Jargon, I’m learning, is a fundamental element of philosophy. Here are some especially confusing terms from today’s 3-hour Philosophy of Time seminar:
-relational construct
-mode of being/comes into being
-physical reality
-quasi-absolute
…and my favorite:
-precondition for the possibility of experience
(I'm thinking about doing a jargon of the week post, so email me if you find any good ones!)
2.28.2006
2.24.2006
More about St. Louey (and my hilarious mother)
My sister has a different St. Louis story:
http://chars-on-mars.livejournal.com/
http://chars-on-mars.livejournal.com/
2.18.2006
Getting Jiggy in St. Louey
Five thousand scientists and reporters are here in St. Louis this weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So I thought my Downtown Pavilion Hotel—five blocks from the convention hub—would be full of scientists and reporters. Eager scientists, divulging their new research only to me. A flurry of science reporters, offering me fabulous jobs. Nope. I entered the lobby last night to find it packed with…girls. It was full of energetic, giggling girls, aged 3 to 18, wearing sequined corsets, long socks, and noisy shoes. Most of them had freckles, and covered their frizzy red hair with an inflexible wig of tight blonde curls. I saw the lobby sign, and had that Aha! / this-can’t-be-for-real epiphany. It read: The Pavilion Welcomes Irish Arts Feis. I was stuck in an Irish dancing competition. And boy, did they dance.
They were everywhere, dancing dancing everywhere. As I walked the long, circuitous path from the west to the east wing elevator shaft, I saw them around every corner, in every ballroom. In every inch of available red velvet carpet they were practicing. They clumped in groups of three or four, jigging down the hallways as if they were Dorothy and the Tin Man following a red-velvet brick road. I walked past the pool room. Hasn’t anyone ever told them NO DANCING near the pool?!
This morning, I was waiting for an elevator down to the lobby. A middle-aged couple waited with me, with their two daughters. The parents looked pathetic, equipped with schedules and snacks. “Sweetie,” the mother said with exasperation, “we’ve got a long time before you dance.” The sweetie was about 6, in full purple, hideous costume, dancing in place. The other girl was too young to talk, sitting in her stroller. But her feet were tapping rhythmically against her hard plastic seat—I swear to god, exactly in sync with her sister!
Who are these parents? Who, in their right mind, thinks that carting the fam to a hotel in St. Louis to dance in the ballrooms is a fun weekend activity? Maybe it’d be ok if your daughter always won. And I don’t mean any honorable mention or crappy yellow ribbons. I mean if she got a gigantic trophy every single time—or better—prize money! But hundreds of girls are littering about, and they can’t all be winners. So not only do you have to watch this dancing all day long, but you have to watch all the other daughters jigging their asses better than your Sweetie? No thanks.
And another thing…lots of girls in elaborate dresses, wearing wigs, and make-up (yes, on the 3-year-olds, too)…doesn’t this seem just a little too much like a beauty pageant? All these blonde curls and rouged cheeks…and all I can think is Jean Benet Ramsey.
And isn’t there some risk of neurological damage if you go hours on end without moving your arms?
They were everywhere, dancing dancing everywhere. As I walked the long, circuitous path from the west to the east wing elevator shaft, I saw them around every corner, in every ballroom. In every inch of available red velvet carpet they were practicing. They clumped in groups of three or four, jigging down the hallways as if they were Dorothy and the Tin Man following a red-velvet brick road. I walked past the pool room. Hasn’t anyone ever told them NO DANCING near the pool?!
This morning, I was waiting for an elevator down to the lobby. A middle-aged couple waited with me, with their two daughters. The parents looked pathetic, equipped with schedules and snacks. “Sweetie,” the mother said with exasperation, “we’ve got a long time before you dance.” The sweetie was about 6, in full purple, hideous costume, dancing in place. The other girl was too young to talk, sitting in her stroller. But her feet were tapping rhythmically against her hard plastic seat—I swear to god, exactly in sync with her sister!
Who are these parents? Who, in their right mind, thinks that carting the fam to a hotel in St. Louis to dance in the ballrooms is a fun weekend activity? Maybe it’d be ok if your daughter always won. And I don’t mean any honorable mention or crappy yellow ribbons. I mean if she got a gigantic trophy every single time—or better—prize money! But hundreds of girls are littering about, and they can’t all be winners. So not only do you have to watch this dancing all day long, but you have to watch all the other daughters jigging their asses better than your Sweetie? No thanks.
And another thing…lots of girls in elaborate dresses, wearing wigs, and make-up (yes, on the 3-year-olds, too)…doesn’t this seem just a little too much like a beauty pageant? All these blonde curls and rouged cheeks…and all I can think is Jean Benet Ramsey.
And isn’t there some risk of neurological damage if you go hours on end without moving your arms?
2.12.2006
The Fall of the House of Steele
In early February, looming from the top of a grassy hill, the dingy-brown building of the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory is Chevy Chase Heights’ very own House of Usher. Smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood, the wooden entrance sign appears abruptly at the bottom of the hill, just 20 feet from a pile of logs and tree stumps. A gray hooded sweatshirt hangs forgotten from one naked magnolia. The grass of the grassy hill is dead, and crunches when you trudge through it. One hundred and fifty of the nation’s best scientists work here, but only a handful of cars are parked along the edge of the driveway that winds up sharply to the front door. You can hear the slow punch of the buttons when the elderly secretary enters the door’s security code, and even the soft shuffle of her shoes on linoleum as she escorts you down the empty corridor. Desolate, cold, a vestige of past greatness—in short, it’s everything you might expect from a martian-life-detection lab.
The idea of martian life detection was challenged in 1996, when the young Brit Andrew Steele showed that meteorite ALH84001—though maybe also harboring martian life—was certainly contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. Today, he’s focused on making life-detecting instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, in a few of the microbiology labs of the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers. They’re probably the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets. But the Arctic Circle is way too cold for t-shirts.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only very cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius, even in August, when there’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (His crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano made up of the same kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the volcano harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips loaded with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes life-specific molecules in a rock sample, like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes, and glows when it finds them. Once all of the kinks are sorted out, Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory. The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a huge, nuclear-powered rover to Mars. In their two years of exploring, the six-wheeled, the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers have each traveled about three miles. The MSL is a tank by comparison; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a fairly horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features (like bedrock). Also, their controllers on earth can’t manipulate them in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that they don’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t yet released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineers spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains, “and meanwhile, the scientists had nothing to do.” Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientists decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them incredible detail of the surrounding geological features. “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
So in addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would help astronauts explore the planet. “We’re making computing technology—like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice during the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything, on the moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on helping astronauts do their job spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars. You think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
But will American astronauts ever land on Mars? On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step:
“…the human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves…”
His exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008, with plans to have the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (which NASA Administrator Michael Griffin pegged “Apollo on steroids”) will be a cone-shaped capsule that can carry three men to the International Space Station, four to the Moon, and six to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.” Yet despite the hype of this announcement, Steele says the new plan has actually “crippled science” at NASA, because it has diverted so many funds away from those astrobiology groups “whose labs aren’t absolutely aligned with Crew.”
One such group is led by Iain Neill Reid, an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (the birthplace of the Hubble telescope). Though he had been focused on studying dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, Reid switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in Astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) program, conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-power telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the idea of TPF is to look not just for any ol’ planet, but for planets like earth—i.e., habitable ones. Reid says the basic idea of TPF is to use two complementary “observatories” floating in space: a coronagraph, observing visible wavelengths, and an interferometer for infrared wavelengths. A planet like the earth, he says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. You use the coronagraph to block the light from the star and make the planet more visible. The interferometer, meanwhile, does the same kind of eclipsing, but in a slightly different way, called nulling out. “Essentially you’ve got two wave patterns from the light from the central star,” Reid explains, “and if you combine them in the right way they’ll cancel each other out.” Here’s the connection to Biology: If an astronomer finds a planet-like object circling a star, Reid says, “we could kind of tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and they could tell us what could live there.”
So in 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). “Our idea,” he says, “was to look at the galaxy as a whole, and ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said “well, this is really too ambitious, and we don’t think you can do it.” So for the next couple of years, they funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K, but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation was the basis of the proposal they submitted a couple of years later, in the next round of NAI applications.
In October of last year, Reid and Robb joined with more scientists from Princeton and the Carnegie Institution to refine their TPF-like project, and create a scaled-back version of what they had proposed the first time around. “We said we’ll just look at the solar neighborhood, and try and essentially put together a kind of stellar encyclopedia of all the stars within 25 parsecs of the sun,” Reid says, “We want to try and figure out, if you’re thinking about finding life, which ones would be the best to look at.”
At the same time, one member of the Carnegie group, Maggie Turnbull, took on a related project of particular interest to Reid: Earthshine. When light from the Sun hits the Moon and then reflects to earth, we seen Moonshine, and it’s usually very bright. Similarly, when light from the Sun hits the earth, is reflected onto the Moon, and then reflected back to the earth, we see Earthshine. Because some light gets absorbed at each reflecting surface, Earthshine is much dimmer than Moonshine, and we can only see Earthshine during certain Moon phases—like young crescents—when Moonshine is especially faint. If you observe the light of Earthshine, Reid says, you’re effectively seeing features of the earth. “Suppose you were an alien from another planet,” he further explains, “and you get this spectrum. The question then becomes, can you tell from the spectrum if there’s life on earth?” As Turnbull is finding out, Earthshine shows you certain atmospheric features in the earth, like the presence of oxygen, or the chlorophyll produced by plants. By observing the Earthshine spectrum at different points of the earth’s rotation—that is, by taking a telescope around the world and observing the Moon from different places—Turnbull wanted to map how the spectrum changes based on the predominant landscape. As Reid explains, “you can tell if most of light that hits the moon is coming from oceans or deserts,” Reid says. “And then, you need to take the next step: If I look at the light distribution from some other planet, how do I know if there’s life there?”
Finding life on other planets using Earthshine means comparing the earth’s light spectrum to that of planets that have yet to be discovered. “It’s planning way into the future,” Neil admits, “but certainly you want to be able to build the right kind of instrument to do this work.” When TPF is finished, for instance, Reid points out that there will be a giant telescope, four or five meters across, launched into orbit to take data. He says some fundamental questions—like whether it would be better to look in optical wavelengths or infrared—must obviously b e sorted out before a single data point is recorded. “If you take this thing and shove it up there into orbit,” he says, “you really don’t want to have to go up and monkey around with it afterwards.”
Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s terrestrial-planet-finding telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine spectra—it all began, and continued, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But on February 6, 2006, almost two years to the day after the announcement of his Vision for Space Exploration, President Bush proposed a new $2.77 trillion budget plan calling for increased spending on the military and domestic security and substantial cuts in domestic programs, including NASA. “Astrobiology seems to have been cut by 50 percent,” Neill says. “So it's pretty much what we expected, although a bigger cut than Andrew had been expecting. We'll just have to persevere as best we can for the moment and see whether the wind will change again.”
Despite the large NASA cuts, Steele’s lab isn’t likely to shut down soon. “We’ve already been funded by Astrobiology Instrument Department for developing instruments until 2009, .so we’ve got another three years,” Steele says. And if they don’t fund him after that, Reid says Steele’s work is important enough to find sources outside of the Astrobiology Institute. “But it doesn’t make it any better,” Reid laments. “It means that you’re going to have to go back and scramble to get other funding and meanwhile the people that you’ve assembled, they’re not just going to hang around there and wait in the optimistic hope, on the off chance that you’re going to get funded again. It’s wrenching, but it’s just the way it works.”
Assuming he finds a way to carry on his work, so what if Steele’s instruments—either by rover or man—do find life on Mars? Steele responds, “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But I’m actually more interested in if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
If life was found on Mars, would the earthlings in charge then put more funding into Astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
The idea of martian life detection was challenged in 1996, when the young Brit Andrew Steele showed that meteorite ALH84001—though maybe also harboring martian life—was certainly contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. Today, he’s focused on making life-detecting instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, in a few of the microbiology labs of the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers. They’re probably the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets. But the Arctic Circle is way too cold for t-shirts.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only very cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius, even in August, when there’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (His crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano made up of the same kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the volcano harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips loaded with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes life-specific molecules in a rock sample, like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes, and glows when it finds them. Once all of the kinks are sorted out, Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory. The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a huge, nuclear-powered rover to Mars. In their two years of exploring, the six-wheeled, the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers have each traveled about three miles. The MSL is a tank by comparison; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a fairly horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features (like bedrock). Also, their controllers on earth can’t manipulate them in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that they don’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t yet released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineers spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains, “and meanwhile, the scientists had nothing to do.” Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientists decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them incredible detail of the surrounding geological features. “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
So in addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would help astronauts explore the planet. “We’re making computing technology—like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice during the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything, on the moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on helping astronauts do their job spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars. You think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
But will American astronauts ever land on Mars? On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step:
“…the human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves…”
His exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008, with plans to have the first manned mission no later than 2014. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (which NASA Administrator Michael Griffin pegged “Apollo on steroids”) will be a cone-shaped capsule that can carry three men to the International Space Station, four to the Moon, and six to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.” Yet despite the hype of this announcement, Steele says the new plan has actually “crippled science” at NASA, because it has diverted so many funds away from those astrobiology groups “whose labs aren’t absolutely aligned with Crew.”
One such group is led by Iain Neill Reid, an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (the birthplace of the Hubble telescope). Though he had been focused on studying dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, Reid switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in Astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) program, conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-power telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the idea of TPF is to look not just for any ol’ planet, but for planets like earth—i.e., habitable ones. Reid says the basic idea of TPF is to use two complementary “observatories” floating in space: a coronagraph, observing visible wavelengths, and an interferometer for infrared wavelengths. A planet like the earth, he says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. You use the coronagraph to block the light from the star and make the planet more visible. The interferometer, meanwhile, does the same kind of eclipsing, but in a slightly different way, called nulling out. “Essentially you’ve got two wave patterns from the light from the central star,” Reid explains, “and if you combine them in the right way they’ll cancel each other out.” Here’s the connection to Biology: If an astronomer finds a planet-like object circling a star, Reid says, “we could kind of tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and they could tell us what could live there.”
So in 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). “Our idea,” he says, “was to look at the galaxy as a whole, and ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said “well, this is really too ambitious, and we don’t think you can do it.” So for the next couple of years, they funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K, but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation was the basis of the proposal they submitted a couple of years later, in the next round of NAI applications.
In October of last year, Reid and Robb joined with more scientists from Princeton and the Carnegie Institution to refine their TPF-like project, and create a scaled-back version of what they had proposed the first time around. “We said we’ll just look at the solar neighborhood, and try and essentially put together a kind of stellar encyclopedia of all the stars within 25 parsecs of the sun,” Reid says, “We want to try and figure out, if you’re thinking about finding life, which ones would be the best to look at.”
At the same time, one member of the Carnegie group, Maggie Turnbull, took on a related project of particular interest to Reid: Earthshine. When light from the Sun hits the Moon and then reflects to earth, we seen Moonshine, and it’s usually very bright. Similarly, when light from the Sun hits the earth, is reflected onto the Moon, and then reflected back to the earth, we see Earthshine. Because some light gets absorbed at each reflecting surface, Earthshine is much dimmer than Moonshine, and we can only see Earthshine during certain Moon phases—like young crescents—when Moonshine is especially faint. If you observe the light of Earthshine, Reid says, you’re effectively seeing features of the earth. “Suppose you were an alien from another planet,” he further explains, “and you get this spectrum. The question then becomes, can you tell from the spectrum if there’s life on earth?” As Turnbull is finding out, Earthshine shows you certain atmospheric features in the earth, like the presence of oxygen, or the chlorophyll produced by plants. By observing the Earthshine spectrum at different points of the earth’s rotation—that is, by taking a telescope around the world and observing the Moon from different places—Turnbull wanted to map how the spectrum changes based on the predominant landscape. As Reid explains, “you can tell if most of light that hits the moon is coming from oceans or deserts,” Reid says. “And then, you need to take the next step: If I look at the light distribution from some other planet, how do I know if there’s life there?”
Finding life on other planets using Earthshine means comparing the earth’s light spectrum to that of planets that have yet to be discovered. “It’s planning way into the future,” Neil admits, “but certainly you want to be able to build the right kind of instrument to do this work.” When TPF is finished, for instance, Reid points out that there will be a giant telescope, four or five meters across, launched into orbit to take data. He says some fundamental questions—like whether it would be better to look in optical wavelengths or infrared—must obviously b e sorted out before a single data point is recorded. “If you take this thing and shove it up there into orbit,” he says, “you really don’t want to have to go up and monkey around with it afterwards.”
Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s terrestrial-planet-finding telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine spectra—it all began, and continued, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But on February 6, 2006, almost two years to the day after the announcement of his Vision for Space Exploration, President Bush proposed a new $2.77 trillion budget plan calling for increased spending on the military and domestic security and substantial cuts in domestic programs, including NASA. “Astrobiology seems to have been cut by 50 percent,” Neill says. “So it's pretty much what we expected, although a bigger cut than Andrew had been expecting. We'll just have to persevere as best we can for the moment and see whether the wind will change again.”
Despite the large NASA cuts, Steele’s lab isn’t likely to shut down soon. “We’ve already been funded by Astrobiology Instrument Department for developing instruments until 2009, .so we’ve got another three years,” Steele says. And if they don’t fund him after that, Reid says Steele’s work is important enough to find sources outside of the Astrobiology Institute. “But it doesn’t make it any better,” Reid laments. “It means that you’re going to have to go back and scramble to get other funding and meanwhile the people that you’ve assembled, they’re not just going to hang around there and wait in the optimistic hope, on the off chance that you’re going to get funded again. It’s wrenching, but it’s just the way it works.”
Assuming he finds a way to carry on his work, so what if Steele’s instruments—either by rover or man—do find life on Mars? Steele responds, “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But I’m actually more interested in if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
If life was found on Mars, would the earthlings in charge then put more funding into Astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
2.07.2006
Archaeology Professor Finds 3,400-Year-Old Egyptian Treasure
(to appear in the April issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine)
On her recent trip to southern Egypt, Professor Betsy Bryan would sometimes look up to see a hot air balloon, filled with tourists, hovering above the clusters of tall yellow grasses and taller archaeology students. She spent some evenings watching birds on the nearby lake, perched on reeds waiting eagerly for dinner to surface from below. These occasional lulls undoubtedly gave the seasoned archaeologist a much-needed respite, after long days of digging on the ancient temple grounds.
On January 3rd, Bryan and her 17-member team of Hopkins graduate and undergraduate students began the sixth round of excavations behind this sacred lake, in the ancient Nile city of Luxor. For the better part of three weeks they worked in adjacent trenches, about 15-feet square, digging a bit more every day to slowly uncover the ruins of a temple to the goddess Mut. By January 21st, the trenches were about 12 inches deep, and exposed the tops of some of the temple’s interior walls. The crew had already found a bronze-handled vessel, and decorated blocks of limestone and sandstone. But while sifting through the rubble on the temple’s platform that chilly morning, they unexpectedly unearthed a treasure of far greater value: a 3,400-year-old life-size statue of a beautiful Egyptian queen.
The crew had actually seen the first part of the facedown figure—an inscription from 1000 BC that ran along its back pillar—the day before, but didn’t realize what it was. After cleaning it more thoroughly, though, they realized they had found something much grander, and older, than the inscription indicated. Before them was a full-size, finely carved statue. Two cobras, representing the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, were carved on her headdress, next to a vulture whose feathers surrounded her face. She also bore the telltale signs of Egyptian female royalty: her left hand, resting on her chest, held remnants a fly whisk; and more importantly, she donned a large cylindrical crown inscribed with the name of one of the period’s most powerful pharaohs, Amenhotep III.
Amenhotep III ruled Egypt for almost 40 years in the 14th century BC, a time of unprecedented prosperity and splendor. Because the statue has multiple inscriptions of his name, Bryan theorizes the beauty is none other than Tiy, the chief queen of Amenhotep III and the grandmother of Tutankhamun. “Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia,” Bryan says. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”
When news of the find spread to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Bryan reports a large crowd arrived to see it, and even lifted it up from the rubble in enthusiastic cheers. After a thorough cleaning, it was wrapped in plastic and carried in a processional ritual through the temple gates to a truck headed for the Luxor Museum. On the team’s daily-updated website (http://www.jhu.edu/neareast/egypttoday.html) Bryan wrote: “We later rode to the museum, and I reluctantly signed the release papers turning over the statue to the museum. We hope that she will stand on display very soon.”
On her recent trip to southern Egypt, Professor Betsy Bryan would sometimes look up to see a hot air balloon, filled with tourists, hovering above the clusters of tall yellow grasses and taller archaeology students. She spent some evenings watching birds on the nearby lake, perched on reeds waiting eagerly for dinner to surface from below. These occasional lulls undoubtedly gave the seasoned archaeologist a much-needed respite, after long days of digging on the ancient temple grounds.
On January 3rd, Bryan and her 17-member team of Hopkins graduate and undergraduate students began the sixth round of excavations behind this sacred lake, in the ancient Nile city of Luxor. For the better part of three weeks they worked in adjacent trenches, about 15-feet square, digging a bit more every day to slowly uncover the ruins of a temple to the goddess Mut. By January 21st, the trenches were about 12 inches deep, and exposed the tops of some of the temple’s interior walls. The crew had already found a bronze-handled vessel, and decorated blocks of limestone and sandstone. But while sifting through the rubble on the temple’s platform that chilly morning, they unexpectedly unearthed a treasure of far greater value: a 3,400-year-old life-size statue of a beautiful Egyptian queen.
The crew had actually seen the first part of the facedown figure—an inscription from 1000 BC that ran along its back pillar—the day before, but didn’t realize what it was. After cleaning it more thoroughly, though, they realized they had found something much grander, and older, than the inscription indicated. Before them was a full-size, finely carved statue. Two cobras, representing the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, were carved on her headdress, next to a vulture whose feathers surrounded her face. She also bore the telltale signs of Egyptian female royalty: her left hand, resting on her chest, held remnants a fly whisk; and more importantly, she donned a large cylindrical crown inscribed with the name of one of the period’s most powerful pharaohs, Amenhotep III.
Amenhotep III ruled Egypt for almost 40 years in the 14th century BC, a time of unprecedented prosperity and splendor. Because the statue has multiple inscriptions of his name, Bryan theorizes the beauty is none other than Tiy, the chief queen of Amenhotep III and the grandmother of Tutankhamun. “Tiy was so powerful that, as a widow, she was the recipient of foreign diplomatic letters sent to her from the king of Babylonia,” Bryan says. “Some indications, such as her own portraits in art, suggest that Tiy may have ruled briefly after her husband’s death, but this is uncertain.”
When news of the find spread to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Bryan reports a large crowd arrived to see it, and even lifted it up from the rubble in enthusiastic cheers. After a thorough cleaning, it was wrapped in plastic and carried in a processional ritual through the temple gates to a truck headed for the Luxor Museum. On the team’s daily-updated website (http://www.jhu.edu/neareast/egypttoday.html) Bryan wrote: “We later rode to the museum, and I reluctantly signed the release papers turning over the statue to the museum. We hope that she will stand on display very soon.”
1.31.2006
My Old Friend Freddy
(to appear in the April issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine)
When Fred Kahn looks back upon his early years, growing up in a Jewish household in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, certain scenes spring to his mind. He remembers neighborhood children riding on sleighs, and the blare of the trumpets coming from the nearby Biebrich castle. But no memory is more vivid than the eve of October 1, 1938, when he left the town of Wiesbaden and the home of his aunt and uncle—the only parents he had ever known.
Kahn spent his childhood hiding in Belgium, and moved to America after the War. He graduated from SAIS in 1963, with an M.A. in Advanced International Studies and a fiancée. After 30 years of civil service, Kahn says it was his childhood memories that motivated him to give back to society. In September, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich appointed him to the new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. But Kahn attributes all of his success to his dramatic escape, at age 5, from Nazi Germany.
In the middle of that fateful October night, Kahn’s Uncle Siegfried awakened him and told him to put on his best suit. The sleepy boy was taken out to the porch of the house he had lived in for four years, ever since his biological parents and older brother had fled to Belgium. The night before, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany gained the political momentum that would eventually lead to world war. When Kahn’s parents heard to news, they called Siegfried with one urgent message: Get the boy out of Germany. Kahn still remembers what was said on that porch, under the full moon: “My uncle told me I was about to go on a big trip.”
Siegfried took him to a Christian German, Maria, who would accompany him to the German-Belgian border. But first, Siegfried took Maria aside and gave her his most valued possession: a gold pocket watch. “He gave it to her on the condition that if he didn’t survive,” Kahn says, “she would make sure I would get it.” Maria took the boy by tram to the border—to no-man’s land. “They assumed that nobody would pay attention to me,” Kahn explains, “but when I arrived there they wouldn’t let me in because I had no papers—nothing.” While the officers made phone calls, he could see his family calling to him from the other side. “My father was yelling ‘C’est mon fils!’—That’s my son!” he recalls, “but of course I didn’t know who he was.” Eventually, the five-year-old was admitted as a political refugee.
Within six weeks, Siegfried and his wife, Rosa, had been deported to concentration camps, never to be seen again. Kahn and his parents, using the old identity papers of a Catholic family, survived the rest of the war in Belgium, storing their valuables in friends’ basements and moving every six months to avoid being listed on the registry of Jewish families. When the Germans left Belgium in 1944, the Kahns were finally able to go back to their home. “I ran into my old friends, kids on the street,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
Kahn moved to the United States at 19, and was quickly drafted to the U.S. Army. After his military service, he attended the University of Maryland, and in 1960 he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at SAIS. Kahn sat with fellow classmate Madeleine Albright in the popular “Wide Wide World” course, and took part in off-the-record lounge sessions with government VIPs like Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. After graduating in 1963, Kahn was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to launch Job Corps. He worked as a political economist for the Department of Labor until his retirement in1992.
His childhood experience and lifetime commitment to civil service made Kahn an ideal member of Maryland’s new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. Kahn says the mission of the group is to advise the state University System on the creation of workshops for how to promote tolerance and sensitivity when teaching Holocaust history. The 13-member group’s first meeting was in December, and they plan to submit a report to the governor in 2007.
Today, Fred Kahn still treasures his uncle’s gold watch. He says his story gives life lessons that apply to everybody, not just Jews. Tolerance education is crucial, he says, “so that you learn not to pick up a gun just because someone is different from you.” Kahn shares his story by moderating a Yahoo! internet group, called Remember the Holocaust, for about one hundred members from around the world. “It is my major hobby now,” he says, “and an education in itself.”
When Fred Kahn looks back upon his early years, growing up in a Jewish household in Germany at the dawn of the Second World War, certain scenes spring to his mind. He remembers neighborhood children riding on sleighs, and the blare of the trumpets coming from the nearby Biebrich castle. But no memory is more vivid than the eve of October 1, 1938, when he left the town of Wiesbaden and the home of his aunt and uncle—the only parents he had ever known.
Kahn spent his childhood hiding in Belgium, and moved to America after the War. He graduated from SAIS in 1963, with an M.A. in Advanced International Studies and a fiancée. After 30 years of civil service, Kahn says it was his childhood memories that motivated him to give back to society. In September, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich appointed him to the new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. But Kahn attributes all of his success to his dramatic escape, at age 5, from Nazi Germany.
In the middle of that fateful October night, Kahn’s Uncle Siegfried awakened him and told him to put on his best suit. The sleepy boy was taken out to the porch of the house he had lived in for four years, ever since his biological parents and older brother had fled to Belgium. The night before, when the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany gained the political momentum that would eventually lead to world war. When Kahn’s parents heard to news, they called Siegfried with one urgent message: Get the boy out of Germany. Kahn still remembers what was said on that porch, under the full moon: “My uncle told me I was about to go on a big trip.”
Siegfried took him to a Christian German, Maria, who would accompany him to the German-Belgian border. But first, Siegfried took Maria aside and gave her his most valued possession: a gold pocket watch. “He gave it to her on the condition that if he didn’t survive,” Kahn says, “she would make sure I would get it.” Maria took the boy by tram to the border—to no-man’s land. “They assumed that nobody would pay attention to me,” Kahn explains, “but when I arrived there they wouldn’t let me in because I had no papers—nothing.” While the officers made phone calls, he could see his family calling to him from the other side. “My father was yelling ‘C’est mon fils!’—That’s my son!” he recalls, “but of course I didn’t know who he was.” Eventually, the five-year-old was admitted as a political refugee.
Within six weeks, Siegfried and his wife, Rosa, had been deported to concentration camps, never to be seen again. Kahn and his parents, using the old identity papers of a Catholic family, survived the rest of the war in Belgium, storing their valuables in friends’ basements and moving every six months to avoid being listed on the registry of Jewish families. When the Germans left Belgium in 1944, the Kahns were finally able to go back to their home. “I ran into my old friends, kids on the street,” he recalls, “and they couldn’t believe I was still alive.”
Kahn moved to the United States at 19, and was quickly drafted to the U.S. Army. After his military service, he attended the University of Maryland, and in 1960 he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at SAIS. Kahn sat with fellow classmate Madeleine Albright in the popular “Wide Wide World” course, and took part in off-the-record lounge sessions with government VIPs like Director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. After graduating in 1963, Kahn was recruited by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to launch Job Corps. He worked as a political economist for the Department of Labor until his retirement in1992.
His childhood experience and lifetime commitment to civil service made Kahn an ideal member of Maryland’s new Task Force to Implement Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance Education. Kahn says the mission of the group is to advise the state University System on the creation of workshops for how to promote tolerance and sensitivity when teaching Holocaust history. The 13-member group’s first meeting was in December, and they plan to submit a report to the governor in 2007.
Today, Fred Kahn still treasures his uncle’s gold watch. He says his story gives life lessons that apply to everybody, not just Jews. Tolerance education is crucial, he says, “so that you learn not to pick up a gun just because someone is different from you.” Kahn shares his story by moderating a Yahoo! internet group, called Remember the Holocaust, for about one hundred members from around the world. “It is my major hobby now,” he says, “and an education in itself.”
1.26.2006
New Clip
Read ya some giant earthquake business:
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/earthquake2.asp
1.19.2006
May Spring Bring Hope
(soon to be published in the Hopkins School of Nursing Magazine….and no, writing about death and kids is NOT fun.)
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
From the January day six-year old Lucas Livingston was diagnosed with leukemia, to a time three months later when his body rejected his father’s transplanted bone marrow, his family and caregivers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center had but one resolve: treat to cure. But in the next two months of fighting, Lucas’ condition only got worse. His father Gordon Livingston, in his memoir Only Spring, recalls spending the last 11 days in intensive care, watching his son fade in and out of consciousness. “When your child dies,” says the Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, “it’s just an inconceivable loss. It’s not the order things are supposed to go in, and people have no preparation for this.”
Dr. Livingston never once lost hope in the five-month ordeal, but fears too many of his son’s doctors and nurses did. “If anything, the doctors were afraid to be hopeful,” he says. “But it wasn’t helpful to us to see them dragging in on rounds like funeral directors.”
That was in 1992. Since then, Hopkins has taken many strides to give better care to its dying patients, and especially its young ones. “Sometimes people think that when we start speaking about palliative care it means we’ve given up hope,” says Dr. Cynda Rushton, Johns Hopkins associate professor of nursing and Program Director of Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, Hopkins’ pediatric palliative care program. “But instead of focusing on the death, we want to help them to live as well as they can, for as long as possible.”
In the fall of 2004, Rushton and her colleagues brought together more than 40 healthcare professionals and parents who have lost their children at the Maryland Pediatric Care Summit at the SON. A detailed report of the Summit, which tackled problems noted in both Hopkins patient surveys and national data, was published this September. The participants discussed making palliative care more family-centered, improving systems of care and education, and changing state financing guidelines so families don’t have to choose between end-of-life treatments and skilled nursing. Also discussed was the construction of a new Children’s Center, with all private rooms, to give healing spaces for families to gather while a child is dying.
Some problems are specific to children. In order to receive hospice services, for instance, patients have to be expected to die within a six-month time period. But as Rushton explains, “children’s diseases are usually not that predictable.” This regulatory barrier prevents some families from receiving the benefits of hospice until close to the child’s death. Ideally, Rushton says these specialized services could be integrated with curative treatments from the time of diagnosis.
The most noticeable progress at Hopkins has been educating doctors and nurses in compassionate communication and decision making. “Everybody involved in the child’s treatment has a responsibility to have these skills,” Rushton says. To this end, on March 12-14 the Children’s Center will co-sponsor an intensive training program for professionals, focusing on how healthcare providers can work together with parents in these emotionally draining situations.
Dr. Livingston agrees this caregiver education is desperately needed, as the pessimism of even one individual can make the entire experience more painful. “We had one nurse in the PICU who actually told us: ‘if I thought of them as children I couldn’t work here,’” he says, “but then we had other nurses who wept with us.”
“Those who work everyday with dying kids just need more help in the way of training,” he says, “to know what things work with parents and what don’t.” Indeed, with the continued efforts at Hopkins to improve the quality of palliative care, dying children and their families may soon feel the hope of spring.
1.11.2006
When night is almost done
When night is almost done,
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
And sunrise grows so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It’s time to smooth the hair
And get the dimples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
-Emily Dickinson
12.22.2005
Some Old Poems....so you MFA poets can laugh laugh
Big Smiles on Cheshire Cats
That grin taunts Alice
flaunts logic (philosophical)
haunts my little girl dreams.
Which way ought I to go from here?
Steady pace it’s 7:16
Stairs winding first
through the kitchen
second doorknob, twist
stairs winding second, land with a thump
Twist, step-step-step, out. out.
of options.
Firemen grazing on Menthols while
Slothful see-men lie.
It’s curious—a
grin without a cat.
Like a dream without a sleep.
Big Smiles in a Central Park
Wind flaps saffron flaps two focused faces beam
Her face is round, but round back in ’03 they called
her pretty gray eyes match a peacoat proper.
Rosy cheeks betray bravado
Bundled up in nervous-wind-flapping saffron
Eyes hopeful,
Smiles fixed-posed-set-forever celluloid
Call back to my moment of wonderful awkward
Turned warm against the wind—
foreground, left—
heart skip-skipping when
mittened fingers brushed his cheek.
She was warm but
knows the cold is sweeping through the saffron
Chasing the Cold White
There—a cold white within her. A doctor who travels
by airplane and they talk about
New York City models,
she laughs.
Beauty in boniness and pallor.
There is a sickness inside, consumes halfway; makes
blood redder
skin whiter.
Suffering does not localize.
Wind, low rocks, icy water
breed familiarity and bacterium.
He worries about her children.
Later she will die and later he will too,
maybe he will cry. He will take off and
land and take off and land, following
the cold white as it grows.
Phillip Copper
Protruding plastic tubes
exit: left: elbow crook
over the river and through the woods to the blinking white ATM machine
Digital displays
A minute passes, as does 465 milliliters
“my body can’t handle 500”
Dirty blood—out. Clean blood—in.
Beep beep. be-eee beeeeeeep.
She’s dozing—the loud talker,
under faded afghan
below Bob Barker.
That grin taunts Alice
flaunts logic (philosophical)
haunts my little girl dreams.
Which way ought I to go from here?
Steady pace it’s 7:16
Stairs winding first
through the kitchen
second doorknob, twist
stairs winding second, land with a thump
Twist, step-step-step, out. out.
of options.
Firemen grazing on Menthols while
Slothful see-men lie.
It’s curious—a
grin without a cat.
Like a dream without a sleep.
Big Smiles in a Central Park
Wind flaps saffron flaps two focused faces beam
Her face is round, but round back in ’03 they called
her pretty gray eyes match a peacoat proper.
Rosy cheeks betray bravado
Bundled up in nervous-wind-flapping saffron
Eyes hopeful,
Smiles fixed-posed-set-forever celluloid
Call back to my moment of wonderful awkward
Turned warm against the wind—
foreground, left—
heart skip-skipping when
mittened fingers brushed his cheek.
She was warm but
knows the cold is sweeping through the saffron
Chasing the Cold White
There—a cold white within her. A doctor who travels
by airplane and they talk about
New York City models,
she laughs.
Beauty in boniness and pallor.
There is a sickness inside, consumes halfway; makes
blood redder
skin whiter.
Suffering does not localize.
Wind, low rocks, icy water
breed familiarity and bacterium.
He worries about her children.
Later she will die and later he will too,
maybe he will cry. He will take off and
land and take off and land, following
the cold white as it grows.
Phillip Copper
Protruding plastic tubes
exit: left: elbow crook
over the river and through the woods to the blinking white ATM machine
Digital displays
A minute passes, as does 465 milliliters
“my body can’t handle 500”
Dirty blood—out. Clean blood—in.
Beep beep. be-eee beeeeeeep.
She’s dozing—the loud talker,
under faded afghan
below Bob Barker.
12.19.2005
12.14.2005
12.12.2005
More Fun with Google
Another fun Google game, courtesy of Ryan James Wilson. To play, google your name with “is” and write down what comes up. Then google your name with “believes” and write down what comes up. Then combine them. Hehehheheehe soooo fun.
Ginny is not yet left to languish, therefore she believes in waiting for sex ‘till after marriage.
Ginny is a painted last strung doll, therefore she believes in old-fashioned service.
Ginny is hiding in front of the car, therefore she believes in giving back to her community at every level.
Ginny is very powerful magically, therefore she believes that looking good on the dance floor requires not so much a knowledge of memorized moves but instead a knowledge of movement.
Ginny is a dynamic workshop leader, therefore she believes in the “bloom where your planted” theory.
Ginny is not yet left to languish, therefore she believes in waiting for sex ‘till after marriage.
Ginny is a painted last strung doll, therefore she believes in old-fashioned service.
Ginny is hiding in front of the car, therefore she believes in giving back to her community at every level.
Ginny is very powerful magically, therefore she believes that looking good on the dance floor requires not so much a knowledge of memorized moves but instead a knowledge of movement.
Ginny is a dynamic workshop leader, therefore she believes in the “bloom where your planted” theory.
Einstein vs. The Nobel Committee
When Albert Einstein listed the most important honors of his life, he did not include the one with the highest profile and pay: the Nobel Prize. But perhaps this omission isn’t so surprising. The Nobel nod—17 years after Einstein published his special theory of relativity—came long after recognition by the rest of the world. Even more bizarre, the gold medallion was given to Einstein not for his relativity revolution, but for the relatively obscure discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Now, in this 100-year anniversary of Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” or miraculous year, one historian thinks he knows why. After years of sifting through letters and diaries of the Scandinavian archives, Robert Marc Friedman of the University of Oslo says it was an intentional snub, fueled by the political atmosphere of post-war Europe.
In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, 26-year-old Albert Einstein published five seminal papers on the nature of space, light, and motion. Until that point, most physicists viewed the cosmos through Isaac-Newton-colored glasses: the planets and the stars obeyed the same rules as apples falling from a tree. Space was inflexible and could be described with Euclidean geometry; time ticked by at the same steady rate everywhere in the universe. But one of Einstein’s 1905 papers, the special theory of relativity, he did away with the notion of absolute space and time—effectively turning the standard Newtonian model on its deterministic head.
In the next decade, Einstein built upon these ideas to include the concept of gravity. In 1915, his general theory of relativity proposed that gravity was not some mysterious force of attraction between bodies, but rather the result of the space distortions caused by massive bodies like the Sun and the planets. Moreover, it proposed that this curving of space affects not only particles, people, and planets—but light, too. Today, general relativity is celebrated as Einstein’s most impressive work. But Friedman says that in Germany after the First World War, Einstein was despised as a pacifist Jew who renounced his German citizenship, went to meetings of radical groups, and publicly supported socialism. His theories were dismissed as “world bluffing Jewish physics” by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice “true” German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory.
Luckily for Einstein, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington believed there was a way to test the general theory. If space was curved, as Einstein proposed, then light traveling through it should too follow a curved, rather than straight, path. Moreover, its path would be curved most around a very strong gravitational force like that of the Sun. This bending of light could be observed, it was thought, if photographs of stars that appeared very close to the Sun were compared to photographs of the same stars when they were not near the Sun. The only problem was that from an earthly vantage point, the Sun’s brightness blinded that of nearby stars. But on May 29, 1919, six minutes of a total solar eclipse ironically provided enough obscurity for Eddington to measure the positions of the stars that appeared next to the eclipsed Sun. And sure enough, they followed the predictions of Einstein’s general theory.
Almost overnight, Einstein became a household name throughout the world. Nominations for Einstein poured into the laps of the members of the Nobel Committee as they were reviewing candidates for the 1920 prize. But the Committee’s objections to relativity went beyond its theoretical nature. According to Friedman, the Committee did not want a “political and intellectual radical, who—it was said—did not conduct experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics.” So the 1920 prize was given to the Swiss Charles-Edouard Guillaume for his ho-hum discovery of an inert nickel-steel alloy. When the announcement was made, Friedman says the previously-unknown Guillaume “was as surprised as the rest of the world.”
By the next year, what Friedman calls “Einstein-mania” was in full bloom. As his quirky personality (and untamed tresses) gained more popularity with the general public, his theory gained more credibility in the scientific community. In 1921, swarms of both theoreticians and experimentalists again nominated Einstein for his work on relativity. Reporters kept asking him, to his great annoyance: Would this finally be the year that he received a Nobel Prize?
But 1921 was not the year, thanks to one stubborn senior member of the Prize Committee: Allvar Gullstrand. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Gullstrand’s knowledge of theoretical physics left much to be desired; nevertheless his arrogance, according to Friedman, led him to challenge Einstein’s theories. (As Friedman jokes, “In a small, isolated but locally prestigious academic environment, arrogance, like mold in a damp cellar, tends to thrive.”) In a 50-odd-page report, Gullstrand collected every published article—no matter how obscure—that even slightly doubted relativity, while omitting the far greater number that saluted it. One private remark by Gullstrand, which Friedman found buried in a diary, sums up his sour attitude: “Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the whole world demands it.” Gullstrand’s arguments, however biased, convinced the rest of the committee. In 1921, no one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Two prizes were thus available in 1922. By this time, Einstein’s popularity was so great that many members of the committee worried about their international reputation if they didn’t recognize him in some way. Like the previous two years, he received many nominations for relativity. But this year there was one nomination—from a certain Carl Wilhelm Oseen—not for relativity, but for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
The photoelectric effect was, along with the special theory of relativity, one of the five papers Einstein published in 1905. Before this, light was known to come in waves. But Einstein was the first to propose that light actually had a dual nature: it acted as both a wave and a particle. At first, this theory faced just as much controversy as special relativity. But there was a big difference: laboratory experiments conducted in 1916 showed the validity of the photoelectric effect. Friedman was the first historian to emphasize that Oseen wanted the Committee to recognize the photoelectric effect not as a theory, but as a fundamental law of nature. Why? Not because he cared about recognizing Einstein, but because he had another theoretical physicist in mind for that second available prize: Niels Bohr.
Niels Bohr had proposed a new quantum theory of the atom that Oseen felt was “the most beautiful of all the beautiful” in recent theoretical physics. In his report to the Committee, Oseen exaggerated the close bond between Einstein’s proven law of nature and Bohr’s new atom. “In one brilliant stroke,” Friedman explains, “he saw how to meet the objections against both Einstein and Bohr.”
After reviewing Friedman’s research, Bruce Hunt, an Einstein historian at the University of Texas at Austin, was especially intrigued by the way Oseen changed the emphasis from the theory of the photoelectric effect to the law of the photoelectric effect. “What Friedman brings out particularly well,” Hunt says, “is how deftly Oseen used the other Swedish physicists' worship of empirical results, and their denigration of ‘mere theory,’ to win them over.”
The Committee was indeed won over. On November 10, 1922, the Nobel Prize for Physics was given to Niels Bohr, and the delayed 1921 Prize awarded to Albert Einstein, “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein, en route to Japan, wasn’t able to attend the official ceremony to accept his award. But according to Friedman, it wasn’t the medal that he cared about, anyway—it was the money. As the German mark decreased in value after the war, Einstein needed a hard foreign currency for alimony payments to his ex-wife. Moreover, the terms of his 1919 divorce proceedings dictated that she was already entitled to all the money “from an eventual Nobel Prize.” Hunt says calling attention to these financial arrangements “brings out the fact that Einstein was a much more worldly and savvy man than his later public image would suggest.”
Einstein gave his official Nobel lecture one year later, to a large and attentive audience that included the Swedish King, Gustav Adolf V. Einstein was told to speak about the photoelectric effect. But the speech—which began: “If we consider that part of the theory of relativity which may nowadays be regarded as bona fide scientific knowledge…”—focused instead on the subject for which he clearly thought he should have won the prize.
Robert Marc Friedman’s story leaves another attentive audience with a new history lesson: “Einstein understood that the golden Nobel medallion is etched with human frailties…and like Einstein, perhaps we should also avoid the temptation of dancing around this modern golden calf.” Hunt says Friedman’s tale gave an oft-overlooked perspective on the way science was practiced and praised in the early 20th century. “The decisions of the Nobel committees are often treated by the press and public as the voice of god,” Hunt says, but Friedman’s research brought to light “how political the deliberations of the Nobel committees sometimes were—and presumably still are.”
In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, 26-year-old Albert Einstein published five seminal papers on the nature of space, light, and motion. Until that point, most physicists viewed the cosmos through Isaac-Newton-colored glasses: the planets and the stars obeyed the same rules as apples falling from a tree. Space was inflexible and could be described with Euclidean geometry; time ticked by at the same steady rate everywhere in the universe. But one of Einstein’s 1905 papers, the special theory of relativity, he did away with the notion of absolute space and time—effectively turning the standard Newtonian model on its deterministic head.
In the next decade, Einstein built upon these ideas to include the concept of gravity. In 1915, his general theory of relativity proposed that gravity was not some mysterious force of attraction between bodies, but rather the result of the space distortions caused by massive bodies like the Sun and the planets. Moreover, it proposed that this curving of space affects not only particles, people, and planets—but light, too. Today, general relativity is celebrated as Einstein’s most impressive work. But Friedman says that in Germany after the First World War, Einstein was despised as a pacifist Jew who renounced his German citizenship, went to meetings of radical groups, and publicly supported socialism. His theories were dismissed as “world bluffing Jewish physics” by some prominent German physicists, who claimed to practice “true” German science based on observations of the natural world and hypotheses that could be tested in a laboratory.
Luckily for Einstein, British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington believed there was a way to test the general theory. If space was curved, as Einstein proposed, then light traveling through it should too follow a curved, rather than straight, path. Moreover, its path would be curved most around a very strong gravitational force like that of the Sun. This bending of light could be observed, it was thought, if photographs of stars that appeared very close to the Sun were compared to photographs of the same stars when they were not near the Sun. The only problem was that from an earthly vantage point, the Sun’s brightness blinded that of nearby stars. But on May 29, 1919, six minutes of a total solar eclipse ironically provided enough obscurity for Eddington to measure the positions of the stars that appeared next to the eclipsed Sun. And sure enough, they followed the predictions of Einstein’s general theory.
Almost overnight, Einstein became a household name throughout the world. Nominations for Einstein poured into the laps of the members of the Nobel Committee as they were reviewing candidates for the 1920 prize. But the Committee’s objections to relativity went beyond its theoretical nature. According to Friedman, the Committee did not want a “political and intellectual radical, who—it was said—did not conduct experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics.” So the 1920 prize was given to the Swiss Charles-Edouard Guillaume for his ho-hum discovery of an inert nickel-steel alloy. When the announcement was made, Friedman says the previously-unknown Guillaume “was as surprised as the rest of the world.”
By the next year, what Friedman calls “Einstein-mania” was in full bloom. As his quirky personality (and untamed tresses) gained more popularity with the general public, his theory gained more credibility in the scientific community. In 1921, swarms of both theoreticians and experimentalists again nominated Einstein for his work on relativity. Reporters kept asking him, to his great annoyance: Would this finally be the year that he received a Nobel Prize?
But 1921 was not the year, thanks to one stubborn senior member of the Prize Committee: Allvar Gullstrand. Trained as an ophthalmologist, Gullstrand’s knowledge of theoretical physics left much to be desired; nevertheless his arrogance, according to Friedman, led him to challenge Einstein’s theories. (As Friedman jokes, “In a small, isolated but locally prestigious academic environment, arrogance, like mold in a damp cellar, tends to thrive.”) In a 50-odd-page report, Gullstrand collected every published article—no matter how obscure—that even slightly doubted relativity, while omitting the far greater number that saluted it. One private remark by Gullstrand, which Friedman found buried in a diary, sums up his sour attitude: “Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize, even if the whole world demands it.” Gullstrand’s arguments, however biased, convinced the rest of the committee. In 1921, no one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Two prizes were thus available in 1922. By this time, Einstein’s popularity was so great that many members of the committee worried about their international reputation if they didn’t recognize him in some way. Like the previous two years, he received many nominations for relativity. But this year there was one nomination—from a certain Carl Wilhelm Oseen—not for relativity, but for the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
The photoelectric effect was, along with the special theory of relativity, one of the five papers Einstein published in 1905. Before this, light was known to come in waves. But Einstein was the first to propose that light actually had a dual nature: it acted as both a wave and a particle. At first, this theory faced just as much controversy as special relativity. But there was a big difference: laboratory experiments conducted in 1916 showed the validity of the photoelectric effect. Friedman was the first historian to emphasize that Oseen wanted the Committee to recognize the photoelectric effect not as a theory, but as a fundamental law of nature. Why? Not because he cared about recognizing Einstein, but because he had another theoretical physicist in mind for that second available prize: Niels Bohr.
Niels Bohr had proposed a new quantum theory of the atom that Oseen felt was “the most beautiful of all the beautiful” in recent theoretical physics. In his report to the Committee, Oseen exaggerated the close bond between Einstein’s proven law of nature and Bohr’s new atom. “In one brilliant stroke,” Friedman explains, “he saw how to meet the objections against both Einstein and Bohr.”
After reviewing Friedman’s research, Bruce Hunt, an Einstein historian at the University of Texas at Austin, was especially intrigued by the way Oseen changed the emphasis from the theory of the photoelectric effect to the law of the photoelectric effect. “What Friedman brings out particularly well,” Hunt says, “is how deftly Oseen used the other Swedish physicists' worship of empirical results, and their denigration of ‘mere theory,’ to win them over.”
The Committee was indeed won over. On November 10, 1922, the Nobel Prize for Physics was given to Niels Bohr, and the delayed 1921 Prize awarded to Albert Einstein, “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein, en route to Japan, wasn’t able to attend the official ceremony to accept his award. But according to Friedman, it wasn’t the medal that he cared about, anyway—it was the money. As the German mark decreased in value after the war, Einstein needed a hard foreign currency for alimony payments to his ex-wife. Moreover, the terms of his 1919 divorce proceedings dictated that she was already entitled to all the money “from an eventual Nobel Prize.” Hunt says calling attention to these financial arrangements “brings out the fact that Einstein was a much more worldly and savvy man than his later public image would suggest.”
Einstein gave his official Nobel lecture one year later, to a large and attentive audience that included the Swedish King, Gustav Adolf V. Einstein was told to speak about the photoelectric effect. But the speech—which began: “If we consider that part of the theory of relativity which may nowadays be regarded as bona fide scientific knowledge…”—focused instead on the subject for which he clearly thought he should have won the prize.
Robert Marc Friedman’s story leaves another attentive audience with a new history lesson: “Einstein understood that the golden Nobel medallion is etched with human frailties…and like Einstein, perhaps we should also avoid the temptation of dancing around this modern golden calf.” Hunt says Friedman’s tale gave an oft-overlooked perspective on the way science was practiced and praised in the early 20th century. “The decisions of the Nobel committees are often treated by the press and public as the voice of god,” Hunt says, but Friedman’s research brought to light “how political the deliberations of the Nobel committees sometimes were—and presumably still are.”
12.09.2005
Google Game!
To play this game (which I stole from Ryan James Wilson!), just Google your name with the word "need." Then you'll find out what you've always expected is true: You do need that!
Ginny Needs:
1. a wig
2. three cute cover-ups to keep her warm!
3. some form of defense against her growing attraction to her new DADA teacher
4. the money to get the message out
5. to be pushed into the spotlight
6. a special home or office environment where she does not have access to soft material furniture such as a bed or couch
7. robes and a wand and everything
8. a day in the sun
9. another dimension
and finally….
10. to be an only pet
Ginny Needs:
1. a wig
2. three cute cover-ups to keep her warm!
3. some form of defense against her growing attraction to her new DADA teacher
4. the money to get the message out
5. to be pushed into the spotlight
6. a special home or office environment where she does not have access to soft material furniture such as a bed or couch
7. robes and a wand and everything
8. a day in the sun
9. another dimension
and finally….
10. to be an only pet
11.21.2005
Clip Clip
So I finally got published…..even if there is absolutely no style in the piece. It’s on Science magazine’s online news site. Check it out at:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1121/1
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1121/1
11.18.2005
Finding New Bugs in an Old Broth
Charles Dickens gave it to Tiny Tim; Hippocrates described it as the most widespread disease of his day; paleontologists even found traces of it in 5,000-year-old Egyptian mummies. Tuberculosis is an old disease. And the diagnostic tests for TB, in contrast to the “cutting-edge” progression of most medical technologies, are similarly ancient. The majority of the world’s hospitals use a “sputum smear test” that has remained unchanged since its invention in 1881: your suspect phlegm is placed in a glorified Petri dish of nutrient broth, where the lung-eating bacteria can grow, though very slowly. After many weeks, when they’ve grown into visible clumps, a microscope can identify the killer bug. But to how many will you spread it while waiting for test results?
Tuberculosis diagnosis, “is as old-fashioned as it gets,” says Dr. Richard Chaisson, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. Faster, cheaper and more accurate diagnostic tools are desperately needed, Chaisson says, to curb the growing epidemic of TB—a curable disease that still kills 5,000 people every day. This summer, three biotech companies announced partnerships with FIND, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, to develop better TB-testing products. But a large-scale study is about to be released suggesting the most effective diagnostic method is not a product at all, or at least not a patentable one. It’s just a new way of looking at an old broth.
The global TB crisis made U.S. headlines on October 17, when pharmaceutical kingfish Bayer announced it will allow one of its best-selling antibiotics to be tested against tuberculosis. Chaisson, who was instrumental in the deal, says the drug will reduce treatment time from six months to four. Still, he has reservations about its effect on the epidemic’s spread through the population. “The individual cure rate is awfully good,” he says, “but the number of cases is still going through the roof.” This is partly because of the increase in HIV infections; those with HIV have compromised immune systems and are thus more vulnerable to TB. But it also stems from the bug’s ability to adapt: strains have evolved that are resistant to every major antibiotic. Because TB is often spread more quickly than it is identified, Chaisson says the answer lies not in faster drugs, but faster diagnostics.
Today’s sputum smear test takes far too long. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where both TB and HIV run rampant, patients can expect to wait 12-16 weeks for test results, according to FIND. And the sputum smear has other problems, too. Making the broth requires electricity—unavailable in most clinics of the third world—for mixing and refrigeration. Moreover, it can’t reliably detect the presence of multi-strain TB.
Since 2003, FIND’s mission has been to tackle these problems. This summer, three international biotech companies announced financial partnerships with FIND to develop new tests that use color-changing strips or simple test-tube reactions to detect proteins that are found in many strains of TB, getting results in hours or even minutes. One promising product is called “TK medium.” When the medium, a red substance, is mixed in a test tube with active TB bacteria, the color turns green. “Nobody knows yet why it works,” Chaisson says. “They’re about a buck each, and you could sell tens of millions of them a year.”
But no fancy new products are needed for what seems to be the best test of all. In the early 1990s, a lab tech in Peru noticed that TB bugs can be detected—using a common broth medium and a regular light microscope—weeks before the bugs grow into visible clumps. Chaisson finds it remarkable that no one had thought of the method—now called MODS—before. “The only drawback,” he says, “is that it’s not patentable.” So for now, FIND won’t fund MODS.
Compared to most bacteria, the growth of TB bugs is interminably slow. And according to Chaisson, slow too is the technological progression of its treatment and diagnosis. He describes, with obvious disdain, the conventional wisdom of most TB doctors: “My god, if it was good enough for my grandfather, then it’s good enough for me.” So perhaps MODS—using old tools and an old broth—is exactly what’s needed to unite the old and new medical philosophies, to keep the bug from staining future pages of human history.
Tuberculosis diagnosis, “is as old-fashioned as it gets,” says Dr. Richard Chaisson, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research. Faster, cheaper and more accurate diagnostic tools are desperately needed, Chaisson says, to curb the growing epidemic of TB—a curable disease that still kills 5,000 people every day. This summer, three biotech companies announced partnerships with FIND, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, to develop better TB-testing products. But a large-scale study is about to be released suggesting the most effective diagnostic method is not a product at all, or at least not a patentable one. It’s just a new way of looking at an old broth.
The global TB crisis made U.S. headlines on October 17, when pharmaceutical kingfish Bayer announced it will allow one of its best-selling antibiotics to be tested against tuberculosis. Chaisson, who was instrumental in the deal, says the drug will reduce treatment time from six months to four. Still, he has reservations about its effect on the epidemic’s spread through the population. “The individual cure rate is awfully good,” he says, “but the number of cases is still going through the roof.” This is partly because of the increase in HIV infections; those with HIV have compromised immune systems and are thus more vulnerable to TB. But it also stems from the bug’s ability to adapt: strains have evolved that are resistant to every major antibiotic. Because TB is often spread more quickly than it is identified, Chaisson says the answer lies not in faster drugs, but faster diagnostics.
Today’s sputum smear test takes far too long. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where both TB and HIV run rampant, patients can expect to wait 12-16 weeks for test results, according to FIND. And the sputum smear has other problems, too. Making the broth requires electricity—unavailable in most clinics of the third world—for mixing and refrigeration. Moreover, it can’t reliably detect the presence of multi-strain TB.
Since 2003, FIND’s mission has been to tackle these problems. This summer, three international biotech companies announced financial partnerships with FIND to develop new tests that use color-changing strips or simple test-tube reactions to detect proteins that are found in many strains of TB, getting results in hours or even minutes. One promising product is called “TK medium.” When the medium, a red substance, is mixed in a test tube with active TB bacteria, the color turns green. “Nobody knows yet why it works,” Chaisson says. “They’re about a buck each, and you could sell tens of millions of them a year.”
But no fancy new products are needed for what seems to be the best test of all. In the early 1990s, a lab tech in Peru noticed that TB bugs can be detected—using a common broth medium and a regular light microscope—weeks before the bugs grow into visible clumps. Chaisson finds it remarkable that no one had thought of the method—now called MODS—before. “The only drawback,” he says, “is that it’s not patentable.” So for now, FIND won’t fund MODS.
Compared to most bacteria, the growth of TB bugs is interminably slow. And according to Chaisson, slow too is the technological progression of its treatment and diagnosis. He describes, with obvious disdain, the conventional wisdom of most TB doctors: “My god, if it was good enough for my grandfather, then it’s good enough for me.” So perhaps MODS—using old tools and an old broth—is exactly what’s needed to unite the old and new medical philosophies, to keep the bug from staining future pages of human history.
11.12.2005
Can Science Save The Holy Wisdom? (And Does It Need Saving?)
So why has it been ages since Ginny has updated her blog? Well, a certain feature story (and its associated interviews and background research) about earthquakes, architecture, and the Byzantine Empire has taken most of my writing energies. Here’s the first paragraph…..perhaps more of the 4,000-word treatise will come later. Lots of love to all my bloggers! Mwa
Every year, thousands flock to Istanbul to see the church that scholars through the ages have called the most magnificent structure on earth: the Hagia Sophia. Greek for “Church of the Holy Wisdom,” in 537 AD the 180-feet-tall domed basilica became the most visible symbol of Justinian’s new Byzantine Empire. For 1,500 years, in a land notorious for political instability, the Hagia Sophia has stood tall and resilient, transforming even, when the Muslim Ottomans invaded in 1299, from a basilica to a mosque. And sitting on top of a major fault line—one that has caused no fewer than three dozen major earthquakes to shake Sophia—the monument has also survived serious geophysical instability. International teams of civil engineers and earthquake scientists are using computer models of today’s church to figure out how it has already withstood such seismic stress. But after the most recent devastating quake in 1999, head researcher Ahmet Çakmak told the New York Times: "The fault that runs closer to Istanbul is still very dangerous…The newspapers are saying we survived the big earthquake, but that's silly. It's a big mistake. What we should do is learn from this one, expect a bigger one and be prepared." If Istanbul is to be hit with a quake of unprecedented size, the big question is whether the Holy Wisdom needs some 21st century technology to—literally—back it up.
Every year, thousands flock to Istanbul to see the church that scholars through the ages have called the most magnificent structure on earth: the Hagia Sophia. Greek for “Church of the Holy Wisdom,” in 537 AD the 180-feet-tall domed basilica became the most visible symbol of Justinian’s new Byzantine Empire. For 1,500 years, in a land notorious for political instability, the Hagia Sophia has stood tall and resilient, transforming even, when the Muslim Ottomans invaded in 1299, from a basilica to a mosque. And sitting on top of a major fault line—one that has caused no fewer than three dozen major earthquakes to shake Sophia—the monument has also survived serious geophysical instability. International teams of civil engineers and earthquake scientists are using computer models of today’s church to figure out how it has already withstood such seismic stress. But after the most recent devastating quake in 1999, head researcher Ahmet Çakmak told the New York Times: "The fault that runs closer to Istanbul is still very dangerous…The newspapers are saying we survived the big earthquake, but that's silly. It's a big mistake. What we should do is learn from this one, expect a bigger one and be prepared." If Istanbul is to be hit with a quake of unprecedented size, the big question is whether the Holy Wisdom needs some 21st century technology to—literally—back it up.
11.09.2005
Hitting the "Maleness" JAKpot
We all learned it in grade school: Boys have a Y chromosome, and girls don’t. A genetic switch turns on maleness or femaleness. But actually, it’s not so simple. A developing embryo’s search for its sexual destiny follows a long and windy road. “I don’t like the term sex determination,” said Mark Van Doren, an Assistant Biology Professor at Johns Hopkins University, because “it implies one moment. But it’s actually a very long process.”
The process starts with the germ cells that have the unique ability to create a new organism; male germ cells go on to produce sperm, while female germ cells produce eggs. But how is the sex of the germ cell determined? In Drosophila fruit fly experiments published in the July 28 issue of Nature, Van Doren and his colleagues found that when activated by neighboring tissue, a certain chemical pathway—JAK/STAT—develops male, but not female, germ cells.
By the time a young germ cell starts down the road to sexual identity, its gonad neighbors—called somatic cells—are already different in males and females (male somatic cells express a specific gene called doublesex). And previous studies had shown that these differentiated neighbors somehow influence the germ cell’s sexual destination. As Van Doren explained, “Germ cells can’t do it on their own...they need a specialized soma” to tell them how to develop.
To find out how exactly the germ cells are influenced by their somatic neighbors, Van Doren’s team first looked at fruit fly gonads with a male germ cell surrounded by male somatic cells. In these situations, the JAK/STAT chemical pathway was always activated—that is, a specific molecule set off a chain of reactions that ended in the expression of a protein called “STAT” in the germ cell. They knew STAT was expressed because they had added molecules with fluorescent tags to find and bind to STAT proteins, in effect “lighting them up” for anybody peeking through the microscope. For the next set of experiments, this fluorescent presence would indicate germ cell maleness.
Their next step was to see what would happen to the sex of the germ cell if they broke one of the links on the reaction chain. When they inhibited JAK/STAT in gonads with male germ cells surrounded by male somatic cells, the germ cells no longer expressed the STAT protein and thus, as Van Doren said, “Male germ cell identity was lost.”
Their most remarkable experimental manipulations, however, observed the function of JAK/STAT in female germ cells. They placed female germ cells in surrounding tissue that expressed the doublesex gene (and was therefore male). These male somatic neighbors triggered the JAK/STAT pathway, telling the female germ cells to express the STAT protein. “We took a female and made it look male,” Van Doren said, “And that’s really the wow factor.”
Van Doren and his team have now shown that activation of JAK/STAT leads to the development male germ cells and thus, a walk down the road to Spermville. But, he stressed, this doesn’t mean females take the path of least resistance. Soon the biologists will look for somatic signals that point to Eggdom instead. Whether flies or humans, though, these signals are just early signposts along the long and torturous road to true sexual identity.
The process starts with the germ cells that have the unique ability to create a new organism; male germ cells go on to produce sperm, while female germ cells produce eggs. But how is the sex of the germ cell determined? In Drosophila fruit fly experiments published in the July 28 issue of Nature, Van Doren and his colleagues found that when activated by neighboring tissue, a certain chemical pathway—JAK/STAT—develops male, but not female, germ cells.
By the time a young germ cell starts down the road to sexual identity, its gonad neighbors—called somatic cells—are already different in males and females (male somatic cells express a specific gene called doublesex). And previous studies had shown that these differentiated neighbors somehow influence the germ cell’s sexual destination. As Van Doren explained, “Germ cells can’t do it on their own...they need a specialized soma” to tell them how to develop.
To find out how exactly the germ cells are influenced by their somatic neighbors, Van Doren’s team first looked at fruit fly gonads with a male germ cell surrounded by male somatic cells. In these situations, the JAK/STAT chemical pathway was always activated—that is, a specific molecule set off a chain of reactions that ended in the expression of a protein called “STAT” in the germ cell. They knew STAT was expressed because they had added molecules with fluorescent tags to find and bind to STAT proteins, in effect “lighting them up” for anybody peeking through the microscope. For the next set of experiments, this fluorescent presence would indicate germ cell maleness.
Their next step was to see what would happen to the sex of the germ cell if they broke one of the links on the reaction chain. When they inhibited JAK/STAT in gonads with male germ cells surrounded by male somatic cells, the germ cells no longer expressed the STAT protein and thus, as Van Doren said, “Male germ cell identity was lost.”
Their most remarkable experimental manipulations, however, observed the function of JAK/STAT in female germ cells. They placed female germ cells in surrounding tissue that expressed the doublesex gene (and was therefore male). These male somatic neighbors triggered the JAK/STAT pathway, telling the female germ cells to express the STAT protein. “We took a female and made it look male,” Van Doren said, “And that’s really the wow factor.”
Van Doren and his team have now shown that activation of JAK/STAT leads to the development male germ cells and thus, a walk down the road to Spermville. But, he stressed, this doesn’t mean females take the path of least resistance. Soon the biologists will look for somatic signals that point to Eggdom instead. Whether flies or humans, though, these signals are just early signposts along the long and torturous road to true sexual identity.
11.04.2005
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