It’s all fun and games until. . .
This unbelievable X-ray from Surfactant comes to us via Street Anatomy.
Whoa.
Save this and show it to your kids next 4th of July, ok? (the culprit was a “homemade explosive device”).
3 comments October 31st, 2007
Archive for October, 2007
The Five Living Poets Challenge
Over at his blog, Jeff Prucher has challenged readers to think of five major LIVING poets. Can you do it? No cheating, no Googling, no looking at your bookshelf or New Yorkers! For verisimilitude, pretend Alex Trebek is staring smugly at you: doo DEE doo doo, doo DEE doo. . . Write down your answers, then see if you agree with mine (after the fold).
This was a little sad, since two poets I had the pleasure of hearing in person, whom I’d like to list, the charming Agha Shahid Ali and Stanley Kunitz, passed away recently.
Among living masters, Seamus Heaney plainly rules the roost (and would hold his own against the greatest dead poets, I’d wager). I can have only four others, so this list is biased: Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver, Li-Young Li. Not necessarily the biggest names, but they’re the ones I want on my list of “major” (whatever that means) poets. Who would you choose?
4 comments October 31st, 2007
I’m intellectual AND sexy? Now that’s scary. . .
First, I need to thank Mo at Neurophilosophy for tagging me with the Intellectual Blogger award. I don’t feel very intellectual lately, but I guess he’s cutting me some slack based on past posts? I’d better pick up the pace, read those back issues of the New Yorker, and post some meaningful something before I’m retroactively stripped of my title. I’ll post my choices for the award tomorrow.
Apologies to everyone who has emailed, or linked me in the past few weeks - I know I’m not keeping up on my correspondence. I have about 10K unread posts on my RSS feeds, and I think I just have to give up and start over. It’s been crazy out here in DC. You may have recently seen the poll indicating that DC ranks 24th out of 25 major US cities for attractive people, which is the only possible reason why I won “sexiest costume” at a pub tonight. Yay Halloween! (I personally think there are attractive people out here - but then I like nice clothing, and people here dress well - though not creatively - versus, say, Seattle).
Finally, I need to add a shout out to the Witless Wanderer - a short time ago I had the pleasure of meeting her on her sojourn in DC. We took a “bloggers-in-real-life” photo, but I don’t have it here, so let me just thank her for an enjoyable lunch with her friend GuiGrl. We laughed a lot, which is the measure of good company.
2 comments October 31st, 2007
Frankenstein’s fairies: red in tooth and claw
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
Before their nursery sanitization, fairy tales were savage. Remember how Cinderella’s stepmother mutilated her own daughters’ feet to fit the glass slipper, but was betrayed by the oozing blood? Or the rape and cannibalism in early versions of Sleeping Beauty? If you don’t, then you haven’t read the oldest versions of these now toothless, Disneyfied stories. Fairy tales once captured the primal violence in human nature all too well.
Fairies themselves were often grotesque and inhumanly cruel, and that’s the pre-Victorian tradition to which the work of artist Tessa Farmer cleaves. Her work juxtaposes dead insects and the remains of birds and snakes with tiny, skeletal fairy sculptures so small, she needs a microscope to assemble them, and viewers need a magnifying glass to appreciate them. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, butterfly-winged fairy girls you find on greeting cards, Farmer’s corpselike fairies rip their prey apart bare-handed, gnawing on the legs of hapless insects like ravenous, humorless Gollums. I would normally find a dead, twisted spider corpse disgusting, but Farmer’s gremlins are far creepier than their victims.
Swarm (detail)
mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2004
from the Saatchi Gallery
A 2006 review by Stephen Feeke describes Farmer’s later work, The Terror:
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs (sic). Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. . .
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
In the artist’s own words,
In 2005 I first observed parasitic behaviour among the fairies, which had shrunk to some 7mm tall. ‘Nymphidia’ (named after a sixteenth century fairy poem by Michael Drayton) is another swarm, again revealing scenes of torture and consumption. The focus of the attack is a wasps’ nest, surrounded by fairies battling with wasps and other insects. On closer inspection they can be seen hatching out of wasps in the cells of the nest, by pushing off their heads and climbing out of the hollow shell of the consumed wasp.
The interesting thing to me is that, in reviews and comments on Farmer’s work, and in her own statement, the violence is described in increasingly naturalistic, pseudo-scientific terms. Are these “fairies” or “parasites”? Are they out of nature, or embodying nature? Is Farmer-the-artist, like Dr. Frankenstein before her, a meticulous scientist who reanimates flesh in order to understand it, or a monomaniac blind to the moral implications of her creation? Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” never seemed so appropriate!
At dinner last night, I disgusted my companions by sharing the appalling reproductive habits of the mite Acarophenax tribolii (courtesy of the Evilutionary Biologist - I warn you, it’s icky). I wish I could claim I was inspired in this misbehavior by Halloween, but as a biologist, I wander into inappropriate dinner conversation all the time. I can’t help it, really. Thinking about it scientifically, objectively, blunts the horror that kicks in when one begins to instinctively anthropomorphize the mites. Curiosity dominates empathy, and fascination displaces disgust - at least for a time. Biology is full of violence and broken taboos, but these natural relationships carry only the moral baggage we bring to them. The mites don’t know how to live any other way, and judging them or reviling them for it is absurd.
The way Farmer speaks of her work, with clinical detachment, is an invitation to follow her into a morally neutral scientific space. She must know full well that the viewer will be unable to sustain that detachment, because her fairies are not mites. They’re nearly human. And we also empathize with the fairies’ helpless victims - birds, ladybugs, bees, even that unlucky spider, curled and twisted in attitudes of pain that are universal. So despite our best efforts to remain detached, we won’t. Like looking at an optical illusion that oscillates from an old woman to a young girl, or a vase to a pair of profiles, we’ll find ourselves identifying first with the victims, then with the cruel aggressors (in these battles, the fairies seem to rarely be at a disadvantage).
By doing this - by forcing human emotions onto her invented ecosystem - Farmer alludes to the destructive effect humans have had on our world. In the scene below, from Nymphidia, a corpselike fairy erupts from a parasitized honeycomb, snaring an unsuspecting wasp. Nymphidia predates the news of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD) - but isn’t it an appropriate representation? Some unknown force, which we may as well depict as a wasp-sized demon, is invading beehives and destroying colonies in the “real” world. This fairy is the wasp/bee Grim Reaper: fanciful, inaccurate, but standing in for a destructive force that actually exists. And it’s fitting that the tiny Reaper is anthropomorphic, because CCD is almost certainly is due to human influence: something in our husbandry practices is making the bees vulnerable.
Nymphidia (detail)
Mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2005
via Miniature Worlds
In the end, Farmer’s art is barely about “fairies” at all. That is, it’s barely about Disneyfied fairies: Tinkerbell, wishes, magic, romance. It is, of course, very much about the cruel, atavistic fairies of the primal fairy tales - disturbing representations of the extremes of human nature. And it’s human nature that pits us against Nature.
My lingering question about Farmer’s work is this: do the fairies know any better? Are they, like the mites, innocent by reason of insentience? Or are they, like the humans whose skeletons they mimic, not merely violent, but unnecessarily, deliberately cruel? I’d like, as a biologist, to embrace the former. But I think - based especially on her use of words like “torture” - that Farmer intends us to believe the latter. We are Farmer’s fairies. Nature, and we, suffer for it.
9 comments October 27th, 2007
Blog bits
I’ve been working on a PC for the first time in my life, and I hate the way the blog looks on IE. It’s been near-unreadable. On a Mac using Firefox or Safari it’s fine, but on a PC using IE. . . EU! FYI, try not to use IE, OK?
I think I’ve cleaned up the worst font discrepancies, so it should be better now, but I have a stupid frame problem in IE that I can’t seem to fix. . if you see what I mean, and have an idea how to get rid of it in the css, let me know. I can tweak a little, but I am by no means a coder.
2 comments October 25th, 2007
Gone, baby, gone
fallen cicada
watercolor, 2007
‘Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.’ - John Berger
During my first month in this apartment, I heard cicada song outside my windows constantly. It woke me in the morning and grew almost unpleasantly loud in the evening. I grew so used to it, I’m not sure when it stopped, but I realized today that the trees are silent. Adult cicadas have short lives - perhaps shorter than the time it took for me to (finally) finish this painting.
This is one of the fallen, viewed through the porthole of a microscope: such a small, homely thing to make such a large song.
Until next year, then. . .
1 comment October 21st, 2007
Visualizing science: Steve Miller
Protein #324, 2003
enamel, silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
The protein-inspired art of Steve Miller in turn inspires Visualizing Science: Image-making in the Constitution of Scientific Knowledge, a cool-sounding symposium to be held next Wednesday, October 24, 2007, at Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
Miller’s strongest work is reminiscent of Japanese brush painting or Hubble photographs: darkly tangible, stylized forms floating in luminous space. But other pieces, like “Protein #330,” rely on the intrigue of the incomprehensible. What can that scribbled notation mean to the audience? Yes, it’s imposing a certain quantitative context on the protein’s inscrutable, cloud-like form, inviting reflection on the tension between the unlabeled natural artifact and the scientist’s interpretation of it. But I have no idea what it means. Nor would it matter if it was mathematically nonsensical; no one would notice. Not sure how I feel about that.
Protein #330, 2003
silk-screen on paper
Steve Miller
Steve Miller’s work
Via the indispensible Biomedicine on Display (bookmark it!)
Add comment October 20th, 2007
Truth and death in a nutshell
Barn
photo by Corinne May Botz
“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this.” - John Waters
Fans of CSI will be familiar with the “miniature killer” story arc, in which Grissom & company are taunted by a serial killer (with, apparently, a LOT of free time) who builds dollhouse-like crime scenes.
CSI’s writers might have gotten the idea from Frances Glessner Lee, a socialite and forensic science amateur who built similar mini-murder rooms. Called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” these nineteen dioramas were used as teaching tools at the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and now reside at Baltimore in the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office.
Several of the dioramas, including a barn (above), kitchen, and woodshed, are on display at the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Proofs exhibition (through February 2008).
Photographer Corinne May Botz documented Lee’s dioramas in a 1994 book. The SF Chronicle review is really excellent, and contains this charming description of Lee’s work:
Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940s. She stocked the larders with canned goods and placed half-peeled potatoes by the kitchen sink. Over a crib, she pasted pink striped wallpaper.
But you might not want your dolls to live there.
Miniature corpses — bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned — are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow.
Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain’s rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Co., used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation.
She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.” At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall.
“The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall,” she suggested in her curriculum notes. (source)
Three-Room Dwelling
Photo by Corinne May Botz
More: A 1953 Popular Mechanics article on Lee’s work (via Modern Mechanix, who noted this “origin of CSI” prior to the obvious miniature killer influence)
a sweetly enthusiastic 1949 news article about her
A critical article by Jennifer Doublet
2 comments October 20th, 2007
I’m a fro-elly-what-what?
Jason at Cephalopodcast.com challenged me to visit this site, sponsored by the New York Zoo, to create my “wild self.” It’s like one of those flip books where you mix and match body parts. As a biologist, such egregious phylogenetic cross-pollination bugs me a little bit, but darn, I like my new look.
2 comments October 18th, 2007
Watson does it again
The co-discoverer of the double helix, James Watson, has once again placed his Nobel-icious foot in his mouth.
He was meant to give a talk today in Britain on his new book, but his appearance has been cancelled in the wake of remarks implying that people of African descent are genetically less intelligent than whites. He’s also been suspended by Cold Spring Harbor, which is perhaps a wee bit disingenuous of them, because he’s said many outre things before, and as far as I know they’ve never done anything about it.
The thing that surprises me most is not that he offended people, but that he’s now criticizing the genes of dark-skinned individuals. I thought he was on the other side - when I last saw him talk, he argued that pasty white women have inferior libidos. Oh, and that we should be genetically engineered to be prettier. What-ever. . .
1 comment October 18th, 2007
Poem of the Week: The way of the Dodo
How happy did it make me that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize? (Rhetorical question.)
In his honor, I thought of a poem by Judith Skillman, from the latest edition of the online journal Tattoo Highway, edited by Sara MacAulay. (Yes, I loaned them my painting for the cover).
The poem is about the quintessential poster-bird of idiocy, the ridiculous Dodo, literally beaten into extinction by environmentally oblivious humans. Like a mini-cabinet of curiosity, Skillman’s gathered source material models a very human response to the natural world: bafflement, and the odd pain of having lost not something we needed, but rather something we never had the opportunity to comprehend. That’s what extinction is. Yet the poem sidesteps obvious blame and reprisal, aiming for an ambiguity closer to the truth: we won’t always understand what we are fighting to preserve, nor can we deny the parts of our own nature that drive us to destroy it.
Judith Skillman
“The Dodo Bird”
with lines from HolderlinI found it land-bound, small wings tucked
against its sides. The head naked,
almost human in its appraisal.
I remember hearing about you, I said
and it replied For the gods grow indignant…It was not repulsive, rather oily, a few black strands
like leftover feathers sprouting from its head.
I thought you were a figment I said,
and it replied if a man not gather himself to save His soul…I said I was a woman, that I would have preferred
to lose the ostrich, but would not starve my children.
If there had been a famine and the opportunity arose
I also would have beaten the Dodo to death
with whatever was at hand—
club, baseball bat, plank of wood,
but I wouldn’t have laughed.Women are tame.
We don’t kill unless threatened.
Did you not perceive the Dutchmen as a threat?
Yet he has no choice…
the bird replied, foraging, head down,
diamond eyes shrunken to slits
as it pried grubs from mud.Why have you grown so large—
three feet tall, walking about
as if you owned the ground
between clouds of idealism and germs of reality.
You had your heyday.
We have your beak in the British Museum
for proof: DNA, some writings and renderings.It went about the business of the omnivorous—
scavenging, turning its arse this way and that,
always the silly walk of it
and the precious non-birdness of its serious demeanor,
unshaken by extinction: like-
wise; mourning is in error…
4 comments October 15th, 2007
Beaded Bacteriophages
Microviridae: bacteriophage φX174
Bugle beads, seed beads, Czech crystals
Holly Wichman
This sculpture made of purple and clear glass beads depicts bacteriophage φX174, a virus that infects bacteria. It rests on a surface that portrays an adaptive landscape, a conceptual visualization. The ridges represent the gene combinations associated with the greatest fitness levels of the virus, as measured by how quickly the virus can reproduce itself. φX174 is an important model system for studies of viral evolution because its genome can readily be sequenced as it evolves under defined laboratory conditions. (source)
The beaded bauble above represents a virus of the family Microviridae - icosahedral bacteriophages, or bacteria-eating viruses. The Microviridae include a bacteriophage that infects and kills Chlamydia, and another bacteriophage that infects Bdellovibrio - itself a parasite preying on other bacteria. Bacteriophages don’t cause disease in humans, and in some cases may even be used therapeutically (for more, see this interesting article in Science).
The artist is Holly Wichman, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Idaho. Wichman makes beaded models of the bacteriophages studied in her lab. Wichman infected Bentley Fane, a professor at the University of Arizona, with the beading bug, and the two have collaborated on a collection of beaded virus sculptures.
According to the artists, beading has generated some intuitive insights into viral structure:
When Bentley Fane made his models of structures from T=1 through T = 16, he discovered that some beaded structures were very stable, while others (T = 9, 12, 16) were quite unstable. This is because the sides of the numerous facets directly coinciding with the main edges of the icosahedron. Whether this instability can be extrapolated to viral structures in nature is unknown, but the structures that are unstable when beaded tend to be rare in nature. There is only one known T = 9 particle, and no known T = 12. The T = 16 in nature are the Herpesviruses, and they have both envelopes and teguments to add to stability.
“Crystal Structures: Viruses in Glass” opens tonight at the University of Idaho Reflections Gallery (through October 29, 2007).
Thanks to Jane for the heads up!
For more phage-related art, check out this archive from the 2005 American Society of Microbiology, and this collection, both hosted by Forest Rohwer of SDSU.
2 comments October 11th, 2007
The industrial body
Der mensch gesund und krank, menschenkunde 1940 . . . . Vol. 2
Zürich-Leipzig, 1939. Relief halftone.
National Library of Medicine
Fritz Kahn
Street Anatomy recently posted a selection of industrial-influenced anatomical art by Fritz Kahn. How I wish the publishers of modern textbooks took design and aesthetics as seriously - it is neither wrong nor wasteful nor unscientific to make a functional illustration artistically challenging.
Bibliodyssey hit the same topic last year. As did Morbid Anatomy. Unfortunately, there are very few Fritz Kahn images online, mostly at Dream Anatomy and the British Library. Like Peacay, I’ve been stymied in my efforts to find more. . .
1 comment October 8th, 2007
Personal histories
I just finished Eric Kandel’s new book, In Search of Memory. For those of you who don’t recognize his name, Kandel won the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for his work on the cellular basis of learning and memory. He is also the author, with Tom Jessell and J. H. Schwarz, of the definitive neuroscience textbook, Principles of Neural Science (often called simply “Kandel”). In Search of Memory is part memoir, part popular science, but entirely self-conscious, and it prompted me to think about the way each of us presents ourselves to the world in our writing.
There are two sides to neuroscience: the colorful, anecdote-filled side, and the truly quantitative, equation-filled physiological side. Oliver Sacks, prolific author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, etc., pretty much owns the world of anecdotes. He specializes in rare and unique case histories which fascinate and provoke new hypotheses, but can’t lend themselves to rigorous testing. Kandel’s Principles of Neuroscience rests firmly on the other end of the spectrum, on long, repetitive histories of experimentation in unglamorous model systems like flies, snails, worms, and rats. It’s a remarkably useful and comprehensive reference, but I don’t recommend it to any but the hardiest of science undergraduates.
In Search of Memory, like many popular science books, falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It begins with Kandel’s memories of the Holocaust in Vienna; although he and his family escaped to the United States, he uses his childhood disillusionment, confusion, and fear to frame (and justify) his professional quest to understand the human mind. As the book continues, it becomes a history of the nascent field of neuroscience - a lucid history, but one that inevitably revolves around unfamiliar names and places: so-and-so at Columbia, so-and-so at Harvard, etc. Almost all histories of science are recounted in this way, as a litany of names and places. Unless the scientists are made human and interesting, it doesn’t work, and it’s hard to capture personalities without becoming downright gossipy, as James Watson did in The Double Helix.
Kandel conscientiously tags each scientist’s name with a smatter of personality - this colleague played tennis, that one loved symphonies. These details are sometimes perfunctory, and rather disappointingly, the most memorable anecdote about his best female postdoc was apparently that she ran an afternoon daycare in the lab break room! But given the era in which Kandel began as a scientist, he didn’t have many female postdocs, and he always speaks of his female colleagues with respect. Professionally, Kandel gives scrupulous credit to his collaborators: I couldn’t help but notice all the meticulously grammatically correct usages of “_____ and me” or “I and ______”. He also admits his own failings as a father and husband. As he became increasingly embedded in his work, his wife Denise, a professor in her own right, had to take up the slack at home - at the expense of her own career. I’m not sure Kandel regrets this, given the outcome (he especially seems to relish that Nobel Prize ceremony) but at least he acknowledges it.
Upon finishing the book, my overall impression was one of a lively and humane mind, one perhaps more concerned with the minutiae of synaptic transmission than his kids’ school plays - but then, I expect no less from scientists, and Nobel winners at that. The book wasn’t as engrossing as an Oliver Sacks essay, or The Double Helix, but it was interesting, and refreshed my memory of the major turning points in my own field, neurobiology. It would be a good read for a non-scientist who cared about the topic of how neurons work, and was willing to give it reasonable attention. Well-punctuated with personal history, the tale unfolds at a digestible pace. In the end, I felt very favorably toward Kandel, and grateful for yet another popular science book I could recommend to students or friends. That’s when it gets interesting.
Many of my friends are also biologists. When they noticed what I was reading, they all said that Eric Kandel is obnoxious! They said he is the sort of self-important PI who disrespects his subordinates and pits them against each other, as well as many further complaints which, because they are hearsay, I won’t repeat here. One of them had met Kandel briefly and was downright hostile to him; others had heard stories through the everactive science grapevine. What to make of this new evidence? On the one hand, I couldn’t believe that the book I had just read was by the ruthless man they were describing. On the other hand, he had written the book - the framing was his. The winners write the history books, or the science books, as the case may be.
Had I been conned? Is Kandel’s book a self-redaction, a fictitious portrait edited for, and written for, history? I have no idea, because I’ve never worked with or even met Eric Kandel. I can only go with the impression I have from the book, which remains favorable: it’s a good book, written by an intelligent and accomplished man. But I’m disturbed by the failing I’ve detected in myself as a reader: if Kandel were a politician, I’d have opened his memoir with utter cynicism about his motives and reliability. If this were a novel, I’d go in positively gunning for the unreliable narrator. But he’s a fellow scientist! It never occurred to me to question his authenticity or motives. Even objectionable, bigoted scientists are openly objectionable and bigoted (see The Double Helix). Right?
The answer is No, of course not. We all frame our stories, consciously or unconsciously, to reflect those parts of ourselves that we want to share with our readers. I do it here, on this blog: although I believe that my blog “voice” on bioephemera is an extremely accurate reflection of, even insight into, my personality (those of you who know me offline can weigh in on this), it is by no means all of my personality. There are topics I explicitly do not discuss here, and opinions I do not share. Although not as organized as a memoir, each blog post, comment, diary, letter or classroom lecture is an act of editing: facts balanced with message for a specific audience. It may seem obvious, it is obvious, and yet, we too often suspend our skepticism for a trusted source - like a colleague or a friend.
As you probably know, framing science in the political sphere has been a huge controversy all summer. Just yesterday, The Scientist published another article, with editorial commentary, about framing. Should scientists deliberately frame their science? According to one opinion, If you don’t frame it, someone else will. True - if the science is important at all. But I’d argue that no one can avoid framing completely, even if they try; so we shouldn’t try - we should just be open and honest about it.
Everything we say and do is molded by our experiences, but perhaps more importantly, by the way we want and need others to see us. We all keep secrets. And it behooves us to remember that scientists are just like everyone else in that respect - fallible. Although the best of us try as hard as humanly possible to be objective, we simply can’t. Any self-aware, truly great scientist will admit this. That’s why science is a group activity: our individual biases will be diluted out and mitigated by our colleagues’. It will all come out in the wash. It’s reassuring to be part of that self-correcting mechanism: whether perfect objectivity is possible or not, we are doing the best we possibly can to be objective. As human beings, with our soft, squishy, fallible brains, we can do no more.
But a memoir is not science. Memory, as any neuroscientist knows well, is far from objective - those squishy brains of ours are idiosyncratic and troublesome, and whatever piquant neural correlates of memory we might find, we will never be able to directly compare our memories to anyone else’s. Eric Kandel laid the foundation for our understanding of how neurons learn, so it’s incredibly fitting that it is his memoir that reminds me today how fallible everything we perceive, learn, and believe can be. Whether he is charming or not, obnoxious or not, this book has been one of the most thought-provoking reads I’ve had in some time.
4 comments October 4th, 2007
I know you are, but what am I?
New from Made with Molecules artist Raven Hanna, creator of the serotonin necklace: protein jewelry! This is incredibly clever, because the single-letter protein code is a language most biologists speak. You stand a pretty good chance of running into a fellow bio geek who’ll be able to decipher your signals. The above bracelet is the perfect example: if you can read it, you are one!
But the best part - why I love Raven’s work - is that non-geeks will have no clue. The silver shapes are elegant and simple enough to pass as abstract art. After coveting her serotonin necklace for several months, I finally bought one, and I’m so glad I did. It’s much lovelier in person than on her site, and I received a lot of compliments on it - even though most people weren’t quite sure what it was (the neurobiologists knew, the chemists got the general chemical class, and the physicists said, “is that a molecule?”)
Bay Area residents can see Raven’s work in person on Friday October 5 at Feria Urbana in Oakland, or check out her etsy shop.
2 comments October 3rd, 2007