Stars, Planets, Life

"From Disaster to Catastrophe -- What's Obama's Endgame In the Gulf?"  Fox News headline, July 15. The headline suggests that there is a difference between a disaster and a catastrophe, and that catastrophes are worse. I suppose most people would agree, but it's interesting to delve a little deeper into what we mean by a catastrophe. The term is derived from Greek words having to do with 'growing down' which makes sense. In biological terms, a catastrophe might be defined as a natural or human impact on a population of organisms that exceeds one or more of the physical or chemical limits within which that population can continue to exist. In a word, extinction.

Newspaper headlines report the total medal count as the most noteworthy measure of a country’s success in the recent Olympic games. The top three were the US with 37, Germany with 30 and Canada with 26. This can be misleading, because the numbers don’t take into account the very different resources available to athletes from different countries. It’s like comparing athletics at a university that has a well-funded sports program and 30,000 students to that of a small college with 2000 students and no sports budget at all.  

     I have been following with interest the columns and blogs related to climate change, most recently from Patrick Lockerby, who agrees with the evidence for human-caused global warming, and Karen Barnes, who comments on Jesse Ventura’s conspiracy theory.  Perhaps thoughttul readers of Scientific Blogging will be interested in seeing the actual data that supports global warming. Here is a NOAA website that succinctly summarizes the main lines of evidence.

In my library at home, I have three books that catch the eye because of their unusual heft. One is my old copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and another is Stephen J. Gould’s massive treatise on evolution. Now, a third tome has made it a trio of thick, heavy books: Divine Action and Natural Selection, edited by Joseph Seckbach and Richard Gordon (World Scientific Publishing, 2009). If I had to pick one of the three to take to the beach on holiday, this would be the one.

I think that in many ways, the motivation of scientists is similar to that of prospectors in the 1800s. The prospectors had gold fever, grubstakes, the ability to persevere against long odds of success, and the rare peak experience of striking the mother lode. Scientists have idea fever, government grants as grubstakes, the ability to persevere against long odds, and the rare experience of having one of their ideas turn out to be truly significant, which might happen once in a scientific lifetime. I'll describe one such idea, then speculate on where it might take us in the next ten years. But first, a little background.

RuBisCo Stars, Frank Drake and the "Riddle of Life"

December 4, 2009.

    In a column posted a few days ago (November 1) I mentioned that my friend John Evans, a Cambridge (England) mathematician, has developed a general formula for estimating biocomplexity. It is quite simple, using only two variables: the number of units in a system, and the number of connections (interactions) each unit has with other units in the system. Today, in fact, biologists publish ‘interactomes” with furry ball figures that illustrate the number of proteins in a given cell and the number of interactions each protein has with other proteins. The concept of complex interactomes has become embedded in systems biology. 

John Evans, a mathematician friend of mine in Cambridge England, came up with a formula that specifically allows one to estimate the relative complexity of nervous systems in the animal kingdom, from C. elegans to the human brain. It takes into account not just the number of neurons in the brain, but also the number of synaptic connections that link neurons to one another, and in a second version, the encephalization quotient.

A few days ago, I was working at home when the phone rang. I answered, and was surprised to hear a soft, accented voice asking for me. It was Lada Tsokolova, calling from Germany, with the sad news that her husband Sergey had just died of cancer.  I was stunned. Sergey was young! He had spent nearly a year in my lab in 2005-06, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and I had seen him recently at scientific meetings in Kyoto and Heidelberg, but he never mentioned that he was ill.

In his July 23 column, Gary Herstein presented a thoughtful discussion and analysis of scientific controversies (What Does A Real Scientific Controversy Look Like?), with an example from physics. Perhaps readers of Scientific Blogging will be interested in another scientific controversy that emerged in biophysics over a 20 year period. 

Michael White recently blogged about Rock Stars of Science (July 8), which is an educational effort to attract kids to careers in science.  (Michael characterized this as “another hopeless attempt to make nerds look cool.”) 

    Part of the enjoyment of doing research is that ideas pop into your head all the time. Everyone has ideas, but the hard part is to choose which should be subjected to critical tests that have the primary aim of proving them wrong. That’s the most efficient way to discard bad ideas, because most of them in fact don’t work. Only after an idea survives the crucible of initial testing can it be taken more seriously and tested further. Then, if it still survives, you can publish.