King Canute

The popular story goes that the early 11^th C King Canute of England was so arrogant that he thought he could control the sea, but of course – he got his feet wet. More recently I learned that the truth was that the King was so irritated by fawning courtiers that he made the demonstration to show that even kings are subservient to the laws of nature. But not it would seem the North Carolina Senate, which in 2012 passed a law effectively banning the use of data about sea-level changes in determining coastal policy in North Carolina. 

Anne and I visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina earlier this year. It’s a beautiful area and very flat. In fact the entire east coast of the US from Cape Cod to the tip of Florida is flat and sandy. Now why would the NC Senate put their heads in the sand? Let me quote from a couple of websites about the attractions of the NC coast: “Millions of visitors head to North Carolina's beaches every year to rent palatial estates and charming beach bungalows along the state's best beachfront areas.” And “300 miles of barrier island beaches are filled with lovely state parks, top restaurants and world-class golf courses.” 

Yep, money, big money. Rock that boat and the state faces big financial losses. Of course wishing it won’t happen doesn’t change anything. The latest predictions are that sea levels will rise at least a meter (3 feet) in the next hundred years. Compounding that, the rising temperature of the oceans directly leads to stronger hurricanes roaring up the coast. 

There’s no need for panic. There is a need for us to live and act responsibly. My city of Medford has been offering tax-breaks for homeowners putting solar panels on their roofs; and the old seaport city of Boston has begun planning to deal with the ocean rise by turning some streets into canals like Venice; in that way channeling the surge. 

Ignoring the reality of man-made global warming is irresponsible. And so are cute remarks like the one I received from an old English friend recently about how England had a cold spring last year. I know – I was there. The reason was not because the climatologists are wrong, but because they’re right. The arctic ice is melting even faster than predicted sending vast amounts of cold water south producing a cool, wet May in Britain in 2013. 

Island nations that do need to worry are those in the Pacific. The very existence of countries like Tuvalu, Kiribati and Palau are now in question with rising ocean levels. The governments of those countries are not passing laws to try and prevent facing facts, but instead have been urgently demanding that larger nations around the world face up to their responsibilities to reduce their carbon emissions.

We live on a relatively small ball, and more often than we realize, what I do can affect somebody on the other side of the ball, or down the coast in North Carolina – incidentally, the only place in the world where Venus Fly-traps grow in the wild. Here’s my pic taken this past April just a short distance from the sea. 

                                           And this fascinating creature deserves to survive too.

Those pesky viruses. But is it all bad? 

Viruses are in the news just now; certainly the Ebola virus. Is it my imagination but in the run-up to the US congressional election Republicans seem to be blaming the African American President for the fact that one person – yep one – has died of Ebola in the USA. Americans should move beyond their self-centeredness and care about the thousands dying of Ebola in West Africa. Yes, even one person dying before their time is one too many; but let’s get things in perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 30,000 Americans die every year from the flu virus. Sadly, too often because they don’t get around to having a flu shot. And what’s the betting that some of those blaming Obama for Ebola in America are the same folk who are against having their children immunized, not only putting their own children at unnecessary risk, but many others as well. 

In the years 1918-1920 the Spanish flu swept around the world killing approximately 50 million people making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Throughout the 20^th century alone smallpox killed about half a billion !  Another viral disease is polio which before the Salk vaccine came into use in the 1950s devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands, mostly children, every year. Jonas Salk was asked once why he hadn’t patented his vaccine. “Can you patent the sun?” he replied. He could have been a billionaire but worked until his death at 80 trying to find a vaccine against HIV. If anyone should be canonized it should be Jonas Salk. 

So what are viruses? They’re a relatively short thread of DNA or RNA in a protein coat. Are they alive? On their own – not really; just a very small packet of organic molecules. But let a few of the wrong ones inside you and your dying body can be riddled with trillions of them in a few days. In other words, with your help they come alive, using your cell metabolism to multiply them at a phenomenal rate. I remember in college our professor showed us a test-tube that had so many bacteria in it the water they were in was cloudy like watery milk – hundreds of millions of cells. We then added a small amount of bacteriophage – viruses that specifically attack bacteria. The professor knew the rate these viruses worked so that one virus would infect a bacterium and minutes later the poor bug would explode scattering hundreds of new viruses. The prof predicted the time and sure enough about an hour later the test tube liquid cleared as millions of bacteria exploded. Viruses move fast. They don’t multiply 1-2-4, but 1-100 -10,000; and not in years but in minutes. That’s why a virus infection can take hold so fast. And tricky to tackle:  a) because antibiotics don’t work because the cells they’re operating in are yours; and b) because their mutation rate (which is largely based on generation time) is so fast that they keep changing.

If they think about it, viruses must be quite a challenge for creationists. Did God make them too? Evolutionists, based on the fact that viruses are made of the same basic material – DNA and RNA – that give the rest of us creatures life, believe that in the very early stages of the development of cell life, these stray bits got in the mix. 

Should we say darn, and hope that on some other planet life has had better luck and no viruses are messing things up? The story gets a little more complicated. Most viruses get into a cell’s cytoplasm and then use the cell to make copies of themselves. But there’s a subset of DNA viruses that go one step further and splice themselves into our cell’s own DNA. They’re called retroviruses. They’re difficult to find let alone destroy. One example of a retrovirus is the HIV virus. Here’s the surprise – 8% of our DNA is composed of old no-longer-functioning (endogenous) retroviruses that have been handed down generation after generation for millions of years along with the rest of our DNA. More bad news for creationists. Most of us have heard that humans have a 98.5% overlap of DNA with chimps. Well we also share the same ‘fossilized’ retroviruses in the same locations on our DNA as our close primate relatives.  

If I haven’t given you enough bad news, some retroviruses can cause cancer! They do this by reverse engineering the DNA – RNA mechanism in our cell metabolism, which isn’t supposed to happen.  Before you say –‘There really must be a devil !’, here’s the kicker – we’d still be bird-brained egg-laying creatures but for this cancer causing viral insinuation.  It is believed that about 100 million years ago an early egg-laying mammal (there’s still a few around today) got infected with a retrovirus that caused a cancerous development in the embryo that embedded into the mother’s tissue, enabling an exchange of oxygen and nutrients across a protective membrane. Yep, we now refer to it as a placenta. Because retroviruses are embedded in the host’s DNA it can get handed down the generations, and it was. Put simply – we humans wouldn’t exist but for some viruses. But do get your flu shot.

Those pesky viruses. But is it all bad? 

Viruses are in the news just now; certainly the Ebola virus. Is it my imagination but in the run-up to the US congressional election Republicans seem to be blaming the African American President for the fact that one person – yep one – has died of Ebola in the USA. Americans should move beyond their self-centeredness and care about the thousands dying of Ebola in West Africa. Yes, even one person dying before their time is one too many; but let’s get things in perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 30,000 Americans die every year from the flu virus. Sadly, too often because they don’t get around to having a flu shot. And what’s the betting that some of those blaming Obama for Ebola in America are the same folk who are against having their children immunized, not only putting their own children at unnecessary risk, but many others as well. 

In the years 1918-1920 the Spanish flu swept around the world killing approximately 50 million people making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.  But throughout the 20^th century alone smallpox killed about half a billion before the Salk vaccine kicked in starting in 1957. Jonas Salk was asked once why he hadn’t patented his vaccine. “Can you patent the sun?” he replied. He could have been a billionaire but worked until his death at 80 trying to find a vaccine against HIV. If anyone should be canonized it should be Jonas Salk.

So what are viruses? They’re a relatively short thread of DNA or RNA in a protein coat. Are they alive? On their own – not really; just a small packet of organic molecules. But let a few of the wrong ones inside you and your body can be riddled with trillions of them in a few days. In other words, with your help they come alive, using your cell metabolism to multiply them at a phenomenal rate. I remember in college our professor showed us a test-tube that had so many bacteria in it the water they were in was cloudy like watery milk – hundreds of millions of cells. We then added a small amount of bacteriophage – viruses that specifically attack bacteria. The professor knew the rate these viruses worked so that one virus would infect a bacterium and minutes later the poor bug would explode scattering hundreds of new viruses. The prof predicted the time and sure enough about an hour later the test tube liquid cleared as millions of bacteria exploded. 

Viruses move fast. They don’t multiply 1-2-4, but more like 1-100 -10,000; and not in years but in minutes. That’s why a virus infection can take hold so fast. And tricky to tackle:  a) because antibiotics don’t work because the cells they’re operating in are yours; and b) because their mutation rate (which is largely based on generation time) is so fast that they keep changing.

If they think about it, viruses must be quite a challenge for creationists. Did God make them too? Evolutionists, based on the fact that viruses are made of the same basic material – DNA and RNA – that give the rest of us creatures life, believe that in the very early stages of the development of cell life on this planet, these stray bits got in the mix.

Should we say darn, and hope that on some other planet life has had better luck and no viruses are messing things up? The story gets a little more complicated. 

Most viruses get into a cell’s cytoplasm and then use the cell to make copies of themselves. But there’s a subset of DNA viruses that go one step further and splice themselves into our cell’s own DNA. They’re called retroviruses. They’re difficult to find let alone destroy. One example of a retrovirus is the HIV virus. Here’s the surprise – 8% of our DNA is composed of old no-longer-functioning (endogenous) retroviruses that have been handed down generation after generation for millions of years along with the rest of our DNA. More bad news for creationists. Most of us have heard that humans have a 98.5% overlap of DNA with chimps. Well we also share the same ‘fossilized’ retroviruses in the same locations on our DNA as our close primate relatives.  

If I haven’t given you enough bad news, some retroviruses can cause cancer! They do this by reverse engineering the DNA – RNA mechanism in our cell metabolism, which isn’t supposed to happen.  Before you say –‘There really must be a devil !’, here’s the kicker – we’d still be bird-brained egg-laying creatures but for one of these cancer causing viral insinuations.  It is believed that about 100 million years ago an early egg-laying mammal (there’s still a few around today) got infected with a retrovirus that caused a cancerous development in the embryo that embedded into the mother’s tissue, enabling an exchange of oxygen and nutrients across a protective membrane. Yep, we now refer to it as a placenta.  

Put simply – we humans wouldn’t exist but for some viruses. But do get your flu shot.

Why do scientists keep changing their minds?

I highly recommend an article in the current (October 23^rd, 2014) issue of the New York Review of Books entitled “What Scientists Really Do” by Priyamvada Natarajan. Science is a communal effort to continually and systematically acquire more knowledge about the world and the universe we find ourselves in. What some people find difficult to understand about this process, or, as Natarajan points out, others quickly use as an excuse to calm their religious doubts or to continue making money to the disadvantage of society, is that scientific knowledge is provisional. We know a lot more about things now than we did a hundred years ago, but there’s still a lot more we don’t know and which our grandchildren will wonder how we missed. I find it a glorious, ongoing story of wonderment.

Therefore, at any point in a particular knowledge development, the current knowledge is considered provisional, recognizing humbly that others will take it further. And that’s why we scientists tend to use the word ‘theory’ to describe a particular current system of understanding. But then sadly, non-scientists, either through a lack of understanding of this process, or through deliberate malfeasance, then say: ‘Well, if it’s just a theory, you have no absolute proof, then I don’t have to believe it.’

Perhaps we scientists make trouble for ourselves by being a bit too honest, too precise. ‘Provisional’ implies that the understanding of a particular system could be reversed. Yes, possible, but very rare. Isaac Newton gave us his theory of gravity. It was a theory, but anyone who hasn’t taken that very mysterious force seriously has learned the hard way, even before Einstein showed that Newton hadn’t gotten it quite right and brought in some refinements. Nowadays Einstein is held up as the quintessential genius. But it wasn’t always like that. When he first proposed his theory of relativity there were many doubters. The term ‘relativity’ didn’t play well with those concerned with the loosening of moral behavior in the ‘roaring twenties’, and one Columbia University professor said it sounded like Bolshevism. Nevertheless, whatever our political or religious views many Americans today take for granted the use of their cellphones and the GPS guidance systems in their cars that only work if Einstein’s theories are correct, or shall we say more refined than Newton’s. Will there be further refinements in our understanding in this realm? Probably. In recent years a few brave physicists have been working to try and use gravity to transmit information. Silly? Probably, but remember that our present understanding remains provisional. And, in seeking to harness gravity in this way they may fail in that, but meanwhile discover something else. Arthur Koestler entitled his book on the history of man’s quest to understand the cosmos “The Sleepwalkers”, describing the zig-zag lurching of man’s understanding of the puzzle. 

Science proceeds for a variety of interconnecting reasons.  Ambition – the striving of younger scientists to make their name and prove the old codgers wrong.  The interchange of new technology, so that computers have revolutionized the ability to analyze across every scientific discipline. Advances in genetics, in particular DNA analysis, have led to major advances in recent decades from medicine to paleoanthropology to botany. 

Ever since Linneaus in the 18^th century botanists thought that aster flowers in Eurasia and North America were in the same genus – Aster. Then in 1994 it was discovered that Eurasian asters had larger, more symmetrical chromosomes. This was bad news for American botanists as they had to come up with a new name for the approximately 180 aster species in North America. Taking the opportunity, or precaution, for more detailed study of these delightful flowers a team of American botanists not only chose the difficult-to-spell new generic name of Symphyotrichum as the main generic name replacing Aster, but broke other species off into several other smaller genera including Sericocarpus, Eurybia and Oclemena. Most species kept their old specific names. However, Symphyotrichum has the neuter gender in Latin whereas Aster is masculine, so that the ending of the specific name also had to be changed in many cases. So that Aster puniceus became Symphyotrichum puniceum. This led one frustrated botanist in Missouri to write a paper entitled “How faster to master the Aster disaster”. 

What I’m trying to show here is that advances in science (whether in physics, astronomy or botany) can be messy, run into opposition, and make the subject more complicated, but in the end do lead steadily towards greater refinement and more detailed understanding of the subject, bringing that provisionality up the asymptotic curve of knowledge, while also giving an advantage to the younger, fresher minds, which is at it should be.

Milk discrimination

Recently I was having breakfast with a friend in Friendly’s, a restaurant chain of 380 restaurants in the north east of the USA that is especially proud of its 22 ice-cream flavors. I asked the waitress if I could please have lactose-free milk for my coffee. She looked surprised and said they didn’t have any. I said that a lot of Americans needed lactose-free milk and that therefore this might affect business.

Lactose is a dimer sugar; composed of two parts – glucose and galactose, stuck together to form this sugar unique to milk. Table sugar, sucrose, is a dimer of glucose and fructose. A specific enzyme is needed to break up these dimers so that the component sugars can then be absorbed and metabolized. For some reason, as early mammals developed mammary glands secreting milk to feed their babies, the sugar in the milk was lactose. An enzyme, lactase, had to have co-evolved to break up this unique dimer sugar. In wild creatures, energy conservation is of primary importance. So once the baby mammal is weaned it will no longer need the lactase enzyme and so the gene to make it is switched off.  Many thousands of years ago when all humans lived by hunting and gathering, babies were breast fed until about age three. They would then not encounter milk again and the lactase gene would have been switched off. 

Starting about eight thousand years ago, humans in some parts of the world domesticated cows or goats and developed dairy farming which often included drinking milk as adults. Once a dimer sugar is broken into the smaller components they can be quickly absorbed into the blood stream giving us our source of energy. But the dimer is too big to be absorbed and then as it carries down into the intestine it feeds excessive bacterial growth which leads to bloating, discomfort and in some cases more serious intestinal problems.

Mutations, that is changes in a gene, occur randomly and would also have occurred in the lactase gene. Only following adult consumption of milk would that mutation have been selected for, i.e. expand in the population.

For Europeans, this mutation for lactase persistence has been traced to 7,500 years ago, spreading amongst European milk drinkers ever since. A major study has been carried out around the world which found that lactose persistence correlates with people who originate from areas of a dairy tradition, e.g. Europe, the Middle East, India and East Africa. So called lactose intolerance correlates with people from areas of the world with no long history of dairy culture, e.g. West Africa, China and the Americas. 

The United States is a melting-pot of the world. It should not be a surprise therefore that recent estimates reckon that at least 30% of Americans are lactose intolerant. That’s about 90 million people. Grocery stores are waking up to this fact and lactose-free milk is now commonly available. I’ve often watched African Americans reaching for it on the supermarket shelf. In addition to the many Americans who originate from non-dairy cultures, the lactase gene can also switch off with advancing age as in my case. 

Back to the Friendly’s restaurant. I was settling into my black coffee when I looked up to find John Maguire the CEO of the entire Friendly’s chain, who I recognized from the company’s TV ads, standing in front of me. By extraordinary coincidence he just happened to be visiting this particular restaurant at that time and he wanted to understand my problem. I gave him a quickie version of what I’ve written above and we parted amicably. It wasn’t long before a jug of lactose-free milk was brought to the table, followed by the restaurant manager. He said that he wanted to understand it for himself. Explaining that I had done my PhD studying sugar metabolism and the switching on and off the genes involved, I told him of the different ethnicities that might well be lactose-intolerant. The manager’s face was a picture. He said that Friendly’s had recently concluded a major survey and could not understand why so few African Americans bought their ice-cream. I said : “Now you know”. 

 It is time that the majority white population of America became more understanding and sensitive on this issue. Leaving aside the simple idea of caring for the other, it could be financially important for restaurants, grocery stores, supermarkets and the makers and purveyors of ice-cream. Remember, you white Americans who are more often than not in decision-making positions: you are the mutants.