theoretical work on neutrinos was widely known. While his work was considered secret, it was not in weapons development.  Bruno was a pacifist who opposed scientific applications to war.  His experiences in Italy and France led him to believe the USSR was the only country where people would be treated as equals and where peace, and not war, was its goal.  This became his religion. He had become a communist party member while in Paris.

              Was Pontecorvo a spy?  Frank Close believes he was but there is no direct evidence to prove this.  Close believes most of Pontecorvo’s spying was done after the end of World War II and involved passing on information on nuclear reactor design and not on weapons manufacture. Nuclear reactors, of course, were a major source of enriched Uranium and Plutonium, both of which entered into weapons making. 

              In 1950 Pontecorvo and his Swedish wife and his three sons took a vacation from their home in Harwell, England (the British equivalent of Los Alamos) and never returned.  They disappeared.  It took five years before Pontecorvo made contact with the western world releasing a statement that he left England to do research on neutrino in the USSR and to avoid “persecution” from western governments.

              I much enjoyed the history of atomic physics that Close provides and the scholarly analysis of both Pontecorvo’s career and his troubled life.  Only after the collapse of the USSR did Pontecorvo admit to his colleagues that his defection was a mistake and that his faith in communism was wrong and that he “must have been a cretin” for his naïve embrace of Stalin’s speeches.  

THOUGHTS ON FREE WILL AND BEHAVIORAL RESPONSIBILITY

              Each of us has a self-perception of uniqueness.  It is built out of the unique experiences we have had since birth that shape our identity as an individual, a family member, a community member, a citizen of the nation we call our country, and as a member of the species called Homo sapiens which differs genetically and psychologically from all other species.  This does not mean we do not share lots of common understandings with others or with other cultures or with other nationalities.  Nor does it mean we share nothing with other species. The reverse is true. We share more with those species closest to us. Virtually all infants develop a sense of self that distinguishes the world outside our bodies and the persons populating it as not the same as ourselves.

 

When we make choices we do not make them randomly.  We are constrained by what we know.  A child who has experienced a burn by touching something hot will have an awareness to avoid doing that again.  A child of the same age who has not experienced that pain from a hot object may require more time to get that experience unless that child is instructed by parents not to go near certain objects (like a fireplace).  The more knowledge and experience we accumulate the fewer are the random acts we make.  The knowledge does not have to be true. A person in a particular family may have an intense exposure to something like a religion shared by the parents and the child will believe what the parents say is true. There is nothing innate about these attitudes.  In order for a community to function it has to have some shared beliefs. Most of us pick this up at home, at school, and from religious instruction.  In a secular society where religious practice is optional, the bulk of shared values come from the neighborhood and from school.

Societies hold the individual responsible for acts that harm others or harm society. Children learn not to bully, not to lie, not to cheat, and not to hurt others.  With rare exceptions children have learned these values at home, school, or in church.  Free will does not mean that a child weighs carefully punching someone younger and weaker or stealing from that other child.  We often make quick decisions without reflection on the consequences.  We could argue that a person was destined to act in an anti-social way but that does not exempt the person from punishment if the act results in physical harm, theft, destruction of property, or some other serious act that society defines as a criminal act.  The measure of response depends on age, mental aptitude, or circumstances unique to the situation. In an ideal society an informed judge would assign the punishment.  In some societies there are fixed mandatory sentences.    It would be more accurate to say we act out of “constrained will” than out of “free will.” Our psychological state evolves as we experience and learn more things through aging and the circumstances that surround us.  At the same time we are not determined to behave in a certain way for any of our actions.  That is because what we may think appropriate one day may change some weeks or years later.  By the time we are adults we have had millions of acts that have led to a sense of well being or disappointment.  We tend to avoid the acts that disappoint us.  We tend to repeat the acts that work successfully for our own well being and for that of society.  As the person I call “me” or “I” and that others call “Elof Carlson”, I recognize that what others call free will is only a narrow range of all possible behaviors I have experienced because the vast majority I have rejected if they harm others or if they lower my self esteem.     

WHO SHOULD PAY FOR THE THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED?

I am puzzled by the number of people who comment on news items on Facebook, Blog sites, and other resources on the web. A considerable number of these comments reflect what I would classify as Libertarian (or Conservative) thinking.  It may be about something like unions and teacher’s salaries and the protections given teachers from being fired. The comments are often dismissive of such organization for collective bargaining.  They argue that people should pay for what they get, follow their bosses’ rules, and not expect government to pay for their needs such as medical insurance, retirement, or unemployment insurance.   Libertarianism and conservatism appeals to those who see themselves as self-made or self-reliant.  They like being rugged individualists and I do not doubt their strong work ethic. But consider this. To have a civilization like the US enjoys requires the activities of thousands of different occupations.  Let us say government paid for nothing but a standing military.  You now take your monthly paycheck and have to pay for the following: health insurance, accident insurance, car insurance, house insurance, lawsuit insurance. You have to pay for fire department protection; you now have to pay for police protection; you have to pay for sanitation to remove trash; you have to pay for clean safe chlorinated water to drink and  bathe; you have to pay for snow removal of the streets; you have to pay for repairs of pot holes in the streets taking you to work; you have to pay for scholarly books (500 dollars each) if the press is to make money when publishing is not subsidized; you have to pay for the research that gives you the modern medicines and drugs you and your family will need; you will pay for the airports, harbors, RR tracks, new highways.  The list will mushroom on all the hidden costs—mail delivery, weather forecasting and reporting, maintaining the internet, providing passports for travel to other countries, seeing to it that the meat and foods you eat are not contaminated, seeing to it that your children do not play in a haze of pollutants, inspecting bridges so they don’t collapse, keeping records of who owns the land your house resides on so that you can eventually sell it.  I don’t individually have to pay for all these hundreds or thousands of errands to keep society working.   Private volunteer work or profit making organizations might not work because not enough people even know about these things that make urban life possible.  And if they defaulted and did not pay up, streets would be filled with abandoned homes, burnt out houses, and impassable streets because no one was paying for the constant upkeep necessary for hundreds of services. 

  Libertarianism downplays the social contract that is necessary for everyone to have hundreds of activities that would bankrupt most of us if we had to write a hundred or more checks a month to pay for them.  At the same time you would be at the mercy of lawsuits for your neglect to do all the repairs and protections that government agencies and services provide. Since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you would have to be aware of hundreds of potential liabilities because you would be responsible for everything that can possibly go wrong. We have to organize to get things done.  Telling those who earn little that they should seek private charity (mostly from churches) is a bad idea because when people are stressed financially they will cut back on their charitable giving especially during depressions or setbacks in the economy.  Democracies with some mixture of private and public funding work better than pure laissez faire capitalism or pure socialism.  

THE WHOLE AND THE PARTS: A COMPARISON OF PEOPLE AND SOCIETIES

        I am one person, with a name given to me at my birth.  I am unique because no one else has lived my life exactly as I have.  I arose from a single cell and now am composed of some 20 trillion cells. I learned as an undergraduate that my cells are capable of forming four types of tissues—nerves, muscles, connective tissues, and epithelial tissues.  The connective tissues form a matrix around them like blood, bone, or cartilage.  Epithelial cells form the lining of organs like skin, or the insides of guts or blood vessels.  When I signed up for a course in histology (the study of tissues) at NYU I was given a box with 100 slides in them.  Each had different representatives of the four types of tissues.  We had to learn to recognize all of them. As I reflected on what I learned about biology, I realized that while I am one person, I am a community of cells.  I am a cooperative community of cells because I can move with the use of my muscle cells.  I can secrete digestive enzymes because of my epithelial cells.  I can receive oxygen for my tissues because red blood cells do that.  I can think because I have nerve cells.  Each tissue has its own collection of cells modified for a special function.  Muscle can be voluntary like those in our hands or feet.  They can be involuntary like those in our blood vessels or intestines. Heart muscle forms a third type of muscle that can pump away for a life time without prolonged rest. By contrast imagine doing billions of pushup exercises without tasking a rest! There are no rugged individualist cells that can transform themselves as they wish.  Tired of being an epithelial cell?  Try being a nerve cell or a muscle cell. Sorry, you can’t.  The closest thing to being a rugged individualist for one of my cells would be if it became a tumor cell. It would respect no boundaries; it would spread out and metastasize.  It would from colonies. But it would also kill me if it got away with being an unregulated or untreated cancer.

        Now shift mental gears.  Think of society, our own American society.  We have over 300 million people living here.  To make society work we become wage earners (white collar or blue collar), we provide services (teaching, law, medicine, banking, and ministry).  We also provide governance (elected and appointed officials and self appointed plutocrats who purchase influence).  We provide entrepreneurs (from Mom and Pop shops to major corporations or cartels).  We farm. Unlike a living person like me, a society is not an individual entity.  There are states with regional differences.  There are differences between rural and urban living. There are inequalities of wealth at birth (some born poor and others born rich). There is mobility for some (or going from rags to riches as we like to believe).  Rugged individualists are numerous.  Some are like cancers and they leave a wake of ruin from those they oppress, exploit, or destroy (economically). Others are just extremely talented as artists, performers, writers, or investors. All the cells of a human body require roughly the same amount of oxygen, metabolic nutrient, and waste removal.  Humans in society vary enormously in attaining both basic needs and opportunities. When societies have too much of inequality, discrimination, elitism, neglect, or sexism, societies can suffer and experience revolutions or cease their influence like fallen empires. This is why “the body politic” is a mischievous term.  This is why calling a corporation an individual person is troublesome. Analogies have their values for teaching but they should not be confused with the complexities of communities that science and reason reveal about their composition and functions.          

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.