Small Wonders: The blog

Professor Ada Yonath has won (with two colleagues) the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hear hear. I was lucky enough to attend a talk she gave a few years ago at a conference, where she presented several film clips of the structure of the ribosome (specifically, the bacterial kind), how it works and its  interactions with antibiotic compounds.

These were not general schematic illustrations, the kind you usually come across in textbooks and talks,  but accurate representations of the crystallographic structure – which made the whole thing much better, and, I found, jaw-droppingly beautiful.

You can see some of these clips and illustrations at the Yonath lab webpage. Go have a look, see what the fuss is about. The colours are artificially added, but the rest is pure nature.

“Good” is better than “Better than”

There are plenty of good things about being a postgraduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science. Being of any use to anyone is not one of them. Unfortunately, my calling offers precious little opportunities for those “man-on-the spot” moments, the ones where you can confidently intervene in a situation and resolve it using your skills. Doctors and nurses have them. Firemen, policemen, lifeuards, veterinarians, plumbers, electricians, lawyers too, in a way. I can easily think of “stand back, everyone” scenarios  for engineers, athletes, chemists and physicists (MacGyver obviously cornering the market there), even IT professionals (in this I’ve been sort of  preempted by xkcd, as usual) and Seinfeld memorably gave us the ultimate Marine Biologist fantasy.

With a bit of work we  could probably produce a chart with all professions listed by their “it’s all right, I’m a ….” probability index, running from traumatologists and airline pilots downwards. And down at the very bottom, together with marketing directors, interior decorators and Dunkin’ Donuts employees, are us humanities postgrads. What we do may or may not matter, but no-one will ever expect us to save the day.

I can do helpful things if neccesary. Only last night Daniel was sick and I was efficiency itself (this, incidentally, included the completely non-ironic utterance of the phrase “go ahead, vomit on daddy.” Parents will understand me ).  It’s just that as an academic of sorts, one’s contribution is more or less guaranteed to always be in the long run and the broad view, never in the Here&Now.

Which is why I will treasure this day from here on in. It started with an unexpected wallet I found at the train station. I glanced inside and noticed a library card – also, no credit cards and hardly any cash at all – and since I was heading towards the library anyway, it was but the work of a moment to decide that it would be wise to drop it off there. Good citizenship? Yes. Sensible decision-making? Quite. A dazzling display of creativity? Not really.

It was later that day, as I was bravely tapping away at this very keyboard, in that very library, that I heard murmurs behind me. The phrases “…article from Nature…New Scientist…minicells” gave me pause. I turned around discreetly – two librarians were Googling something, and they were, I could immediately sense, not getting anywhere. I took a deep breath and carpe diem‘d: I rose from my seat and said “excuse me, I’m a microbiologist, can I help?”

(note: I’m not a practicing microbiologist anymore, but I sensed that my true identity would be better left concealed for the time being, if only because by the time I finish saying “I’m a student in the field of the History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science” most people have already wandered off.)

It turned out that there was this nice man who was trying to obtain an article from “Nature Biotechnology”. His wife was ill, and he’d read about a new sort of treatment for it and wanted that article for her doctor to read. The library didn’t have access to Nature fulltext articles. I said “I have access” and got working. The article was located and printed, and off he went.

Now, you might say that it’s a very very small thing to do, bordering on the pathetic.  It would be utterly pathetic to attach any importance to it. Luckily, I don’t attach any importance to it. This is simply the one and only scenario where my professional skills could conceivably have helped anyone in any way, and I wanted the record to show that life can, at times, trump hypothetical scenarios.

This article from ScienceDaily explores the high-profile issue of nuclear waste and its removal – this time it’s E.coli who’ll be cleaning up uranium from polluted water. The news understandably generated a flurry of “OMG mutant nuclear bacteria”-type comments in slashdot, god bless them. Anyway, as the article itself notes, the idea is over a decade old – the one thing that is new is that they’ve found a way to use a waste product as the substrate of the reaction, which makes it (potentially) a neat way of reusing waste products to clean up other waste products.

“Creation”, a film about Charles Darwin’s inner struggle with belief, is apparently not going to be screened commercially in the US – no distributor wants to touch it, because a film about Darwin and religion is judged as too controversial for American audiences.

I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t know if it’s any good; also, films, being visual works tend to simplify complex debates, so I’m cautious . A New Scientist review suggests it might be less than perfect. (then again, they were less than ecstatic about my stuff a month ago, so, you know…). Still, you’d think audiences would’ve liked to be given the opportunity to see for themselves. I understand the film contains no violence, nudity, strong language, portrayal of drug use or teenagers performing unnatural acts with pies. perhaps the director should’ve put some of that stuff in – it might’ve helped with the distribution problems…

The review also mentions leading actor Paul Bettany’s performance as a ship’s surgeon and naturalist in Peter Weir’s 2003 Master and Commander: The Far side of the World, which is one of my absolute favourite performances ever (the DVD of the film effortlessly tops our household’s “most watched” list), and not only because it resonates powerfully with Darwinian history.

Lastly, I find it somewhat ironic that when this very same actor portrayed a murderous monk, the film grossed hunderds of millions in the US.

boingboing posted a review of  The Invisible Kingdom. Ah, fame at last…

Have I mentioned that Small Wonders is being published in America? I don’t think I mentioned that Small Wonders is being published in America. Well,  Small Wonders is being published in America. The name has been changed to The Invisible Kingdom, and it got some updates (things move quickly in the world of Microbiology) and a new bonus Bonus Track at the end; also, some Australian references (Cricket, the distance from Sydney to Melbourne) were replaced by American-friendly ones (Baseball). Other than that, it’s the same book.

Which leads me to wonder what non-Australian readers will make of the title “Darwin to Cairns and back” which I gave to one of the sections. It’s my favourite title, since it describes perfectly both the issue I was writing about and a rather challenging road-trip route.

SW has been shortlisted for the 2009 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, Science Writer category. I’m thrilled.

But that’s nothing compared to what happened to my publisher’s publicity manager…

The Fourth Matter

Following common Matter, Dark Matter, and Antimatter, long recognized by Science, is the less well-known Doesn’t Matter, the study of which has for quite some time now gone under-funded, unappreciated, and rather difficult to publish.
“It’s a problematic issue, although not very” says a not-so-notable Physicist (cornered during a longish lift ride). “Research into this field has always struggled with indifference in the scientific community, not to mention the public. Even research staff and students tend to fall asleep at the lab, or simply wander off”.
Doesn’t Matter was discovered by pure accident during a 1976 NASA project attempting to quantify black hole properties, and had initially caused some concern before being discovered to have no effect on the original measurements. Since then it has been given little attention despite its possible scientific, technological and even commercial implications (including stealth technology and tax evasion).
“No-one really bothers with it”, comments Dr. E. Jasper, editor of “Physics Whenever” journal, “now please go away, I have some work to do. It’s not worth your trouble anyway.”
It has been speculated, usually during long train journeys and lunch queues at Physics conventions, that Doesn’t Matter has what was flippantly named (and never renamed) “psycho-recessive” properties, namely the quality of being extremely elusive to cognition and consciousness, tending to slip out of anyone’s attention. This property effectively prevents its being subjected to any kind of empirical trials and tribulations.
“Maybe it doesn’t want to be found,” yawns a Philosopher of Science who didn’t even stay long enough to give his name, “Leave it be. Who cares? Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Be that as it may, Um… what was I saying? Never mind.

Like most people, I fit into several different minority groups; in this age of subdividing society from every possible direction, the number of people who feel entirely embedded within the majority in every aspect of life is very small indeed (and this should, of course, qualify them as a minority group in itself – the “totally well-adjusted”, perhaps. Poor things.)

Yet the trait which causes me the most acute feelings of not belonging is hardly ever mentioned. Is it, I ask myself sometimes late at night, just me? Can it be that I am the only one with this problem? I don’t think so. Here it is: my biological clock is out of synch. My natural bedtime is somewhere around 2am, and left to my own devices I’ll wake up around 10:30am. If I’m busy, I’ll work later and wake up later. Most of my book was written between midnight and 6am. Virtually none of it before noon.

It has been like this since basically forever, as far as I can recall. As a teenager I’d read or play music until extremely late, force myself to go to sleep, then a few hours later stumble out of bed for a morning routine of five minutes (dress, toilet, run out of house to catch bus, fall asleep on the way to school). Doing shift work, I’d go for the night shifts every time, and never felt tired doing them. As a uni student, studying for exams was strictly night work. And so on.

I hate this. I hate being woken up at 9:30am by the bustle of everyday life, cars in the street, workmen outside the window, telephone calls. I hate the deadening drowsiness that envelopes me whenever I have to get up at a “proper” time, the way my wife has to tear me out of bed in order to help her with the morning chores, I hate having to tiptoe noiselessly to the kitchen to make myself something to eat when taking a break at 3am because everyone around me is asleep and I’m a weird, vampirish freak. I hate it when my friends and acquaintances say “I hope I didn’t wake you up” when telephoning me at 1pm, because they know there’s just no way of knowing whether or not I’m asleep at any given time.I hate not fitting in.

And I have tried. I have striven mightily to adjust. I have tried multiple alarm clocks, showers, exercise, asking my wife to shout at me, having a really tempting breakfast waiting for me. I’ve tried going to sleep early, late, not at all; anything to try and force my biological clock to straighten itself out. Nothing worked. I even tried moving to Australia in order to confuse it, but the bastard just adjusted itself to the local time and went right ahead with its old routine. I have not tried cigarettes and coffee, because I can’t stand them; I have read that people like me have a higher risk of being addicted to these two morning stimulants, and it’s theorised that it’s because they help us kick our bodies into wakefulness at these wretched morning hours.

Some of you may think I’m just not disciplined enough, or whatever. I might be. I won’t deny the possibility. But it goes deeper than just a lazy slob unwilling to hop out of bed and go do an honest day’s work. I can go to sleep at 4 in the morning and wake up at 11 sharp as a tack, but for me 7am is the middle of the night; try getting up at 3am for a week or two and you will, perhaps, understand us better.

I probably should have settled for a life of either regular night shifts (truckie? Security guard? Late shift newspaper editor?) or a bohemian, artistic life wherein the workday begins when onstage at 9pm, ends around midnight, and then a late night out with the crowd. You’re allowed to sleep in when you’re visibly at work in the evenings, I reckon. But I’m not. I just type on a computer keyboard, and people who type on keyboards late at night are obviously up to no good. I envy morning people. The early risers, the 6am-joggers, the relaxed breakfasters reading the morning paper with 20 min to go before hopping on the 8:20 train to work. Their lives are so neat and tidy; mine, an ill-adjusted scramble. And I reserve some extra-special resentment for the people who consider “staying out late” to be a form of entertainment: “Ooh, I was out till so late Sunday night. You should have seen me arrive at the office on Monday.” Grr.

We the Differently Awake are not actively discriminated against, but society is organised along strict Morningist lines. Perhaps we should organise: We’ll call ourselves OWLS (OverWhelmingly Late Sleepers-in) have meetings (“The Darebin Sleeper Cell meets Tuesdays, 1am at the local Community Centre”), and hold all-night rallies until our demands our met: Issuing of special disability cards that will allow us priority seating on public transport before 10am (so we can snooze en route to the office), discounts on earplugs, ultra-flexitime, and mandatory no-chainsaw-or-leafblower-before-noon laws in heavily OWLish areas. Who’s with me?!

Ah, it won’t work. There will not be, cannot be, a rallying cry for us rise’n’shiningly-challenged, because the one thing we abhor above all else is the wakeup call.

But to end on a happy note: Lately, things are improving a little, at least for me personally. There’s something about an angelic baby crawling up one’s slumbering heap of a body, emitting merry giggles and attempting to joyfully claw one’s eyes out that just won’t let one roll over and resnore. My son is proving to be quite the early riser; perhaps therein my ultimate salvation lies.