LastDayOfSabbatical

Last day of Sabbatical

So, just to catch you up. Two weeks ago we had a splendid “dock party” for Siwash. Here’s her cake made by the most wonderful bakers at Angel Maid in Culver City.

It was all very festive, and yet sad. We were at the dock that used to belong to my Mom and Dad, but that is now for sale. Everything is in flux. And yet somehow, all those present felt a palpable comfort in being able to gather and muse about this old boat that survives everyone.
Science is starting to ascend through all the bubbly stuff of life, as it reliably does. Unanswered questions on several fronts still titillate my students and me.

Here’s a cool one. Kind of a research update from the weeks we spent on Catalina Island last Fall.

Remember, if you will, that our hypothesis to explain the value of sensitization, the increase in defensive behaviors that we observe in sea hares following a lobster attack, is that this hypersensitivity helps protect the sea hare from future attack. By the way, we got the original research, showing sensitization after lobster attack, published in a cool, highly visible journal, the Journal of Neuroscience.

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/33/11028?etoc

To me, this paper was fairly straightforward. Entice lobsters to attack sea hares. Separate them before too much damage is done, and then test the sea hares for enhanced reflex withdrawal. No big deal, really.

But this paper has made more of splash than I ever thought possible. Lots of folks emailed me to congratulate us. The paper may get mentioned in other journals as a “hot” paper. Pretty cool. The best part is that the research was performed by so many students over several years.

Ok. But showing sensitization still doesn’t answer the question of what good it does for sea hares! Does it really help sea hares protect themselves from future attacks? Well, Dan and John and I went back out to Catalina Island a few weeks ago and actually tested this hypothesis!

We put out the same enclosure cages we used before. Then we went back to the lab and marked sea hares with little plastic tags. Then we gave half of the sea hares “standard” electric shock treatment to induce sensitization. Then we planted sensitized and naïve animals in a cage. Finally we did our usual dive protocol with bait sea hares in order to identify attacking lobsters. We planted a hungry lobster in each of the two cages, and checked back in the next day to see which sea hares the lobsters preferred. We hypothesized that the naive sea hares would be preferred because they were not pre-sensitized.

As so often happens in science, our hypothesis got roundly defeated. Every one of the 5 lobsters that ate 1 or two sea hares consumed ONLY the SENSITIZED ones. Previous sensitizing attack seems to make sea hares more, not less, vulnerable to subsequent attack.

Now dear readers, you can email me or post ideas to explain these results. Clearly this professor has no clue what good sensitization is doing these slugs!

On this note, we end the sabbatical. Perhaps I’ll continue with the Wright lab’s research adventures, but we shall see.
Thanks for reading this stuff. Writing about research and life clears my head in ways I still don’t really understand.

Two Parties 50 Years Apart

7 August 2010.

100 years old, and still kicking.

How did it happen that I’m now the custodian of a 100 year old boat? I am still trying to figure that out.

The way I see it, I may be the legal owner, but Siwash is just passing through me, like she did my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father.

We celebrated her 100th anniversary at Catalina last weekend, and it was very cool.

50 years ago, Mom and Dad, much younger than I am now (33 and 38, I think), rowed all around Howland’s cove, dressed up in 1910’s garb to invite everyone. Bird and I did the same thing for last Saturday. Note the dingkitten is the same in both photos.






Here’s Dad reading his proclamation about Siwash in 1960 (note Grandad farthest to the left, drinking, and Mom right at Dad’s knees lighting a cigarette.



Here I am giving the anniversary proclamation in 2010.



Here’s Siwash, loaded to her waterline with well-wishers (photo by Fin Beven, a legend in his own right).

Here's Siwash's intrepid crew!

And, of course, just to show that Siwash is sailing as hard as ever, here’s Bird “holding her down” in hurricane gulch on the way home.

If you missed this party (or if you liked the rum and want some more), you can still come to the "docksider" party next Saturday starting at 2PM (and you are all invited).

100 years is a long time ago.

A few months longer ago than that, my dad’s dad was a snotty-nosed teenager hanging out in the cockpit of a new yacht being built right down in Wilmington harbor, the guts of the Los Angeles harbor area then, and now.

The new yacht had not yet been finished. Grandad said he could see right through from the cockpit to the bow. The yacht was launched that August. This weekend we celebrate that launching with a “cocktail party” at Howland's Landing on Catalina Island.

This yacht came by her name in a funny way. The builder, Charlie Fulton, had just attached the transom (the board that covers the aftermost part of the boat). Some disgruntled worker in the yard had had some kind of issue against Charlie, and chalked the moniker “Siwash”, which was a slang (semi-deprecatory) expression in those days for someone with native American blood.

Charlie had, indeed, some native American blood in his veins, but he also knew what every sailor does: changing the name of a boat is bad luck. So he PAINTED the name clearly on the transom.

Siwash is in my blood too.

We will be handing out rum drinks to anyone who comes aboard. Best not to wait too long after the sun is over the yard-arm. Sailors develop a might thirst by the time noon comes round.

Grandad’s dad had already given him a 28 foot sailboat when he was thirteen. Now less than 4 years later he wanted a 47 footer! He worked on his dad every day for more than a year. When Charlie Fulton went bankrupt, Grandad’s dad, Walter Savage Wright, a successful lawyer, couldn’t resist. He bought the boat and it hasn’t been outside the family since.

Here’s a challenge. I challenge anyone to identify a presently floating yacht that was built in Southern California longer ago than 100 years. I’ll give you a rum drink, and you can stay aboard for dinner!

For those of you that can’t make it to Catalina this Saturday afternoon, come instead to our dock party on the 14th of August. Contact me for details!

Memes and the celebration of life

Mom displaying the genes (but not the memes!) of her first born, Howard C.


24July2010
Death is really just like a candle coming to the end of its wick. The flame gets weaker and weaker till finally, poof, it disappears, leaving behind something new, the smoke of the extinguished flame.

When my mom died, she too left a cloud of smoke. Some of this smoke is made up of “memes.”

A meme is kind of like a gene. It is a cultural memory. Language is a repository of memes. The old memes are just the language, the new memes are slang.

Any “culturally transmitted” behavior is a meme. For example, sometime after the milk deliverers in England figured out how to put aluminum-foil lids on the milk they delivered, small birds (blue tits) figured out how to pull off the lids. Each tit didn’t employ his/her own trial and error process to learn how to remove the lid. Rather, he/she watched other birds successfully get the tops off, and then imitated them. Behavioural ecologists tracked the spread of this cool meme from its source, all over England. This is a classic meme. It is a culturally transmitted idea that works.

We all leave meme’s behind when we die. One of my favorites from Mom is what she says when things are getting intense: “Oh, gosh”.

But at Mom’s “celebration of life” (this term is a classic meme that tons of individuals picked up on and re-used) I was amazed at the richness of the meme’s attributed to her.

For example, people were uniformly impressed by Mom’s frankness. This honesty sometimes hurt, but ultimately, it gave comfort because it meant Mom wasn’t hiding anything (this is the extreme version of that meme). I kind of expected this one, and it was widely expressed by her near and dear.

But what surprised me was the apparent strength of Mom’s memes. Women referred to Mom as a role model! Really? My Mom? Mother of 3 boys? A role model for young women? Yes, indeed! Lots of women (young and old) told their stories of how Mom was their role model. You could see other women in the room involuntarily nodding their heads. Everyone saw the nodding, thereby strengthening the meme even further.

I had NO IDEA that Mom’s memes would be so strong. Pretty cool, really. From that extinguished flame came some meme smoke hardly visible (at least to me) while the flame survived.

It is kind of sad, but true, that most memes, like most genes, eventually go extinct. Virtually all memes that do survive lose the connection of the meme to its originator. Exceptions include, e.g., Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?”; Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”; Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Yet, some memes survive for a very long time. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand what I am writing.

But the fact remains that most of us will die without leaving many memes behind. Most of our memes will be unrecognizably swallowed up by the culture we live in, or perhaps just go extinct on their own.

Oh, gosh.

I don’t know how long Mom’s memes will survive. But, there are at least some of us living today, that won’t forget her crazy notions.

Trust the trail

The Friday Harbor Marine Laboratory, where I am doing research right now, is the most amazing place. Besides all the water and the diversity of sea creatures, there is this drop-dead wow beauty. It is set on a peninsula of maybe a couple of square miles of just amazing old-growth pine forest. They have a hiking trail that goes through this forest. Everywhere you look there are giant pine trees, but even more amazing are the fallen trees. No one can take anything out of the forest, so the fallen trees just get covered with moss and gradually rot.

So I’ve got my running togs on (I forgot my hoody in California, so it’s just my shoes and socks and shorts and t-shirt). First day. Jogging up the main trail. I see a sign “Shoreline trails.” Yup, that’s the one for me. I’m trying to keep a decent pace (cause I’ve been lazy recently and not run enough, so I’m trying to compensate), but the trail gets thinner and bushier, and I have to bend down low to get through the underbrush, and suddenly I realize that it is just a deer trail. Not meant for humans at all. Then I realize that this trail is not trustable, unless you are a deer. I reach the shore and turn left, go for 15 min or so, flush a bald eagle out of a tree (I’m not kidding here, the national bird, huge, beautiful). But now there is really no trail at all. So I realize I probably ought to head back. So I decide to walk through this old-growth woods without a trail (I could try to retrace my outward path but nah). It is overcast and the sun is almost down anyway. Ok, I’ll just walk back in the general thataway direction and find the trail I was on.

Man there are some stickery, beautiful, thorny, shrubs in those woods. I’m getting my legs cut up pretty bad, and I’m going pretty damn slow. Nobody anywhere. I’m not sure if I’m going the right direction. This is not going too well. And then I start looking for fallen trees aligned in the direction I want to go, and getting up on them, and avoiding the brambles that way. But some of these trees are 10 or 15 feet off the ground, and I become aware that if I fall off one and break my leg I’m in a pickle.

So I’m up on a huge tree trunk about to traverse its length. And then I stop. What the fuck are you so nervous about, Bill? You are in the most beautiful woods you’ve ever seen and you're worried cause there is no trail. What is wrong with you? Breath! Look at this place. Just look around. This is amazing.

But I can’t shake being nervous about what is going to happen to me. I get tangled up in briars and nettles, and it goes on and on. Getting up on fallen trees, balancing and testing them for rot and going very slowly along. I realize I am not as agile as I used to be. Not so much spring. Not so much balance. I’m dying. We are all dying. We trust this trail we are on, but ultimately at the end it betrays us. We just don’t know when. Maybe today is my day.

But maybe it isn’t.

Whoops. There’s the trail. Of course it is. So I turn right, heading for the main trail, which I will take back to the labs, leaving this existential crisis in the nettles. So I’m walking along expecting the main trail any time now. Then I meet a couple of students from the labs. We’re talking, and they inform me that I’m actually already on the main trail. I've been walking in the opposite direction from the labs. Oh. Oh well, I might as well continue this direction then.

Jeezus, this story is long. The point is. That even when you’re on the fucking trail, you might be going the wrong direction. So stop being so damn nervous and look around! It’s so easy. Just look around. Just absorb the scene. Breath. Your trail will end soon enough. Just breath.

The earth breathed

My mom died at 2 AM this morning.
The earth breathed, and the heavens moved over a notch.
Fare thee well, Mom.

Friday Harbor Labs.

Sitting on a bus creeping through downtown Seattle on its way to Anacortes, a port on the east side of the Puget Sound. There I will climb aboard a ferry that will take me to one of the most amazing marine labs ever.

I first fell in love with Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories (FHL) in Fall, 1985, a month after defending my Ph.D. thesis at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I had managed to finagle a 1-year FHL postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Richard Strathmann, one of the most creative larval biologists of all time.

My family (daughter, age 9; son, age 6; wife, and I) just rolled into Friday Harbor, and I started coming in every day to do research.

It was unbelievably cool. I became a part of the small family of scientists that work at FHL year round. My job was to do research there, and when summer came around, to organize the weekly seminars. Not a bad job. I was in heaven.

Summer comes to FHL, and there is a steady stream of really interesting, deeply involved scientists. The people I met that year keep popping up in the who’s who of science (is there such a thing?). Many of them have become long-term friends.

But just the place, itself, is magic. The ocean there is just teeming with wildlife. A visit to the tidepools is just enough to blow your mind. Gobs of kelp of myriad different kinds. Huge chitons, big-ass barnacles, limpets of all shapes and flavors. Our friend, David Duggins, was skippering the research vessel, and he would put down a net and bring it up with hundreds of different species. In one trawl. It was like the jewels in the dragons cave. Just grabbing a handful of a net full of marine creatures; creeping and crawling all over the place, was breath-taking.

So here I am about to go to be part of the summer scientist influx (actually I’m part of the “pre-summer” crowd).

I am meeting up with crazy Leonid again. We are returning to our research on slug brains.

Now I’ve just arrived and found my studio apartment. Here’s the view outside my window. Pretty cool, eh? Work starts tomorrow. Tonight I sleep.

The intimacy of care-giving. Dear moments.

I said goodbye to Mom a couple of days ago. My little brother had just arrived to take over the night watches. She barely registered my adieu, which is a good thing, because I would have melted if she had fussed. I had told her repeatedly during the previous nights that we were changing sons and I would be gone for three weeks. This interval pretty much guarantees I won’t see her alive again.

So, four separate watches (around 1 week each) I had, each one with a Mom in a very different state. I will always remember these watches. It was the first time my Mom and I had been so engaged since I was a little boy in her care. The fact that I was taking care of her (rather than she taking care of me) hardly matters. The emotional connection was very strong. The intimacy of these nights was really good for a couple of reasons.

First, the intimacy reminded me that I really do love my mom. You kind of forget this when your life is forging ahead and she is doing just fine in her own life. When an adult child gets together with his parent in normal circumstances it is usually just about exchanging narratives about your lives; her Alaska trip; my research trip to Catalina.

But now, there we were, Mom and I, many nights in a row. Physically engaged in a common project; the task of taking care of her immediate needs. There were some really cool moments during this project.

One thing I really liked was how she responded to being uncomfortable (e.g., a new pain, or getting tangled up in the bed-sheets). “Oh gosh,” she says. Nothing more. Just, “Oh, gosh.”

I mean, I would be saying “Goddamnit, I’m stuck again. Or “Shit I can’t move my foot.” But Mom always says simply, “Oh gosh.” It really sounds like what she might have said as a 7-year old. It sounds like something my granddaughter would say.

Another cool moment happened on my fourth watch (ending two days ago).

Mom was going through many long periods without saying anything. Now and then, I would ask her if she wanted to sip some water or “liquid food” through a straw. “No thanks.” Or, “Yes that would be nice.” But mostly she was very quiet. Sometimes, perhaps much of the time, this was because she was checked out, maybe perusing what was coming, maybe simply sleeping. But the quiet of my last night with Mom, middle of the night, was broken when she suddenly said,

“That bottle of beer looks really good.”

Bottle of beer?

I put my head next to hers and peered the same direction as she was looking. Perhaps there was something there that looked like a beer bottle. Nope, nothing there.

“Do you see a bottle of beer there, Mom?”

“No, but I’d like to.”

This just completely cracked me up. It was pure Mom.

“Would you like to split a bottle of beer with me, Mom?”

“That’s a great idea, Bill.”

So I poured her a glass of beer from the fridge (this was the only time she drank beer during the entire two months since I came back from Costa Rica).

We toasted each other. Mom used a bendy straw, and sucked her beer right down to the bottom.

“I’m going to miss you, Mom.”

“I’m going to miss you too, dearie.”

Breathing

I hate jogging. All I feel when I run is the pain. What’s the point? And still I do it. I’m on sabbatical and there is a part of me that knows that the exercise rules and habits I adopt now might add decades of quality to my life.

I found a soccer ball while on a beach run a few months ago. Now, I push it ahead of me when I run on the beach. It makes me forget my pain. I kick it as far along the beach as I can (not very far; I played my first real soccer game in my 30’s), and run after it. Sometimes I kick it crooked, and it starts to roll down the beach slope into the ocean. NOooooo. I can’t let it go. This ball is saving my life! I sprint to catch it before the briny does. Almost every time I succeed, but the effort creates such an oxygen debt that I stand there at the seaside, arms akimbo, breathing hard, just trying to catch my breath, softly kicking the ball with my foot straight toward the high-tide line, and walking to where it rolls back down. Over and over I repeat this little kick-and-retrieve exercise till I catch my breath, and then start kicking it down the beach again.

Breathing hard.

Breathing hard is not what it used to be. I used to think, shit, what the hell did I do so wrong that I’m breathing so hard? I really blew it. Whatever I was doing, stop doing it.

But now I realize that breathing hard (short of a coronary) is exactly what you must do, at least once a day to keep from going down hill.

The last few weeks, I’ve been studying my Mom’s breathing. She’s going through bouts of breathing really hard. Not the good kind. This is the breathing hard that lung and liver cancer make you do.

Last week she was tossing and turning in her bed. My older brother describes it as her just wanting to crawl out of her own skin. Kicks off the bedclothes, breathing so hard you think she will burst. Jumps up. I gotta pee. Then she quiets down. Then she gets cold. I put the covers back on her and the cycle starts over again.

But the last few nights, she has taken another ratchet downhill. She is not getting up anymore. She can’t. She’s too weak to stand.

But still I listen to her breathe. Soft, peaceful; followed by labored, heavy, pained breathing. Cycles go on and off. Maybe 5-10 minute interval.

The other day, in spite of my best effort, my poorly kicked soccer ball rolled into the sea. It immediately floated away. I watched for a moment hoping it would come back, but I soon realized that the wind and current and waves were taking my ball farther out.

Somehow, this made me totally desperate. I swam out after this silly ball, soaking my brand new running shoes and shorts, totally ruining the rest of my run. But I saved the ball.

I still have it.

Honored Travelers

These days, I am escorting an honored traveler. I am escorting her as far as I can.

I’ve done this before. Decades ago, two honored travelers came into this world. but they came from the other direction. Through the membrane between death and life they burst, like magicians appearing in a cloud of smoke. Then, they were the honored ones.

First, my daughter; then, my son. They emerged completely helpless, and their mom and I did everything humanly possible to keep them alive and comfortable as they moved away from that membrane.

Now, some 30-plus years later I am escorting another honored traveler, my mother.

She is traveling through that same membrane, but this time in the opposite direction. As before, my job is to perform the nitty-gritty tasks on this side of the membrane. The feeding, the butt-cleaning, the consoling. This nitty-gritty work is strikingly similar to 30 years ago; so is its purpose, which is to keep the transition true for the traveler.

My kids needed that nitty-gritty work to start them down the path of the living. My mom needs it so that she can cleanly, gracefully, make the transition to the dead.

Obviously different, birth and death; but being the escort is striking similar in both cases. Somehow in both cases, there is a strong connection to what it means to be human. This is what we do, we humans. I find a palpable sense in both cases that the nasty thankless work I am doing is bigger than I am. I can’t really explain it. But I’ve been struck by the similarity of these transitions. When things start getting really out of control, you don’t say screw it I’m out of here. You say ok, I am going to do this. That’s all there is to it.

There just aren’t that many activities where that mind-set ascends so clearly. So, yes, the feeding, the cleaning, the changing; everything; is all ridiculously, amazingly, similar. But even more similar is the feeling I have while I’m actually doing these things. I think in both cases I feel a sense of awe to be escorting an honored traveler.

Peer Review

During the last 4 weeks or so, I’ve been (in the background) engaging our “Scientific Peer Review System” in an effort to get some of the research my collaborators and I have been doing out into the literature. In short we are trying to get a paper published.

Peer review is an amazing process. It is frustrating, maddening, enlightening, inspiring all at once. It is the bane of my existence, and it is my only claim to legitimacy. It is the core of science.

Many of my colleagues spend unending hours railing against the anonymous reviewers of a manuscript or grant proposal. If only the reviewers had read the paper! If only they actually knew the literature! If only they weren’t so caught up in the fashion of the day, they could see the work’s brilliance and originality.

I submitted a paper a while ago with my first undergraduate collaborator at Chapman as a first author. She did a great job of learning a new technique, of coming into the lab day after day and running experiment after experiment. She got “significant results”, which means that she found that something is going on. She wrote a first draft. I rewrote it, then she rewrote my rewrite, and back and forth for, well years. The data are good, the experiments “worked”, but the question of what they mean was not really clear. This is the critical question of all science: What do the data mean?

She got into graduate school in Japan, a very gutsy move, and has learned junkloads of new science there. She is fully committed to the science pathway, a commitment that is not for the faint-hearted. The second author is also presently in graduate school, and going great guns. She is also a toughie.

So that kind of toughness breeds reciprocal toughness (from the undergraduate mentor, me). We have to usher this study into the light of day. Into the light of peer review. Bright, startling, hot light. This is really hard. Like a sharp rock.

Because we had presented the data in a variety of scientific meetings, we had a pretty good sense of what the data meant.

Our peer reviewers did not share that sense. The paper is 11 pages of double-spaced text. The critiques we got back from the three reviewers covered 16 pages. All the good and all the bad of the peer-review system is throbbing in those 16 pages.

Science is not for sissies. This kind of a review makes you just want to beam the fuck up. Get me out of here. Give me a real job. Don’t make me look at this paper again. Really? I have to get in there and entertain every one of the 16 pages of small and large criticisms?

Yep. That’s right. That’s what you have to do. Stop whining and get to work.

And now we are almost done with that. Every single critique, large and small is in our 10-page (single-spaced) response letter. The manuscript itself has been reworked, not beyond recognition, but to the point of “wow, that is a shift.”

Revising a manuscript is a little like the rough side of being married. Someone, more or less just like you, doesn’t agree with what you are doing and thinks you should change it. If you don’t respond at all, there will be consequences (you won’t get the damn thing published!). Doing nothing is not an option. So you grab each aggravating, sometimes embarrassing (it isn’t uncommon for a critique to make you realize how little you actually know), comment, and work it. Think about it. Look up articles that deal with it. Write and rewrite.

Then a little magic happens. As you get more familiar with it, you start to see the critique for what it actually is. Not for what the damage it can do you, or for the biased perspective of its perpetrator, but for the strength that it can give your work. To know the way 3 or 4 smart people think about your work is a gift from the gods. It makes it much stronger. You have to preserve its core with love, but these changes are little miracles of science.

So. All that is fine and dandy, but will the paper get published? Stay tuned.

Teamwork

All hands! All hands on deck! Let’s go.

This is the start of a night-time sailboat drill. I write “all hands” cause I know that is the cry of the crew on deck. Yet I have no memory of hearing it from my bed. I’m being pulled out of the deepest sleep into a flurry of coordinated, precision teamwork. I am still sound asleep for the first few moments as I head for the main hatch. Got to take down the spinnaker, quick before the wind tears it to shreds.

But here’s the thing. I’m not in a sailboat race here. I am taking care of my dying mom at night. Her labored breathing on the monitor cues me that she needs help. I am rushing through the door that separates us, not sure what I will find.

Night time is scary and beautiful and tranquil and terrifying. All at once.

Just like a sailboat race, I’m called out of the deepest sleep.

Just like a sailboat race, I don’t exactly know what is going to greet me as I come onto the scene. Is she rising to get out of bed, is she out of bed, did she make it to the commode without me, did she fall on her face in a pool of pee and anguish?

Just like a sailboat race, I will need to integrate myself into a working team (my mom and her addled brain), who may not be doing things the way I would. Ok, let’s get you over to the pottie. Mom, you’ve got to move your feet just a little bit (the pottie is right next to her bed). That’s it. Good. Close enough. Now sit down. Good… she pees… The crisis settles a bit. Everyone knows what to do next. Let’s put on a new set of undies, Mom. Here they are. Mom, you awake? Ok, then, let me get it started. Lift your foot. Step in. I’m going to pull it up a little. Ok. How bout you stand up now. Mom are you awake? Let’s stand up so you can go back to bed. That’s it. I’ve got your nightie, so pull up your panties… that’s it…back toward the bed…put your butt down, Mom… lie back. Bella (the cat), you’re in the way… brush her away... Ok, Mom I’m going to lift your legs onto the bed. There we go. Good. ..pulling on the covers. You OK, Mom?

I look out at the moonlight on the water outside her window. It is perfectly calm out there. Not a ripple on the bay. A beautiful May night.

It makes me consider what I’m doing here. That’s a long story.

Good night, Mom. I love you. Don’t forget to call me when you need to go again.

Just like a sailboat race, this campaign of care; the nightly pattern of peeing and pantie changes; will end.

Just like a sailboat race, I look forward to the end.

Just like a sailboat race, I know I’m going to miss it when it is over.

Unlike a sailboat race, when it is over, my brothers and I are going to quietly let the vessel sink. And step back onto our own vessels, and sail on.

Adrenalin

Adrenalin

Just got back from presenting the lobster attack-in-reserve story to a bunch of evolutionary biologists at UC Santa Cruz.

I was an undergraduate there a million years ago and did a (for me) seminal piece of research under an amazing Marine Biologist, John Pearse, who, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, encouraged me to keep on being a marine biologist. Instead, I sailed with my first wife and big brother and his first wife on their little boat for more than a year.

Anyway, back to my visit to UCSC on Tuesday. Giving a talk is really nerve racking, especially if your data are new, as yet unpublished. Not sure if your story will survive the scrutiny of peer review. Plus, my night work taking care of Mom had depleted most of my concentration stores. But I managed to get it together, in the San Jose Airport actually, where the quiet and high-speed internet are awesome.

I was hosted by one of the coolest scientists on the planet, Jim Estes. This guy studies the ecological effects of cute little furry sea otters. They, like lobsters and sheephead inside the reserve, are what we call keystone predators. They eat urchins, which if unchecked, will eat a kelp forest right down to the bed rock. Add a population of sea otters to an urchin barren, and within a couple of years, viola, a beautiful kelp bed full of big fish and lots of new invertebrates.

The chair of the department at UCSC, Pete Raimondi, and another faculty, Mark Carr have pretty much written the book on marine reserves, so my coming in and telling all these guys that “it’s the behavior, stupid”, was a little unnerving.

Very unnerving actually. Giving a talk is a little like what I imagine rock musicians go through. Lots of adrenaline pumping through your veins. Your are up there naked, vulnerable. The scene in “Blues Brothers” comes to mind; when the band is pelted by beer bottles and anything else the angry mob can get their hands on.

Back to the sail-boat ride with my brother. When it was all over (January, 1975), my first wife and I were kind of shell-shocked. Months on end of idyllic sailing and surfing were over.

“So,” I said, “What do you want to do with the rest of our life?”
“I dunno,” says she. “What do you want to do?”
“Well,” says I, “I think I want to be either a rock musician or a marine biologist.”
To which she answers, “Well your voice isn’t very good.”

That is how I came to be a marine biologist.

But last Wednesday noon I felt the adrenalin surge of a rock musician going to the cyclone-fence bar for a gig.

But the mobs liked it! They asked great questions. Made me think. Made me wish I could be at a graduate University where lots of good scientists are talking about their work all the time. Saw some pretty stressed-out graduate students, though, which reminds me why I like Chapman so much. Everything is a trade-off

Looking to the Side

My Dad taught me how to find a distant light house when at sea on dark nights. “Look” for it to the side of your gaze. Sounds weird, but it works. You can be staring right at a dim light and it isn’t there. Shift your gaze 10 degrees to the left, and pop, there it is.

My mom looks at her needs that way (-my words preceded by dash).

-Mom, do you have any pains?
No, I’m fine.
You know, I’ve kind of been wondering if my liver is stretching or something.
-Does your belly hurt?
No.
Well maybe a little.
-So, on our pain scale (1-2 tolerable, 10 excruciating) how would you rate it?
I don’t know.
-Really, Mom? Cmon, give me a number, so I know what kind of pain medicine to give you.
I told you I don’t know, Bill.
-Ok, is it a 7?
Oh, no.
-Ok, how bout 3?
Well, no, it is more than that.
-Ok. How bout a 5?
No, actually it’s a bit more.
-6?
No, more.
-How bout 7?
No, I already told you it isn’t that high.
-Ok, then it is a 6 ½. I’ll give you some Tylenol with codeine. Is that alright?
That would be fine.

Now, readers, I would ask you to be a little like my mom. Don’t just stare blindly at the fact that she is dying. Look to the side. If you talk to her or visit, make it seem spontaneous. The direct approach just makes everyone uncomfortable, and blinds the flow of information. Looking to the side opens up the channels. You can much better see the depth of things.

Why is there cancer?

Evolutionary biologists are constantly wondering why things are the way they are. I’ve bored you all with a rather esoteric example: Why would a slug lose its ability to learn?

Here’s another one, a little closer to home: Why wouldn’t the human body evolve mechanisms to fight cancer? Why hasn’t natural selection eliminated cancer long ago? Surely a mutation that prevented cancer would confer an advantage. This is pretty puzzling.

First, I have to hasten to say that our bodies DO have cancer fighting mechanisms. Lots of them. They are found at many different levels (molecular, cellular, immune system). These mechanisms do a really good job. It is actually quite amazing that we live so many decades. Such longevity is very rare in nature.

But why do OLD people get cancer more than young ones do? In fact why do old people get feeble at all? In short, why do we senesce? Surely individuals that don’t senesce should be better at surviving that those that do! Makes sense right? If you don’t senesce, you live longer cause you don't die of old age. But if you are smart (which I’m not), you realize that ,,, it depends!

One of the greats of evolutionary biology, George C. Williams realized this back in the 50’s! Williams proposed the idea of antagonistic pleiotropy.

This is a mouthful, but the idea is quite simple. These are genetic “deals with the devil.” If my actuarial table says I am on average going to be eaten by a saber-toothed cat sometime before my 30th birthday, then genes that improve my chances of fighting cancer when I’m in my 80s don’t do my lineage much good. They will not spread very quickly by natural selection.

On the other hand, if a mutation comes along that actually INCREASES my chances of dying of cancer in my 80’s, but, at the same time, ENHANCES my ability to fight saber-tooth tigers during my first 3 decades, this mutation it will have a big advantage. Cause the bad part of the deal (cancer in my 80s) is hardly ever seen (cause I’m usually already eaten by a saber-toothed tiger long before I’m 80), while the good side of the deal is ALWAYS realized. With my new mutation, I, and my descendents, are able to better avoid saber-toothed cats, thereby living on average 5 years longer till the grand ole age of 35 (and produce a couple of more kids). If we happen to be lucky and live to be 80, the devil takes us and we die of cancer. But overall, we have more babies than the lineages that didn’t get to take the deal, so we have more babies. Now each time one of these "deal-with-the-devil" mutations arises, natural selection takes the bait. Thus, lousy genes that kill us when we are old build up. Viola, senescence, i,e., ower fitness when we are old.

Williams posed this possibility as a very logical, very powerful hypothesis. Of course, in science, this doesn’t make it right.
More later.

A Gift

I’ve been given a gift from the gods. I am on sabbatical and my Mom is dying. This means I can arrange my work schedule so I can be with her. Functionally I can help by watching out for her at night. Metaphysically I can process her decline and maybe finally become a grown up.

Because I have to admit I have not really experienced death so much. I was at sea when my dad died. My grandparents’ deaths were pretty much hidden from me. My sweet wife was very much present for each of her two parents’ deaths, but I wasn’t really there. Although watching her live through those passages gave me a sense of what it is all about.
So here I am. I’m using you, mister blog, and you blog readers, as a crutch. Perhaps writing from the perspective of the professor-on-sabbatical that I am supposed to be will give me a stable platform.

Biologically, cancer is a strange affair. It is really all about a cell of your body staging a revolution; reverting to its ancestral state, a single cell trying to grow and divide faster than all the other competing cells in its neighborhood. Somehow, this cell manages to slip past a huge number of checks and brakes put up by your body to prevent this evolutionary reversal. These checks and brakes work very well when we are young, but they tend to wear out as we age. Seems like everything wears out as we age.

Actually, recent research is finding that cancer has a wide variety of forms. Remember me writing about the “transcriptome”? The list of all the genes that are activated in particular cells? Well, cell biologists are now frantically categorizing particular cancers by their transcriptomes. It seems that each clone of cancer cells (e.g., tumor), be it a lymphoma or brain cancer or colon cancer, has its own distinctive transcriptome. The hope is that by characterizing these cancers’ transcriptomes, we can ultimately design therapies, specific to each cancer, that can re-instate the discarded checks and brakes, and stop the cells from their incessant growing and dividing.

Most of you know this, that cancer is a multiheaded monster. Eventually, maybe even in my lifetime, scientists will know enough about how to fashion specific weapons for any ugly headed cancer cell that crops up.

But not in my mom’s lifetime.

Not in the brochure II

So I’ve been here with Mom for a week plus. I’m here during the nights, Milan, Mom’s caregiver is here during the days.

Mom is very weak, but still very much alive. She has received a steady stream of visitors. They all go away scratching their heads a bit. Mom is on hospice, meaning that she is not relying on medical doctors to help her fight her cancer. There’s way too much of it multiplying way too fast, and her 82 year-old frame cannot take the chemo. But she doesn’t act at all like a dying soul. So her friends leave their from these visits perplexed. They expect to see Death’s cold hand on her, but don't. She is kind of a live wire on a death bed.

But that cold hand is not far away. Her balance is deteriorating daily, her appetite is minimal, her breath is short, and her concentration episodic.

So, we are starting down the waterslide, and this one has no safety net.

Not in the brochure

I wrote the following around 10 days ago. I’ve delayed posting it till now.
_______________________________
Here it is, the 10th of March. My mom’s had cancer for 2 years. Now it is starting to get the better of her, as cancer so often does. She’s got it in her spleen, colon, lymph nodes, liver, and lung. That is a significant fraction of the viscera available to take down. She’s 82 years old, and gone through the gauntlet of chemotherapies, and this is where she is.

She is dying. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe next week, or the next week, or the following. We don’t know.

I arrived in Costa Rica, heard her voice on the telephone as she got worse, and realized I was in the wrong place.

I missed my dad’s death. I’m not going to miss my mom’s. I will be there with her. Somehow I have to suppress the dread of empathic recognition, and the palpable feeling of a hole where she will be exiting. Or maybe I can just live in all of it. But I will escort my mom out of here.

On the flight home, I sat on the plane with a young woman whose dad had died 3 years ago of Wegener’s disease. I think that is the name she used. I’ve never heard of it. Neither had she. She had only a few years before been let in on the fact that her mom had multiple sclerosis. So she and her sister and dad were all watching out for mom, when her dad got pneumonia as a consequence of his disease, and up and died. Now her mom is transitioning from barely walking to not walking.

This shit isn’t in the brochure.

I watched a Robert Dinero tear-jerker on the plane out of the corner of my eye. I saw it coming from a long way away and didn’t purchase the earphones; there would have been a flash flood if I had. This is a turbulent time in my life. Not a bucolic sabbatical, but a tumultuous one.

The director of the biological station in Costa Rica had some keen insights to all of this. First he said, “you are doing the right thing”, that is by cutting my research month short at 10 days to assure that I am there when Mom dies. He had missed his mom’s death 40 years previously and is still not over it.

Through all of this, I try not to lose track that this is the natural order of things. The same director also recalled his days in Ghana. There, the death of a parent is a cause for a happy celebration of a natural milestone. By contrast, the death of ones child is considered a dark, dark day. I like this dichotomy. I hope when it is my turn my kids and I can mark my imminent passing in a spirit of celebrating all that is natural.

But all this natural order of things doesn’t much change the hole I’m feeling.

Getting Wet

Allright, enough molecular already. Hopefully you at least got a sense of what we are doing. Something in the brains of Aplysia (California) and Dolabrifera (Costa Rica) is different, because the former learns and the latter doesn’t. We want to find out what. That is the how question.

But we, that is I, also want to figure out why.

This question is much trickier. Why don’t these Dolabrifera show sensitization? Why don’t they learn? Part of coming to Costa Rica is to get insights. How do we do this?

You know what Yogi Berra says, don’t you? You can observe a lot by just watching.

Put your head in their world and just be there. Here is Leonid putting his head into the world of Dolabrifera.



Here is what he sees.



An active, responsive slug. Dolabrifera movements are quicker than those of Aplysia. During low tide in the noon-day sun, these slugs are all over the tidepools doing this. They are anything but dullards. The intuition I get from watching them is that they couldn’t have LOST sensitization, like an absent-minded professor. Rather they would seem to be actively suppressing it. If these slugs were sensitized, a wisp of water current would stop them in their tracks. Reduce them to a little ball of slug jelly. That’s what happens to Aplysia. But Aplysia’s ecology seems much slower paced to me. Maybe they can afford to be a slug ball some of the time. Here’s a representative video from you-tube.

Aplysia in situ

This guy covers much less ground, and his muzzle (called proprodium) is not nearly as quick. He won’t be slowed down much by a strong withdrawal reflex. How bout you all? Do you see any differences that might explain no sensitization in Dolabrifera, and lots of it in Aplysia?

What's Going On In There?

I first met Leonid at a huge Neuroscience meeting in Atlanta I think. I had read a little of his molecular magic. That is where I first heard the term “transcriptome.” This is similar to a genome, which is the entirety of the genetic material stored in the DNA in the nucleus of the cells of a particular species. The first genome to be sequenced was the human genome, an effort that was HUGELY expensive, but totally cool. Bottom line: a genome represents all the potential genetic instructions of an individual.

By contrast, a transcriptome refers to all the genetic instructions that are actually being sent out to the rest of the cell (by the process known as transcription). Transcriptomes are species specific, but they are also tissue specific, and even cell specific. These instructions represent a subset of the genome, but they also represent what the cell does. For example, the Beta-cells in the islets of Langerhans in your pancreas have one job, and that is to produce lots and lots of insulin to be used by your body. The genome of these Beta-cells is the same as all the other cells in your body, and very close to the now-registered “human genome”. Again, the genome represents genetic potential. But your Beta-cells shut down almost all of those potential genes. Their single function is to make insulin, so it is the insulin gene whose instructions are sent out in huge volumes for manufacture into insulin.

The transcriptome is different from cell to cell. We know that much. We don’t know much about how transcriptomes of particular cells changes across evolution. For example, we don’t know how the transcriptome of different parts of the brain change across evolution.

Here's a part of the brain of an Aplysia (borrowed from Wikipedia). Each little yellow sphere is an individual nerve cell. This is the focus of our research.