Life Lines 24

DINOSAURS AND GOODWILL: A STONY BROOK STORY



If you enter the Administration Building on the Stony Brook University campus, a mounted skeleton of a dinosaur from Madagascar will greet you. For those who like jaw breaking names it is a Majungasaurus crenatissimus. It looks much like one of those dinosaurs (velociraptors) seen in science fiction films. What makes it unusual is the presence of air sacs in its cervical bones, a characteristic of birds but not of living lizards. The person who found it is a Distinguished Service Professor in the Anatomy Department at Stony Brook University. David Krause took an interest in Madagascar as a possible site to study fossils because he read an 1896 article in a French journal describing some fossil teeth that looked like they belonged to dinosaurs. He arranged an expedition and began digging at the site which is close to the Equator, hot and humid, and where living conditions were Spartan at best. Some 100 years after the French discovery, Krause and his working crew unearthed hundreds of these fossil teeth along with vertebrae of several dinosaur species. He brought back an embedded skull and it took six months to remove the rock around the fossilized bone. Madagascar is rich in dinosaur fossils many of them relating dinosaurs to birds and Krause and his students hope to continue their studies in the years to come.

Krause was both puzzled and pleased to see lots of local children watching the excavations. He learned they were illiterate because there were no funds for schools in this remote rural area. He was fortunate that President Kenny took an interest and through her family the Joel Strum Kenny school was built, dedicated to the memory of her son. Funds for the teachers (paid $500 per year) and school supplies ($300 per year) are raised mostly by donations of change collected by students in public schools on Long Island. Krause liked the idea of a children helping children program that teaches philanthropy at an early age.

Krause now employs local people in Madagascar and teaches them to be paleontologists. Stony Brook dental and medical students volunteer to come down for a summer to treat the local people in a field hospital they set up and with donated equipment and medical supplies. Most of the people of Madagascar are largely of Malaysian ancestry and they speak Malagasy. Madagascar is an immense island off the East coast of Africa. Its fossil animals are similar to those in India, South America, and Antarctica to which Madagascar was attached about 100 million years ago. They are not similar to African fossil reptiles. Africa at that time was separate from these other connected continents. Madagascar today is an impoverished country with many endangered species. Some 99 percent of its land vertebrates are found only in Madagascar. As the population increases, forests are burned or cut down to make way for agriculture and the natural beauty of the country is disappearing. Krause hopes that tourism will be the best way to shift local people from farming to working in tourist programs that are more profitable. About half the population is Christian, the rest practice ancestor worship. Donations may be made to the Madagascar Ankizy Fund/284300 to Dr. Krause at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-8081

Life Lines 23

DEALING WITH COMPLEXITY: RACHEL CARSON AND SILENT SPRING


About 50 years ago Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that many critics have identified as launching the environmentalist movement. Unlike Teddy Roosevelt who was praised for founding the conservationist movement, Carson was denounced by many industrialists and chemists who regarded her as “hysterical” or incapable of distinguishing pseudoscience from science. We see similar responses today to scientists who warn of global warming, and even more when a politician, like Al Gore, adopts it as a cause. How does the public know when a product is safe, when an environment is polluted, when resources are depleted, or when the public is put to risk by “business as usual” practices of those who put an economic measure as their filter of what to believe or what to reject?

Carson’s book is worth reading even if it is outdated. She did not seek to ban DDT and other pesticides; she sought to regulate them. She recognized these as biocides because they killed or harmed more than their targeted pests. The farmer that wants to get rid of corn borers may not be aware that the DDT will also get rid of the bees needed for fertilizing other crops. That would be of little concern if the farmer only used purchased hybrid seed to plant each year. But a farmer dependent on bees would feel annoyed that his concern and financial loss was seen by his neighbor as just so much
”collateral damage.” It would also annoy those who enjoy a variety of birds that eat pests and delight the eye and ear to see some of those birds diminish in numbers as their egg shells thinned and they left fewer progeny. Carson felt chemists in the 1950s were not educated about ecology and the web of life that makes all living things connected.

Critics also argued that by banning DDT, malaria was allowed to fester in undeveloped countries. But if DDT were not banned there might well be DDT resistant strains of mosquitoes that would have replaced the ones that were killed. Pests evolve when they are put to the test by chemicals or antibiotics. Carson felt the problem was complex and most users of pesticides and herbicides were unaware of that complexity. She felt chemical companies should hire ecologists who could advise them on how to minimize the collateral damage to beneficial insects and how to minimize the damage to other forms of life in the vicinity. She also felt that it was simplicity to think that a single chemical was the answer to a complex relation of the living mass that we call the soil.

All people exaggerate and all politicians do too. Environmentalists can see cancers from industrial chemicals where there is no evidence for their induction. Environmentalists can see massive destruction of the environment with no recuperation and often after ten or twenty years recovery does occur. Environmentalists may favor natural over commercial foods although many natural or organic foods have abundant carcinogens and mutagens in them. Because we tend to make a lawyer’s case for one side only on complex issues, we do unintended harm. Hitler liked cream puffs. Does this mean, as one who abhors Hitler, that I should never eat a cream puff? We have to learn that complex issues require objectivity, regulation that is not politicized, and getting less than what are fantasies dictate.

Life Lines 22

DARWIN ABUSED AS USUAL


I was honored to be the key speaker at Rutgers’s University during their Darwin Day celebration. I spoke on the topic “Darwin: Used, Abused, and Necessary.” That was in February 2007. In early May a NY Times front page story carried a debate among Republican conservatives on the significance of Darwinism in their outlook. Some wanted to align with those who deny evolution has occurred and who favor a biblical outlook whether they call it Creation Science or Intelligent Design. Others see in Darwinism a justification of conservative principles based on a human nature that has an alleged Darwinian history (male dominance, female nurturing, territoriality, aggressiveness, keeping an alert guard). A smaller number see Darwinism as providing a basis for human moral values including “compassionate conservatism.”

The difficulty for a scientist who is also a “political animal” as Aristotle defined us, is that all of this is an abuse of Darwinism. A scientist is not interested in proving or supporting left wing or right wing ideology. An evolutionary biologist wants to find out how organisms evolved over time. Life is very old (more than 3 billion years of fossil history) and evolutionists, like historians, try their best to be objective about how the past worked and what its components were. They try to find evidence for their ideas and if the evidence contradicts their hunches the hunches are dumped. This is the opposite of political ideology. If you are left-wing you dump any right wing supporting ideas and findings. If you are right-wing you dump any left wing ideas or findings. That is not science but it is close to what political discourse is like, not an effort to find truths or reality, but an attempt to persuade others to think like you.

Most evolutionary biologists try to separate their scientific findings from social applications of their knowledge. They know that the history of applied science is filled with monstrous abuses. Think of scientific racism (Jews, Slavs, Irish, Russians, Greeks as inferior immigrants and thus not worthy of being allowed into our country in the 1926 laws passed by Congress). Think of the American eugenics movement (compulsory sterilization laws that sterilized some 60,000 people in the United States against their will). Think of Nazi race hygiene (if you are a Jew, Slav, Serb, or Gypsy you deserve to die or should be turned into a sterile slave). Think of Lysenkoism (if you are a farmer and can’t use Lysenkoism to produce better yields on your land, you are a saboteur). Think of social Darwinism (if you are fired because your boss wants to make more money, it’s your fault for not wanting less pay to do more work and have less benefits or for not being smart enough to be the boss). It doesn’t matter if science is abused for the good of capitalism, communism, fascism, or any other ideology. It’s an abuse of science and cannot be justified as legitimate science. Whatever the conservatives choose as an application of Darwinism to conservative ideology is an abuse as wrong as that of political liberals trying to use Darwinism to justify their political ideology. I don’t know what evolutionary science, when it becomes as molecular as cellular biology, will find about the evolutionary history of human behavior. It may favor conservatives, liberals, both, or neither. At a political level humans will remain diverse, argumentative, and convinced that their particular outlook is a superior one.

Life Lines 21

CHEWING GUM: A 9000 YEAR OLD HABIT


Chewing gum is something frowned on in school (it is often stuck under tables and chairs) or even by most pedestrians as they eye the flattened, dirt dyed, remains of dropped gum on sidewalks or passageways (like the tunnel connecting the Subway Shuttle’s East and West sides). It is at least as filthy a habit as cigarette smoking, but not as dangerous to human health. People chew gum because it helps keep their teeth clean (and if they use sugarless gum it even prevents cavities). They also chew gum to make their breath smell fresher, especially if the gum is flavored with mint. The gum we chew is made of chickle, a sap of the sapodilla tree. In the 1860s Thomas Adams tried to make rubber out of it but it didn’t thicken enough so he used it as chewing gum. In 1892 William Wrigley bought the rights to use chickle and mass marketed his gum by flavoring it with mint. As a child I chewed with Adams’ gum and Wrigley’s gum. I also chewed its predecessor, paraffin. I would buy tiny paraffin bottles filled with sugar syrup and the paraffin, when warmed to body temperature, was a suitable gum.

In 1993 a Swedish archaeologist found birch resin in the layers of silt in a Stone Age hut and it had teeth markings suggesting it was chewed. The ancient Greeks chewed a resin from a shrub called mastiche (and hence the word “masticate” – to chew). Native Americans also chewed resin that they scraped from spruce trees. I’ve tried chewing pine resins when I was visiting in Colorado but they were very bitter and they contain a lot of phenols which are not a very good idea to swallow because they can be carcinogenic. The phenol content probably healed sore gums (by killing bacteria) and in an era without toothpaste and toothbrushes, that may have been another reason why our ancestors chewed gum.

The most recent finding was in Finland at an archaeological site of a long forgotten settlement. It was a birch resin that had been chewed (the signature of tooth marks is the evidence). I was delighted that a second item revealing our ancient behavior was also found – an amber ring. Amber is fossilized resin and no doubt the amber was scraped into a flattened disk and then drilled through until it fit the hand of the holder or the person for whom it was made. We don’t know the symbolic significance of that ring but it was clearly intended to convey some sentiment (like marriage, coming of age, or status in the community).

Those who are infuriated by gum sticking to the soles of their shoes or matting their hair or infiltrating their clothing when sat on, may have silently applauded the action of Singapore’s Prime Minister in the 1970s who made it a criminal offense to buy, sell, or chew gum in Singapore. When I was in Singapore in 2001, I did not see a single wad of flattened gum on their streets. My favorite use of gum as a child was pressing it on a stone tied to a string and retrieving coins when it was dropped down grates in New York’s streets. You could call it urban fishing.

Life Lines 20

CAUGHT A COLD? THERE ARE 98 REASONS WHY YOU’LL GET ANOTHER

Virtually everyone has experienced getting the flu and getting a cold. In general the flu gives us fevers and a profound weakness that lays us low for several days. With colds we fill our wastebaskets with tissue paper from our runny noses. Flu viruses have been studied for several decades and they lend themselves to vaccines. At my age, I usually take a shot each year and I haven’t had a flu since then (more than ten years). Why aren’t there vaccines for colds? Recently all known varieties of cold viruses in the world have been analyzed down to their nucleotide sequences.. They are called serotypes. There are at least 99 that fall into two categories of human rhinoviruses called HRV-A and HRV-B. Of the 99, 74 are HRV-A and 25 are HRV-B. As the name implies (the prefix rhino means nose) rhinoviruses cause runny noses. They are small viruses that make about a dozen proteins. They are spherical in shape and they can be found around the world.

Flu viruses tend to be far fewer in serotypes and fall into two categories that form the basis of which flu shot we get in the flu season which around here begins in the early fall. So far no one has figured out a way to make a vaccine specific for all 99 serotypes of HRV and that may be because each serotype requires its own vaccine. That means each of us is likely to have a cold every year (or even two or three colds in a given year). By the time we have hit our mid 60s we have had virtually all the serotypes available in the US and hence we rarely get colds when we get old. When I was younger I dreaded flying to meetings because I would tell my students that my cold germs would go into orgies with cognate cold germs they meet in another city or another country. After they swapped genes they came up with new forms of cold germs that caused me to come down with colds. I suspect if I went to Australia or to some parts of Latin America where I have not traveled, I would get a cold. In all likelihood I have experienced infections with the overwhelming majority of HRV cold viruses because I taught classes with hundreds of students every year (many of them seasoned travelers) and thus was more likely to be exposed to the available serotypes they brought to class.

Rhinoviruses are a major contributor to severe asthma attacks. They are RNA viruses and single stranded. They are related to polioviruses but differ considerably in their proteins, which have long followed independent paths to their favorite cell types for infection. Flu viruses are long folded viruses, like floppy noodles, that are quite different from rhinoviruses. In fact flu viruses are much closer to a form of virus that kills birds, called Newcastle disease. When a cold virus enters a human cell (usually in the nasal passageway), it introduces its RNA, which then multiplies rapidly and the HRV RNA produces a single large protein that is cut into 12 chunks. All 99 of the HRV viruses have an unusual clover-like sequence of RNA that allows them to rapidly synthesize their RNA in the host cell. The Wisconsin group that has worked out the 99 HRV viruses hopes they can locate a few vulnerable sites shared by clusters of these cold viruses so they can be prevented by vaccination. It may turn out a few years from now, that future generations will be at risk for colds only in their childhood years and the rest of their lives they will be protected by vaccination for those HRV serotypes with shared vulnerable sites.

Life Lines 19

CANCER ARISES FROM A SINGLE CELL AND TAKES DECADES TO PRODUCE SYMPTOMS

How fast did it take you to know as a child not to put your hand on a hot pot or pan? I suspect a few seconds and a pained “ow” was sufficient to drive home cause (very hot) and effect (pain). Which is worse, a burn on your hand from touching a hot pot or a tumor in your lungs? The question is idiotic but surprisingly more people are aware of avoiding hot surfaces than avoiding things that produce tumors in the lungs. Why is that? The burn is immediate and millions of cells including nerve cells are involved in the burn that produces the “ouch.” So our brains are very good at recognizing immediate cause and effect. But if you smoke cigarettes you are inhaling some four thousand combustion products of tobacco and several dozen are known carcinogens, agents that induce cancers. These include stuff you never heard of like nitrosamines and anthracenes but some that are familiar like aldehydes. That stuff slaps against the lining cells of your trachea and bronchial tree; and it kills those cells, most of which flatten out into squamous cells. But you don’t feel that. Nor do you feel the seepage of the chemicals of combustion as they dribble down several layers of cells and on rare occasions (about once in 10 to 20 years of smoking a pack a day) they produce a tumor cell. Nor do you feel that tumor cell divide every six months or so and after some 15 or more years it produces a lump about the size of a pea. That will make you cough. So 25 or 35 years may elapse between starting a smoking habit and having a first symptom of cancer. Our brains do not respond to the gene mutations and chromosome breakages that eventually set off a cell to act like a tumor cell.

The first person to realize cancers were diseases of cells was Rudolph Virchow in the 1850s. He formulated the cell doctrine that asserts all cells arise from pre-existing cells. He extended this to cancers because he saw that they were alike in the tumor and he inferred they arose from one initial cell. It took 20 more years to work out cell division and it took a century before the relation between tumors and carcinogens was worked out.

Because most of humanity is ignorant of science they spend their time teaching kids not to play with broken glass, not to swallow yucky stuff in pretty bottles, and other things to which their experience and senses are familiar. But to the big killers, like agents that mutate genes, break chromosomes, deform embryos, and transform cells into tumor cells, we rely on what? Nothing! So we call it fate or bad luck or say stupid things [“You’ve got to die of something”] when we can greatly reduce the amount of harm done by agents in our foods, air, water, and the house we live in that can cause cellular damage.

If we were science literate or cared as much about our health for serious things as we do for relatively minor things, we would demand our schools teach “defensive living” just as we demand it for teaching our teens “defensive driving.” The fault is shared by scientists who prefer to teach science stripped of its values and implications for our lives and by the public which is afraid that learning about biology in a liberal arts context leads to loss of faith, conflict with religious beliefs, or subversive social views about regulating industry. The price we pay for this attitude is a lot of unnecessary illness and death.

Life Lines 18

BREVITY AND LENGTH IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS

I was preparing an assignment sheet for a seminar course in the history of classical genetics that I was invited to teach at Stony Brook University. In it I was asking graduate students to read some key articles on major findings in genetics from the beginning of the 20^th century to 1953 when molecular genetics began with the working out of the double helix model of DNA. I noted that Thomas Hunt Morgan began working with fruit flies in 1907 but did not have anything to publish until 1910 when he published two articles and 1911 when he published two more articles. These four publications (three of them in Science) amounted to ten pages. Now in those ten pages Morgan showed that he had found several mutations in fruit flies which made it a good organism to study genetics; he found that several of them including white eyes, were associated with sex (males showed the trait and females rarely did), and of the ones that were associated with sex, they gave strange ratios not compatible with Mendel’s laws. He made the interpretation that these genes were all linked on one chromosome (called the X) and that a process called crossing over could separate them or put them together. Those findings, today called X-linked inheritance and crossing over were the basis for Morgan’s Nobel Prize in 1933.

If you think that is something (ten pages of work equals one Nobel) consider that Watson and Crick published two articles in Nature in 1953. One was on the structure of DNA (it was a double helix) and the other was on the biological implications of the model (it accounted for gene replication, mutation, and coding). The two articles are less than 3 pages total. That is impressive to compress a Nobel Prize finding into such a small amount of print. It certainly rivals minimalism in art. For me it’s a Zen Buddhist moment of realization. When I was a graduate student, the average PhD dissertation for most of my fellow graduate students was about 200 pages. Most of it consisted of tables of data and methodology and lots of background history as well as a lengthy discussion of what it all means. Mine was about 70 pages. I published the gist of my dissertation into 26 pages. The opposite of this minimalism in science was the introduction of Alfred Korzybski’s book on semantics [Science and Sanity]. He told his readers that if they did not read his book (about 800 pages) three times, not to bother reading it at all. He was lucky; I read it once.

In a productive career, like that of my mentor, H. J. Muller, there is bound to be a range of sizes of publications. His 370 articles included major findings as small as one paragraph (usually an abstract of a larger oral presentation at a meeting) and very lengthy articles of about 77 pages that detailed some of his major findings on the relation of genes to the characters they express. His Nobel paper (on the induction of mutations by x-rays) came out in Science in 1927 and was four pages long. In 1967 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists asked me to condense a speech Muller gave in Chicago shortly before his death. I did so but felt I was mutilating his voice. Today brevity is in (the cost of publication is high) and I miss some of the elaborate reasoning and flourishes of the imagination found in the research papers of the first two decades of the 20th century. More than ten years of writing Life Lines columns to fit one typed page [about 500 words] have taught me the art of brevity.