Blogs / The Loom

Last night I strapped on a bow tie and shot out my tuxedo cuffs, got in the car, and headed to the upper West Side to celebrate a global cataclysm. Actually, I was helping to celebrate the geologist who discovered the cataclysm. Walter Alvarez was receiving the Vetlesen Prize, the highest honor in the earth sciences.

Under the magnificent rotunda at Columbia’s Low Library, we sat down to dinner. Michael Purdy, the director of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, kicked off the event by explaining that Alvarez was winning the award because he had changed the way earth scientists view the history of the Earth. Later, Columbia president Lee Bollinger got up to present him with the award, declaring that Alvarez had shown how life was intimately connected to the cosmos. The real highlight of the evening, however, was listening to Alvarez himself.

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My experience with tuxedos has been limited to proms and weddings up until now, but today I’m renting a penguin suit for a most unexpected event: the geological equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Bet you didn’t know there was one! Actually, the Vetlesen Prize has been awarded every few years since 1959. This year’s winner is Walter Alvarez, who discovered the first clues that an asteroid plowed into the Earth 65 million years ago. The discovery was not just cool in and of itself, but changed the way scientists think about how surprising physical events can alter the course of evolution. I’ve spoken once to Alvarez on the phone, traded some email, and written the foreword to the new edition of his book, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. So I’m excited to be suiting up today. I don’t think live-blogging is appropriate to the event, but I’ll report back once I’ve returned to civilian gear.

Image: The Vetlesen Prize site

…you can steer away from this biology-based blog and towards the newest addition to the Discover blog stable: Cosmic Variance. I’m a long-time fan of this cabal of highly literate physicists, and I welcome them here.

Over the past year or so I’ve been engaging in a bit of science-writing masochism. I’ve been asking a few short  questions and trying to get some answers from people who’ve spent years grappling with them. For example:

What is life? (in Seed)

What is a species? (in Scientific American)

What is intelligence? (also in Scientific American)

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I tackle my next question: What is a gene?

This article emerged out of a lot of conversations with my editor over the past few months. We marveled over the steady stream of intriguing studies on genetics that were being published–studies that were pushing us to expand our ideas about things we took for granted, like the very nature of genes. So I started talking to scientists who are looking closely at the human genome. Some are studying how the same stretch of DNA can spew out many different proteins. Some are looking at the previously underappreciated army of RNA molecules that create a shadow network in our cells. Some are studying heredity beyond DNA–the molecules that cling to DNA and control which parts get used to build proteins and RNA, and which are silenced (as wonderfully illustrated by the toadflax flowers shown here–identical genes, but different flowers). We talked about undead genes and carcasses of viruses that have been dead for millions of years. It’s a very long article for a newspaper, but trust me–I could have kept writing for a lot longer.

In fact, my piece is actually just the lead article to a package of stories exploring similar terrain, from Andrew Pollack on the search for RNA-based medicines to Natalie Angier on the philosophy of genes. Check them all out.

As I cryptically mentioned earlier, I’ll be talking about my article  tomorrow morning on the Takeaway, a morning news show on NPR. Check here for schedule information; you can also to the site for the podcast.

Image source: Nature Genetics

This morning as I was about to board a plane, my phone rang. A reporter with Scientific American wanted to ask me about my father’s campaign for the US Senate. She wanted to talk to me, a science writer, about my father’s experience with science as a Congressman from New Jersey and as a Senate candidate.

As a journalist, I’ve never written about my dad. For the most part, I think it’s a bad idea for science writers to dispense political opinions anywhere except over a beer. We’re entitled to our views like anyone else, but we should not blur the line between our views and the science we write about. If I am writing about DNA, I do not have to know the party of the geneticist I’m interviewing. Science is not Democratic or Republican. If science writers split their time between political commentary and straight science, readers may come to doubt their accuracy. That’s not to say that science writers shouldn’t demolish non-science disinformation when they see it, even if it comes from a politician. I don’t mind if people think I’m biased in favor of continental drift. But I do mind if they think I report things only because they fit my personal ideology.

I’ve tried to be particularly scrupulous when it comes to my father’s work as a politician. So when the reporter today asked to talk, I said I didn’t think it would be appropriate. Here’s what came of that exchange. It’s one of the stranger news hooks I’ve ever come across, but I was glad that the story revisits some of my father’s experiences with science. Yet I have to say that when I read my no-comment at the end, I seemed like a bit of a prude.

So, let me just note here that my father, the erstwhile chemistry student, helped me become fascinated by science. My father, the AP stringer, made me a better writer by showing me how any writing can always be made better. My father the candidate continues to show me how to conduct oneself with dignity and wit, to be fearless when there is reason to fear. That is my comment.

Last month I wrote in the New York Times about Spore, a highly anticipated game that let you follow life from microbe to intergalactic civilization. I had a couple evolutionary biologists play around with it to get their reaction, and contact a couple others who had had a chance to play the game. They gave it positive–though decidely mixed–marks. In today’s issue of Science, John Bohanon describes the reactions of a number of other biologists, and they really don’t like it at all. Here’s what Ryan Gregory has to say:

“The problem is that the game features virtually none of the key ingredients of evolution as we understand it,” says Gregory. “There’s no shared common descent between species, since every single creature in Spore can trace its lineage back to a different single-celled organism that arrives from space.” Spore also lacks biological variation. “When you run into other members of your species, they are always identical clones of you.” Nor does it have natural selection. “There are no consequences for dying, since you just reappear at your nest.” Your organism does evolve, says Gregory, “in the sense that it changes over time, but it really has no bearing on how things evolve in the real world.”

I believe the article is behind a subscription wall, but you can check out a wiki Bohanan set up for an in-depth report card.

The Boston Globe has set up an insanely beautiful feature called “The Big Picture.” Each week, they pick out a dozen or more stunning pictures on some topic and display them at huge size. The latest theme is “Earth From Above,” and the pictures are all from photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. I don’t know why, but this picture really spoke to me (click through for the full size shot). It’s a fresh expanse of lava in Iceland that has cooled down enough for moss and other organisms to colonize it. Life always finds a way.

We’ve cast our votes…and here are the winners. As a judge, let me extend best wishes to the winners and all the entrants to the National Academies of Sciences Communication Award.

Have you ever seen a fungus firing its spores to the tune of the Anvil Chorus from Il Travatore?

I’ll take that as a no.

Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has been playing around with very fast video. Ultra fast. As in 250,000 frames-a-second fast. He knew exactly what this kind of video was made for. To film fungi that live on dung as they discharge their spores. These tiny fungi can blast spores as far as six feet away, boosting the odds that they’ll land on a clean plant that a cow or other grazing animal may eat. The fungi develop inside the animal, get pooped out with its dung, and fire their spores once more.

Money’s results were not just significant, but beautiful. The fungi fire their spores up to 55 miles an hour–which translates to an acceleration of 180,000 g. Money calls it “the fastest flight in nature.”

Money has just published his results in the journal PLOS One, and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created the first fungus opera. Behold:

I just found that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the 1980 TV series on life and the universe, is now on Itunes. You can get it here, at $1.99 an episode.

I’ve downloaded the first two episodes, which I don’t think I’ve seen since they first aired 28 years ago. I remember watching every episode intently as a 14-year old at the end of the Carter administration. The passage of time has revealed some hokiness around the edges.  The music, much of it by Vangelis, sometimes makes me think I’ve walked into a crystal shop. Sagan is fitted in corduroy blazers and what seems to be the precursor of the Members Only jacket. Some of the images still look good–like Sagan’s calendar of the cosmos–but there are also painfully long pans across a cardboard diorama of ancient amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. We are so spoiled today by Jurassic Park.

For some reason, what struck me as hokiest about Cosmos was the spaceship Sagan uses to coast around space to show off galaxies and pulsars. It is meant as a deeply profound experience–a voyage of the imagination across billions of light years (say it slowly, in proper Sagan style). But Sagan sits in a plastic bucket chair that survives today only in aging bus stations and flea markets.

The picture of science Sagan presents is also a bit too simple for my taste now (at least in the first two episodes I’ve watched again). He offers a black-and-white picture of science versus the forces of superstition, war, and other bad things. Greeks love knowledge, Dark Ages fall, Kepler rises! Only science will save us from the evils of nuclear war! Of course, Kepler’s discoveries were motivated by his mystical reading of the Bible. And, of course, science and war (hot or cold) have been intimately intertwined for the past century. The people who sacked the library of Alexandria did not build the atomic bomb. The generation of physicists who taught Sagan did.

But as I was tallying up the shortcomings of the show, something funny happened. My daughters, 7 and 4, are pretty well-trained now to stay out of the office. But as I was watching Cosmos on my computer, they snuck in and ended up sitting on my lap, captivated by the stately unwinding of DNA and the majestic trip through the cell. I could see they were starting to understand things that I’ve been trying to explain without much luck. In an age of hyper-fast editing cuts and soundtracks always turned to eleven, Cosmos can still mesmerize a child and give her an introduction to the natural world. Sagan’s accounts are sometimes a bit dated now, but nobody has done a better job of conveying a sense of the scale of nature, from that calendar to that bus-station spaceship to the dive into the cell–and it’s thanks largely to Sagan’s exceptional ability to talk about science in clear, even poetic terms. It is, I’m realizing, a show that shaped the way I look at the world, even now that I’m getting close to Sagan’s age when he filmed it. And for that, I can forgive any fashion faux pas.

This morning: grey clouds and low tide on White Island, home to an empty lighthouse, thousands of terns, and thousands more mosquitoes. And red algae.

George Orwell is about to start a blog.