Francis Bacon’s argument for books, libraries, and universities

The long quest for some funding may be easing a little, perhaps leaving some time and mental space to continue writing regularly here. In the mean time, enjoy this example of Francis Bacon’s remarkable gift for metaphor, from his Advancement of Learning, Book 2:

For as water, whether it be the dew of heaven or the springs of the earth, doth scatter and leese itself in the ground, except it be collected into some receptacle where it may by union comfort and sustain itself; and for that cause the industry of man hath made and framed springheads, conduits, cisterns, and pools, which men have accustomed likewise to beautify and adorn with accomplishments of magnificence and state, as well as of use and necessity; so this excellent liquor of knowledge, whether it descend from divine inspiration, or spring from human sense, would soon perish and vanish to oblivion, if it were not preserved in books, traditions, conferences, and places appointed, as universities, colleges, and schools, for the receipt and comforting of the same.

And here Bacon defends basic research:

First, therefore, amongst so many great foundations of colleges in Europe, I find strange that they are all dedicated to professions, and none left free to arts and sciences at large…

And this I take to be a great cause that hath hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage. For if you will have a tree bear more fruit than it hath used to do, it is not anything you can do to the boughs, but it is the stirring of the earth and putting new mould about thee roots that must work it.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition

Immigrants are Critical for American Science

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My great-grandfather, a political refugee from Latvia, was a bacteriologist for Merck.

The Trump administration’s ill-conceived and implemented executive order harms all sorts of people, like Iraqis who risked their lives to help the US military, and US citizens whose spouses, parents, and children are not citizens. The policy is inhumane and will likely damage our national security.

It also harms science, as many are pointing out. (See Ed Yong in the Atlantic for stories of scientists who are directly affected.) Immigrants play an enormous role making American science great. I made the case for this in a Pacific Standard piece two years ago – and it’s a good day to reup the argument:

Science has always been most successful when countries exchange ideas, talent, and resources, which is why one of the National Research Council’s “ten breakthrough actions” recommended to Congress is to “ensure that the United States will continue to benefit strongly from the participation of international students and scholars in our research enterprise.” Our scientific preeminence relies heavily on migrant scientists, and that’s a good thing.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition, Uncategorized Tagged: Science in Society

More Science is Always a Winning Bet

Eric Lander in The Boston Globe on hype and hope in medical research is well worth reading:

Science is the most powerful force in the world for improving human health and well-being. It consistently pays enormous returns on society’s investment, transforming the way we live and work.

This is a case we need to keep making, to society and our political leaders as we head into a new Congress, new administration, and new state governments in 2017. As Nature also argues this week, scientists need to stay politically engaged. And that doesn’t just mean partisanship; it means engaging with the party in power, even if it’s not yours.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Science in Society

The FDA is not holding back effective drugs

It’s going unnoticed amidst the news of the rolling disaster that is the incoming Trump administration, but our lame duck Congress has just passed a major piece of legislation called the 21st century cures act. Scientists are happy about the extra $5 billion this bill gives to the NIH – sort of. That money has to go to specific programs, like the Precision Medicine Initiative and Biden’s Moonshot program, rather than being put into the general funds of the NIH, meaning that Congress, and not the NIH, is deciding what specific research to fund. That’s generally not a good idea, but more money toward broad research and translational initiatives like cancer and precision medicine is still a net win.

More controversial are the FDA provisions of this bill. The bill pushes the FDA to take into account other, often less rigorous types of clinical studies when it decides whether or not to approve a new drug. Some worry that this means drug companies will have more leeway to push unsafe or ineffective drugs on the market. I’m more ambivalent – there are cases (drugs for rare diseases) when double blind randomized clinical trials may not be right, and the FDA should have the flexibility to demand the best evidence appropriate to each case. If – and this is a big if as we look ahead – we trust that the FDA can stand up to industry pressure, than giving them more flexibility to follow best scientific practices is the way to go.

My bigger problem with the FDA provisions are that the premise is flawed. As I write in Pacific Standard this week, the bill’s sponsors argue that, by cutting regulations and red tape at the FDA, we’ll free new cures that are just waiting to be put into the hands of patients. That’s wrong – the FDA is not the rate limiting step here. There is no backlog of effective new drugs just waiting to be approved.

Go check out my piece for the details. The rate limiting step is the science. Medical science is hard, and diseases are understood imperfectly. If you want more effective drugs faster, we need to invest more in research.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition, This Mortal Coil, Uncategorized Tagged: drugs, FDA, science funding

Trusted Sources

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reminds us that the public at large believes in the results of science based on their trust in scientists and, quite often, those that communicate the science.

The comic also shows how hazardous it can be to abuse that trust. This is why efforts to hold the institutions through which we do science accountable – like Retraction Watch, Rep. Speier’s HR6161, SAFE, critiquing of the publish-or-perish system, p-hacking, journal profiteering, and embargo abuse – are vital. It needs to be clear in public forums that we take that trust seriously and are more committed to protecting the integrity of the practice of science than to protecting individuals who violate that trust to maintain an illusion.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, Scientist, Zach Weinersmith

Apocalypse 1913: Adrift In A Hostile Cosmos

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913)

415px-Strandus-1913-05End of the world narratives are typically about a fight for survival – people fight for food, shelter, and safety as the asteroid, pandemic plague, or zombie hordes threaten to wipe out human life. This was just as true of SF a century ago as it is today: In 1912, Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague featured armed Berkeley professors, holed up in the chemistry building as a plague swept away civilization; while Garrett Serviss’ The Second Deluge tells of a thousand lucky survivors who, in a modern ark, escape a world-wide flood.

The next year, Arthur Conan Doyle also published a novel about a group of hardy survivors. But the terms of survival in The Poison Belt are much more ironic: Professor Challenger and his fellow adventurers, who had fought off dinosaurs and ape-men on a remote South American plateau in Doyle’s 1912 The Lost World, now confront the extinction of human life as passive observers, watching the destruction of humanity from the window of the “charmingly feminine sitting room” of Professor Challenger’s wife.

The Poison Belt does have the scenes of destruction and ruin that we’ve come to expect in this genre. But most of this remarkable novel centers on existential conversations that take place in a single, comfortable room – a setting that anticipates Samuel Beckett’s classic apocalyptic play, Endgame (1957). In this setting, Doyle explores humanity’s role in the universe – a role that, by 1913, was being reevaluated after decades of scientific discoveries revealed that the earth was much older and the universe much larger than had been recognized. As the cosmic stage grew, humanity’s role shrank, raising the possibility that we might not in fact be the central characters we thought we were – and that we might be forced to exit long before any final act.

The Atavistic Super-Scientist

The premise of The Poison Belt is similar to that of Garrett Serviss’ pulp story The Second Deluge, published just the year before. In both books, the earth – whose trajectory through the universe is completely beyond all human control – passes through a cloud of something that threatens all life. (Ted Thomas and Kate Wilhelm would turn to this premise again in 1970, in The Year of the Cloud.) In Serviss’ story, this cloud is a watery nebula. A brilliant, iconoclastic super-scientist correctly recognizes the threat, revealed by some puzzling astronomical data, and builds a high-tech ark that saves 1000 carefully selected people from the inevitable flood.

scoops_19340505_v1_n13A super-scientist, Professor Challenger, is the lead character of Doyle’s novel as well. Challenger also recognizes a poisonous cosmic cloud by correctly interpreting mysterious astronomical data, and prepares an ark of sorts, in which he faces the end of the world with a few select friends.

But in spite of the parallels with Second Deluge, The Poison Belt‘s ironies make for a much richer, more interesting novel. One irony is the super-scientist himself: unlike the typical scientist hero of pulps SF, Professor Challenger is both genius and atavism; a short, hairy, and quarrelsome man who bellows and grunts like an animal, but behind whose heavy, Neanderthalish brow sits a formidable brain. And Challenger’s ark is not a high-tech engineering marvel; it’s his wife’s boudoir, made air-tight with some varnished paper.

How Challenger and his friends end up in Mrs. Challenger’s sealed room is told as a first-person account by E.D. Malone, a London-based journalist who was with Professor Challenger on his South American adventures in The Lost World. Malone is sent by his editor to interview Challenger, who has just published a baffling warning letter in today’s paper.

Poison-belt-strand-march-1913-1In the letter, Challenger argues that there is a link between some recent, unexplained blurriness in the spectrographic data collected by astronomers, and a mysterious, disabling illness that is afflicting Sumatra. Challenger, somewhat cryptically, suggests that the cause of both is is that our solar system is beginning to drift into a possibly toxic zone of the universal ether.

Malone’s editorial assignment is fortunate, since he has just received a telegram from Challenger himself, summoning Malone to the scientist’s country home. The telegraph ominously tells him to bring oxygen.

When Malone arrives at the professor’s house, he finds that Challenger has arranged a reunion of the four South American adventurers: Challenger and Malone, as well as soldier of fortune Lord John Roxton, and Challenger’s scientific foil, the hyper-critical Professor Summerlee. Challenger confirms to them that the earth is about to pass through a toxic belt in the ether, which is certain to kill all life. But by remaining in Mrs. Challenger’s air-tight room with a few tanks of oxygen, this small group can remain alive just a little longer. Watching through the window, which looks out onto a nearby village, they will observe humanity’s end.

The Cosmos Is Not Our Friend

Poison-belt-strand-april-1913-2The central, fatalistic theme of the book is captured in a key metaphor proposed by Challenger in his letter to the London papers. Our planet, along with the others of our solar system, are like a handful of corks dropped into the Atlantic ocean:

“The corks drift slowly from day to day with the same conditions all round them. If the corks were sentient we could imagine that they would consider these conditions to be permanent and assured. But we, with our superior knowledge, know that many things might happen to surprise the corks. They might possibly float up against a ship, or a sleeping whale, or become entangled in seaweed. In any case, their voyage would probably end by being thrown up on the rocky coast of Labrador…

“A third-rate sun, with its rag tag and bobtail of insignificant satellites, we float under the same daily conditions towards some unknown end, some squalid catastrophe which will overwhelm us at the ultimate confines of space, where we are swept over an etheric Niagara or dashed upon some unthinkable Labrador.”

In other words, the universe is a big, dangerous place, and we have no guarantee of safe passage.

BerkleyF1203As Challenger and his friends sit in the oxygen-saturated room, they watch people and animals outside fall victim to the poisonous ether, and discuss the meaning of the end of the world. Although physically these veteran adventurers are helpless, Challenger argues that mentally they should continue the fight until the end: “The ideal scientific mind should be capable of thinking out a point of abstract knowledge in the interval between its owner falling from a balloon and reaching earth.” Whether anyone will know or care about that point of abstract knowledge afterwards is something Challenger is not so sure about.

As they await death, the characters discuss many questions whose previously well-accepted answers were now uncertain a the increasingly scientific age of Edwardian Britain. The discoveries of scientists from Darwin through Einstein had revealed a cosmos very different from the comfortably Christian one that had been taken for granted. (In fact, Einstein’s theory of relativity had already rendered obsolete the idea behind Doyle’s catastrophe scenario. The universal ether – a super-fine medium through which all light and matter moved – was no longer accepted as real.)

These discoveries are the implicit backdrop to the characters’ discussions. Will there be life after death? Will life evolve on earth again? Is human life not the purpose of creation? At one point, Professor Sommerlee challenges Challenger’s human-centric view of the cosmos:

“You seem to to take it for granted, Challenger,” said Summerlee, “that the object for which this world was created was that it should produce and sustain human life.”

“Well sir, and what object do you suggest?” asked Challenger, bristling at the least hint of Contradiction.

“Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon.”

It’s hard to maintain that conceit when on a beautifully clear day the entire human species faces sudden extinction.

The Narrow Path of Material Existence (SPOILERS)

574px-Poison-belt-strand-may-1913-4Careful readers will note that right from the beginning, Malone’s narrative seems to be describing the earth’s passage through the poison belt as something that has already happened. Almost all end of the world stories are about the survivors, and The Poison Belt is no exception. As their last oxygen tank runs out, Challenger and his friends are ready to give themselves up to the poisoned ether. They smash the window to let in the outside air… and they find that the crisis has passed. They have survived.

In the last section of the book, they drive through London, now empty, silent, and littered with bodies. Their situation is now almost more awful than dying – what is their purpose now, the five of them in an empty world? It turns out that the answer is dealt with in yet one more plot twist that I won’t spoil.

Malone ends his narrative with the lesson to be drawn from the disaster of the poison belt: it is a “demonstration of how narrow is the path of our material existence and what abysses may lie upon either side of it.”

However, the abyss into which Europe plunged the year following The Poison Belt was one that humans dug for themselves.

Read more entries in my post-apocalyptic science fiction series, and my other science fiction reviews.

Image credits: Art from the original 1913 magazine publication of The Poison Belt from the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, with original story illustrations by Harry Rountree. Cover, 1966 Berkeley Medallion edition by uncredited artist, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

 

 


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Post-apocalyptic, Science Fiction

Sunday Science Poem: Darwin and Happy Endings

Wisława Szymborska’s “Consolation” (2002)
henri_rousseau_-_fight_between_a_tiger_and_a_buffaloEvolution has always been more controversial socially than scientifically. After Darwin published the Origin, the idea that all species descended from common ancestors was quickly accepted by most biologists (though his proposed mechanism of evolution, natural selection, remained controversial until the 20th century). Socially, however, evolution was and remains difficult for many people to swallow. The literalist beliefs of religious fundamentalists of course conflict with evolution. But even among those who don’t have a particular religious axe to grind, discomfort is not uncommon. Evolution in practice is brutal: we posses our unique adaptations – our brains, our opposable thumbs, our ability to talk, to socialize, to feel, see, and touch – thanks to the selective death of billions of organism over eons.

In her hilarious poem “Consolation”, the late Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska ironically contrasts the brutality of the real world in which evolution plays out, with the romantic world we construct for ourselves. She portrays Darwin, the great thinker who first grasped the harsh reality of evolution, as someone who escapes by reading novels with only happy endings.
Consolation

Darwin.
Supposedly for relaxation he read novels.
But he had a requirement:
they couldn't end sadly.
If he happened on one,
he flung it furiously in the fire.

True or not –
I gladly believe it.

Roaming in his mind over so many times and places
looking back on all the extinct species,
such triumphs of strong over weak,
so many tests of survival,
sooner or later all in vain,
that at least in fiction
and its micro-scale
he had a right to expect a happy ending.

And so necessarily: sunrays behind a cloud,
lovers together again, kin reconciled,
doubts dissolved, faith rewarded,
fortunes recovered, treasures dug up,
neighbors regret their mulishness,
good names restored, greed put to shame,
old maids married to respectable ministers,
schemers expelled to the other hemisphere,
forgers of documents cast down the stairs,
seducers of virgins hurrying to altars
orphans taken in, widows embraced,
pride humbled, wounds mended,
prodigal sons invited to the table,
the cup of bitterness poured into the sea,
tissues wet with tears of reconciliation,
universal singing and music-making,
and the puppy Fido,
lost already in the first chapter,
let him run home again
and bark joyfully.

Translation from the Polish by Michael A. White (2016)
Image: “Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo”, Henri Rousseau (1908), via Wikimedia Commons.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition, Uncategorized Tagged: evolution, science poetry, Sunday Poem

I dare you to convince me this isn’t decent science journalism

Comedian Nikki Glaser has a new show on Comedy Central, Not Safe, focused on sex in pop culture. The second episode contained a segment called “Studies Show” which invited panelists to riff off the results of sex research. At the end, Glaser provided a stingingly accurate commentary on the way journalists the media apply the results of individual studies on hot button topics too broadly and which aligns well with Mike’s analysis of the challenges of scientific research:

I hope you learned something, but, if not, no big deal. They’ll be contradicted by new studies next week. – Nikki Glaser

 


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Comedy Central, Nikki Glaser, Not Safe, science, science journalism

Lise Meitner

I’m taking a writing class at the moment, and one of the assignments was to write a profile about Lise Meitner:

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn

On Christmas Eve, 1938, sitting on a tree trunk in the snow in Sweden, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch figured out the mechanism of nuclear fission. They had gone for a walk during a family holiday to discuss a letter Meitner had received from her colleague Otto Hahn. He asked for her opinion on a strange scientific phenomenon he had discovered.

Until a few months earlier, Meitner and Hahn had worked closely together at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) in Berlin, where they studied the effect of bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons.

Meitner had moved to Berlin shortly after completing her doctorate degree in her birth city of Vienna. She was one of the first women to reach this level of academia, and encountered some archaic attitudes and ideas: in Berlin, she worked unsalaried for a few years, and was occasionally expected to entertain the wives of visiting physicists while the men talked about science.

During the three decades she worked in Berlin, Meitner made Germany her home, but when the Second World War edged closer, it was no longer safe for Jewish people in Germany. With her piercing brown eyes, dark frizzy hair and pronounced nose, Meitner’s heritage was unmistakable. She fled to Sweden in July 1938, with help from an international group of friends and colleagues from the physics community.

Now, six months later, Hahn’s curious letter had reached her. He described how, after another round of shooting neutrons at uranium, he discovered barium in the reaction mixture. Where had it come from? Pondering this question with Frisch during their winter walk, Meitner realised that the neutron in Hahn’s experiment must have split the uranium atom in half. This would leave two smaller atoms in its place, which would continue to produce even smaller atoms, and generate large amounts of energy.

The discovery came at a dangerous time: Could the Nazis use this technology to create a weapon? The USA quickly launched the Manhattan Project to ensure they were the first to build an atomic bomb. Meitner was invited to join, but she refused. She didn’t want to be part of such a violent application of her discovery – not even to defeat the enemy who had chased her out of Germany.

After the war, Meitner spent several months in the USA as part of a visiting professorship. She was named Woman of the Year there, in 1946, and was interviewed by Eleanor Roosevelt for NBC radio.  Roosevelt told her: “We are proud of your contributions as a woman in science”.

Meitner continued to inspire women in science throughout her retirement years. A photo taken at Bryn Mawr, in 1959, shows her sitting casually on the steps of a university building. Her frizzy hair now grey, but with the same dark piercing eyes, she is surrounded by students in long floral skirts who have come to hear her fascinating stories.

Maybe she told them about the time she went for a walk with her nephew, through the snow in a cold Swedish winter. Or maybe they asked her about that other winter in Sweden, when in December 1945, Hahn – and Hahn alone – received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the award ceremony in Stockholm.

It’s an oversight that’s still often mentioned, especially in the context of continuing challenges to retain women at the top level of science.  But even without a Nobel Prize, Meitner was well-respected, and happy to sit down for a chat about her work: in the snow with her nephew, on the radio with a former president’s wife, or casually outside on the steps with admiring students.

Image: Meitner and Hahn. Public domain, via Wikimedia. Other image described in the text was not free to use, so click that text for a link.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition, This Mortal Coil

Science for the People: Good Thinking

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415z6goyhwl-_sl160_This week, Science for the People is trying to better understand our human brain, it’s quirky ways and unexpected processes, so we can use it better in daily life. We’ll speak with Guy Harrison, author of Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser, about how to cope with our brain’s built-in pitfalls. And we’ll speak to Ben Lillie about The Story Collider, a podcast that blends science and storytelling to show how science touches everyone, scientist and layperson alike.

Science for the People is now part of the Skepchick Network.

Don’t forget to support the Science for the People on Patreon to keep the sciencey goodness flowing toward your ear holes.

*Josh provides research help to Science for the People and is, therefore, completely biased.


Filed under: Follies of the Human Condition Tagged: Ben Lillie, Brain, Guy Harrison, Podcast, science for the people, The Story Collider