Science

The Not-So Quixotic Quest

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In his novel, Count Zero, William Gibson has his billionaire cancer patient Josef Virek say:

“Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh… I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers… I was touched, Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold.”

It turns out that the cancer cell’s pursuit of an individual career may not be as quixotic a pursuit as once thought.

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Terrestrial chemistry is an anomaly in the Solar System

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We take too much for granted when we are looking at terrestrial materials such as rocks and then assume that they are representative for those on other bodies within our solar system in general:

Conditions on Earth scarcely resemble those elsewhere in our own solar system. We live on a wet and tepid exception to the chemical and physical norms of the planets that contain most of the solar sysytems mass. Being made largely of water like the rest of the life on Earth, we think nothing of life’s inorganic substrate being the product of wet chemistry…
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Earthly quartz and feldspars, micas and clays, all contain water and have been re-arranged by it. Likewise, compounds that are decomposed by water and elements that react vigorously with it are largely alien to the surface of the Earth. Not only have we never seen them in the state of nature, but they scarcely figure in our imagined view of the chemistry that gave rise to life…

To plug the gaps in our knowledge and to overcome our (understandable) failure of imagination, we would have to send out a fleet of robotic spacecraft to collect samples from the various rocky bodies in the solar system. A systematic analysis of those samples would offer some important insights in how materials develop and self-organize in and on rocky planets and moons that are solid like the Earth but unlike it are non-aqueous. These results would in turn provide some clues on how emergent and autocatalytic processes can lead from inorganic to organic chemistry and maybe even to life, under conditions that are radically different from those on Earth.

Sykes — Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots …

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Sykes, Bryan, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland, Norton: New York, 2006. 306 pp. [published as The Blood of the Isles in the UK]

Oxford University professor of human genetics, Bryan Sykes, follows up his best-selling popular books on recent European DNA studies with a book specifically about the “Isles” — England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Casting a wide but useful net, he provides a grounding not only in the geography, climate history and human prehistory of the two islands … but describes the mythology about, and early scientific investigations into, the origins of the people there. These are far from just academic preoccupations. In past centuries, English kings made their claims for sovereignty based on tales of Trojan settlers and Arthurian prowess. Every medieval commentary and discovery was followed with intense royal interest. Well into the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rights of kings were linked to ancient origins. Not surprisingly, later Victorian efforts at phrenological and morphological interpretation of the island’s peoples (the shape of their skulls and features of their bodies) comes in for some hard knocks in this book. But Sykes gives those pioneer scientists full points for effort, thoroughness, and a methodical approach. Their efforts might now be dashed upon the rocks of genetic information, but their tables, charts, line drawings and descriptions of hair colour, skin tone, and body shape across the British Isles reflect the sincere interest of generations past, attempting to answer the question “who are we?”. In many ways, Professor Sykes continues their efforts.

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Heresy With a Smile

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A&L links to Freeman Dyson’s “Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society“; Edge excerpts sections of Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe. While this demonstrates neither an obnoxious nor vain spirit, he does wryly demonstrate how terribly wrong scientists can be – what with being human and all. (A good instance would be the patronizing sympathy he felt for Crick, thinking that WWII had destroyed his chance to do good science and that going into biology would be a dead end.) But, he argues, heresy is necessary – an attitude that may not sit well with some of the characters whose vanity John Jay describes with such a sharp edge. Dyson is self-deprecating:

We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, “Too bad he has lost his marbles”, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.

Of course, one of his heresies is toward the great religion of this decade – global warming.

But, fortunately, no one has been yet stoned for being a “global warming denier.”

Update: Dyson makes several points about global warming, about which he is certainly heretical, and the roles of scientists. Below the jump at a couple more excerpts of the excerpts, but some of you are likely to find the whole enjoyable.

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Gawande — Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

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Gawande, Atul, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2007. 273 pp.

Several years ago, Dr. Gawande published a best-selling book on his experiences as a young surgeon called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. In the intervening years, he’s written a number of elegant essays on medical topics for the New Yorker while maintaining a surgical practice at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. In a further embarrassment of talent, he was a MacArthur Fellow in 2006 and now also teaches at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School for Public Health.

Notably, he’s a rare voice of humility amongst his profession in reflecting on the day-to-day practice of medicine. Not just on the larger issues of “what we don’t know” or “what we can’t do” but on the oft-overlooked issues of “what we do poorly, every day, merely out of habit.” That honesty adds particular strength to his writing. In his latest book, he’s assembled his essay-chapters into three larger themes (diligence, doing right, ingenuity) all tied around his reflections on how he wants to improve his own practice as a doctor.

The results are fascinating. As befits a writer for the New Yorker, Gawande makes good use of anecdote and the background research for each topic covered. He writes well and writes for a general audience. A few months ago I listened to a podcast interview with the author and he mentioned that it’s a real struggle for him to get writing done because of his professional obligations. To some extent, that time limitation is reflected in this book. The subject area, improving individual doctor performance, could cover a lot of ground. Gawande doesn’t pretend to do so exhaustively. Instead, we have a series of vignettes on the limitations and successes of medical practice. For any reader interested in a particular chapter’s topic, the results are excellent. Those interested in the “gaps” between chapters may need to head for the academic literature and something closer to a textbook. More’s the pity.

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