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. 

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.