Vignettes
I stared hard into strong sea wind. The night was blue-black. Whitecaps flared off crests. Small waves lapped the rock. The water was deep green, wine-dark and smelled of seaweed.
I sat on cold sea rock.
A shriek at my left shoulder brought me around, seagull hanging on the wind. I turned back to the ocean colder than before.
The oak woods were full of deer and rabbits. By day, sea lions blared from rocks. Squirrels were everywhere. At lunch, I watched raccoons forage for shellfish by a rocky shore.
In those days, the world was alive in a way that it isn’t now. The air and water have changed for the worse. The ocean dies, faster than the life of a man.
Another day, we would backpack into the high country. We were camping by a clear stream near trail head. The thin air and sharp evening cold bit our lowland lungs. As I walked back to the group, I saw a man stumble. He carried a paper bag grasped at the soldier’s neck. A boy just a few years older than I ran by. As the boy passed, the man spun toward him and cursed, “Go ahead, jog!” Spit hovered around ragged, whiskered lips. “You think you’re going to live forever! Well, you’re not! You’re going to get old and die, just like the rest of us!” The boy ran on.
I was about 16 years old. My father collected my sister and me and drove down to the harbor. We had borrowed the Blinder’s Tempest: a seaworthy 21 foot sloop. Light was fading as we left the harbor. My father got hung up at work. We hugged the shore on a broad reach toward Paradise Cove, which we neared about midnight. We sailed north up the coast to gain a more favorable tack toward the island. My father planned our approach on a reach, so we wouldn’t fight the whole way, close hauled to a changing wind. We had intended to anchor for the night at the cove, but there wasn’t enough light to settle the boat safely. Eve, just 14, was fussy, exhausted. Our mother had died the year before, and nothing was right in the family. Dad seemed distant. The summer night at sea, normally comforting, felt harsh. Eve squirmed forward and crashed. My father blinked slowly, eyes closed too long. We came across the wind to reset course toward Santa Barbara Island, a big rock about 30 miles off the mainland. The air was still, and, under full sail, flying the large jib, the jenny, the boat gurgled forward, doing 1-2 knots, tops. My father told me to hold the compass course. He explained that we were sailing through shipping lanes so I should wake him if I saw a ship. We might have to take evasive action. I imagined a ship encountering a 21 foot sailboat in the black of night. We had running lights, but you had to look to see them. Bright green, red and blue points indicated stern, aft, starboard and port: little protection in a large ocean. My dad collapsed alongside my fallen sister. At my father’s suggestion, I started navigating from lights on the shore, checking the compass occasionally. After several hours, I steered by compass alone. I didn’t want to stare at the compass for fear of falling asleep, working the helm. I listened to the water shift against the hull. I mended the mainsail and jib to catch whatever scant wind. I set the mainsail to luff ever so slightly, to make sure I captured what little wind god might will us this dark night. The still air barely lifted the telltale. I woke my dad at first light. We reached the island later that day. Santa Barbara Island was desolate: a barren rock rising from a hyperactive sea. There was a sea lion rookery. My dad put a hole in the sabot trying to investigate. My sister was scared by a sea lion swimming too near the boat. We saw dolphins, cormorants, and many fish.
Back in the Sierras, I climbed a flat topped granite peak. The ascent brought us from the right side of the face along a narrow knife edge, falling forever on one side, 200 feet on the other, which is forever if you fall. The rock felt cold, although the day was bright and warm. We made the summit, just as the sun was setting on one side and a full moon was rising on the other. The moon and sun never looked that big. We rappelled down the left side of the face, where the drop was less, to save time getting back. What I lacked in sense in those days, I partly made up in strength and endurance.
I rode my bicycle in a double century (200 miles). I blew two tires. It was hot and dusty. I wore a black jersey. 13 hr into the ride, I noticed that an imprint of my ribs, etched in salt, showed on my chest, like a latter day shroud of Turin. The last two hours of the ride, my head ached from holding it up so long. I had no idea my head was so heavy. Late in the ride, I reached out with greasy bicycling gloves for an overripe banana, the gift of a volunteer. I managed to keep it down, but it didn’t settle in my stomach gracefully.
In those days, I had bicycling muscles popping in mounds over my knee caps. They have receded, since.
Riding hard with a strong tailwind by the ocean, I passed the Point and felt like I was riding downhill, only 30 miles from home. A passing truck spun up gravel that hit the left lens of my sunglasses very hard. I slowed, released my right clip and stopped. When I stopped shaking, I continued on. I rarely wore glasses when I rode.
In a smokey Laundromat, in Madison, Wisconsin, I sat. Girls are good talkers, and these were no exception. “Do you remember when John Lennon was killed? I died that day! I died with him.” I lived in a little crackerjack apartment. It was a happy time. I met my wife there.
Ann and I were on a sandbar by the Wisconsin River. It was a hot summer’s day. We had waded through a stream to get out on the unhurried river, which rolled by as if it would roll forever. Ann wore a silvery blue bathing suit. I smiled. She looked out at the slow river and said, “I wish I had something to sit on!” My thoughts were elsewhere, unspoken. A moment later a reed mat floated toward us. I waded out and rescued the treasure. I’ve often thought since that we should have wished for something more valuable, but maybe it was best to wish for something that could float. Probably, you get only one wish. If you wished for a million dollars, you’d probably never know your wish had been granted. We still have the mat. The million dollars would be gone by now, I guess. Perhaps it would still be in the river.
We spent many hours in our canoe. We would paddle out and anchor. Swim. When the magic moment came just at dusk, I would throw a few lures at the water. One time a large pike-muskie hybrid breached a few feet from the boat. Once, I hooked a small fish, who skipped over the water, as I set the hook. The fish was smaller than the lurid, orange lure I had thrown at him, but, in the boat, the little muskie still had blood in his eye. He was certain he could swallow this strange orange fish that seemed to have bit him back. I released him carefully, wishing him a bright future. It is good to have ambition.
I was a man of energy even if devoid of any specific ambition. I had not, however, been idle. I had a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UCLA. In Madison, I often spent whole nights running gels, sometimes a whole little room full of them, sequencing DNA or mapping RNAs to their DNA complements. I loved working in a lab. Other times, I played sports: softball, basketball, and volleyball. I was somewhat creative in my experimental work, but I don’t think I ever thought very well about what I was trying to do.
I wandered from Madison to Toronto to take a second postdoc. “To-Ronto!” was the toast Jim offered, as I prepared to go north. I wished to learn some new things, and I was intrigued by Jack Greenblatt’s character. He seemed to me to be a very smart man brimming over with interesting ideas. Michigan suffered a dull sameness, as I drove across it toward Windsor.
Toronto was a good town. I rooted for the Blue Jays, although I was still soft on the Dodgers and Brewers. I played slow pitch softball and volleyball. Paul was my setter. I was the jack in the box, the middle hitter, taking the short set. I learned to hit off Paul’s hands and also to hit loops and shoots. Playing with the same setter for three years, I got much better. Except for the chronic pain that rasps shoulder and elbow, it’s a great feeling to pound a volleyball. It’s a lot like pounding the soul of the softball using the power part of the bat. Soccer was a disaster. I was always off sides, and I’m not certain why. It seemed a silly rule. I went to Toronto Blizzard games to try to find out. Now I could ice skate forwards and backwards crossing my skates. Clumsy, but not bad for a kid who grew up in LA, where skates have wheels.
Ann and I would window shop in Yorkville, sometimes in pouring rain. We loved riding around on the street cars and subways.
I loved working in the lab. It was peaceful. The cold room was a relief on hot days. I loved seeing molecules on gels. I didn’t care that my project didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Canadians were a trip. Dan, Min, Paul, Ann, and I were wandering around town. Dan liked to gross people out. The conversation had strayed to the homeless and how they kept warm in winter. Dan went through a routine of seeking contentment by snuggling up to a fellow hobo. “I see,” I said, “so happiness is a warm bum?” Perhaps it’s true.
When I took a faculty position at Michigan State University, I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting into. No one told me anything about being a professor. I had no notion what was involved. Also, this was the time of the great killing. Scientists and education were not valued at this time in America. Nor have they been valued since.
When I was a small boy, I loved the La Brea pits in LA. They built a beautiful museum there, which I still like to visit when I can. They have a room full of scientists cleaning bones. A few times, the room has been empty without a scientist in sight, and I worry. When I went outside, and gazed on the noisome pool bubbling tar and gas, I thought I knew what they must have done with them. This is a likely fate for a scientist in the modern age.
I continued to play basketball and a little softball. Some colleagues lured me into playing doubles tennis. Tennis is a frustrating game. Staying between the lines seems so confining.
Generally, I don’t put much credence in this sort of thing, but I was riding along an LA freeway, and I would swear the radio told me that, in LA, 50 % of people suffer some kind of stress at some time. I was stunned by this revelation, but I was worried about the other 50 %. Were they dead or what?
Los Angeles must be the ugliest city under creation. I am amazed by its filth and drab asphalt, the dirty air, the smell of gas and oil, the heat and dust. The soul is sapped driving roads that go nowhere. The long parking lots they call freeways: this is a new definition of freedom: the freedom to embrace dull stupidity and ignorance: to live in it: to revel in it. Life without pace or meaning: an American life.
LA continues to grow like a cancer, sprawling to the mountains and spilling beyond like a burst dam: a tribute to the unrestrained sexuality of man and woman. The city is domed by a huge mound of smog, dust and filth. The air is toxic, the people ungovernable.
My father killed himself. He raised a pistol to his neck and fired. He was trying to hit the brain stem, but he missed and got cortex instead, the bullet bounced off his skull case, spinning inward. “What you see is what you get,” explained one physician. A Hispanic doctor told us how brave my father had been to have done this. Ultimately, we discontinued treatment, and my father starved to death in his bed. This was the work of my brother Alex, not me. I didn’t know what to do, and I had to return to Michigan State to start my teaching. I did sing a lullaby to my father as he lay dead but still breathing in his hospital bed. Men die on the inside before their body dies. This was explained to me by an old girlfriend thinking of her father, who then was listed among the walking dead. I guessed she was right. Women die better than men. I think women are better suited for life.
I’m not sure I tried very hard to put my father’s parting shot in perspective. It was certainly one man’s view of the meaning of life, and the message was clear. My tennis buddy, Dave, asked, some years later, whether I had forgiven my father. I had to say that I thought my father had put himself somewhat beyond any power of my forgiveness. What good would it do him? What good would it do me?
My grandmother made me promise that I would help to euthanize her when it was her time to die: a promise I am ashamed to say, I was unable to fulfill. She explained how she had helped to euthanize a dear friend of hers by placing a morphine tablet from a doctor under her friend’s tongue. She explained how peacefully her beloved friend had died. She was practically spitting when she described how they force these tubes into you in a vain hope to bring back life. She spoke of torture, something an old Jewish lady would understand. My grandmother died far from family. She had been in a home. I had tried to keep in touch, but we had lost connection, and I didn’t know why until she was already dead. I guess she starved herself to death. I think this is the new euthanasia. Grandma lived to about 93.
Granny refused radical medical treatment for Pop, when he slipped into a coma from pneumonia. He was in his late 80s. Granny spoke with disgust about his nurses, who discussed their sex lives with excessive frankness, as they tended to Pop’s unconscious and failing body with my grandmother present in the room. My brother Ben and I visited Mort, Pop’s brother, at UCLA medical center. He was dying of pneumonia. He was full of tubes draining his lungs of black-green ooze. Mort had not led a blameless life, and Ben opined as we left the hospital that that’s what he might have expected from a probe of Mort’s innermost sphere. In his hospital bed, Mort turned toward us looking very pale and said, “You never come to see me!” “Well. We’re here now,” I explained.
Mort wrote a novel called “Bread of Idleness”. He also wrote a book of sonnets. I tried to read the novel but never made it past the hundredth page. Sadly, the sonnets are lost. Granny gave away a whole box of Mort’s poems after he died. I always thought Shakespeare’s sonnets were silly beyond belief and not up to his standard. I can only imagine what Mort’s sonnets must be like. I would give much to read them. So would Ben.
Men are brittle creatures. Dreams fail, hopes fail. What else is there to hold a person together? In a world of theft and greed and lies and no opportunity, what hope remains? Unless you are amongst the thieves and brigands, how do you sustain your effort against this growing tide?
The world of science was changing. I didn’t know it then, but I tried to explain later, “I grew up in the Age of Aquarius. Now I work in the age of infinite accountability.” I had been allowed to muck about in laboratories for years without any particular direction or sense that I had to accomplish something specific by any specific time. Now things were different. Whatever I might accomplish, it would not be enough, perhaps not enough even for the survival of my lab. And if the lab failed, what then? I wasn’t suited for other things: politics, television, art, society, music. The world outside the lab seemed stale beyond belief or imagining.
But mucking about in labs was a thing of the past. Society had no interest or tolerance for science. They wanted their favorite disease cured tomorrow. They didn’t care about their friend’s favorite disease. They didn’t care how life worked. They cared about SUVs and satellite television: aggressive motion without meaning or direction.
My point of view was quite different. I was really only interested in basic science: the best science scientists could contrive. I wanted to know how life worked, and I really didn’t care about curing some disease or other. My belief was that the biggest issue in curing disease was to know life mechanisms. I guessed that the biggest innovations in medicine would come from basic research. With knowledge would come power to manipulate, to cure. I was more interested in discovery than treatment. There were plenty of people out there interested in the other end but not knowing how to go about it and needing a basic scientist to inform them.
Ok. So I could see their point. My mother died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 44, I was 15. So I should work on leukemias or lymphomas, right? Maybe. I was much more likely to make a contribution doing what I was doing. Research that is too directed becomes too contrived. The effort becomes more political than scientific.
In Toronto, I used to drive to the slaughter house for Provini calf thymuses. I would watch the calves conveyed, hanging on hooks with throats slit. The smell of raw meat and recent dread and death made me vaguely sick. I tried to be stoic. I didn’t want the factory workers to think less of me than they did to start. Postdocs and meat packers generally don’t mix, so this was a meeting at a cautious interface. I took the ice-packed organs back to the lab for cleaning and flash freezing. Older animals don’t have much of a thymus, so the animals had to die young.
I made large columns with calf RNA polymerase II covalently attached to an agarose matrix. I passed extracts of human cells through the columns to identify proteins that bound specifically to the RNA polymerase II protein. I still work on some of these proteins today. RNA polymerase II is an enzyme that forms an RNA polymer from a DNA template. Protein affinity technology has vastly improved, but I was one of the pioneers who first used these methods to identify and isolate important proteins through protein-protein binding. I loved this work. This was high art and high science. I loved looking at bands of brown-stained proteins in gels.
Sam was born in the midst of a big experiment. Ann and I were trying to clone the gene encoding RAP74 (RNA polymerase II-associating protein; 74 kilodaltons). She was bursting with Sam: a slight woman carrying a large child. Ann could barely sidle up to the lab bench. We were sequencing DNA to identify clones. Although all the cloning diagnostics were good, we had little hope that we might succeed. The problem is that, until the answer becomes obvious, you really don’t know what you are doing, and you can’t tell whether or not you’ve been successful. Anyway, we couldn’t tell. We were running out of money and out of hope. I had been typing away on some damn grant proposal in my office, with my usual dismal expectation. Ann was out in the lab. She started reading off DNA sequence to me. After running the sequence through the computer to decode it, I had to do a double take. I felt vaguely sick. The sequence of the gene she had read clearly matched the sequence of the protein, the gene for which we were trying to clone. Sam was born a few days later.
Nowadays, cloning genes is automatic. In fact, most of them are already cloned and available. This is the legacy of the human and other genome projects. You just have to figure out which clones you want and check them out of the appropriate library or amplify them using the polymerase chain reaction. No big deal. In those days, it was different. You had to isolate and identify them yourself, gene by gene. Now, pretty much everything is cloned and lying somewhere on the shelf waiting to be claimed.
I was driving to work, thinking inappropriate thoughts about women. A car passed: an old station wagon, slightly rusted. The bumper sticker read, “Fear this bitch!”
I had tried everything to succeed in my new job, but I was not doing well. I published some stuff of reasonable quality, but I wasn’t a very good molecular biologist, and I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing. The bar for success in science kept rising, as the field became more aggressive and competitive.
Realizing that mutations in RAP74 had similar effects on initiation and elongation, that is, starting and continuing an RNA chain, and realizing that we would never figure out initiation, I decided to study elongation. This turned out to be a good move. Elongation was tractable in ways initiation was not.
I hired Yuri Nedialkov and we started doing rapid chemical quench-flow kinetic studies of RNA polymerase II elongation. The name of the method is fancy, but the technique is not. It’s a 30 year old technology for starting and stopping a chemical reaction within a few milliseconds, a few thousandths of a second. The rapid timing is important because enzymes catalyze reactions within milliseconds, so to observe an enzyme in action requires fast reaction timing.
It took us over a year to get started. The machine was pretty easy to use, but we needed training. We were inventing something new. I still don’t know exactly what I’m inventing. I try to study and read enough kinetics to figure out how to do a better job, but each problem in kinetics is in some way a separate problem. There is a lot of discovery and creativity in kinetic studies, and RNA polymerase II is a big problem: it is a big enzyme.
Size matters, and a big enzyme is a big problem. Throwing in a DNA template, a growing RNA chain, NTP (nucleoside triphosphate) substrates, and a bunch of magnesium atoms popcorning around, and the problem grows.
As we improved at doing kinetics, we started figuring out how RNA polymerase II worked, and we were often surprised. Many prevalent views appeared to be wrong or mostly wrong. Kinetics seemed to give a much improved view of RNA polymerase II mechanism, and I was certain that mechanism was the key to understanding regulation. Regulation of RNA synthesis is the key to knowing how gene expression is controlled. That is, how the DNA program is interpreted in a particular cell type: a fundamental issue in cell development, viral infection, and cancer, as I often reminded the NIH. We had a sense that we were deciphering one of the core mechanisms of living systems. We were solving a very fundamental problem in biology: like Watson and Crick figuring out the structure of DNA and its probable replication mechanism. We were figuring out the transcription mechanism: the synthesis of RNA from a DNA template.
Hell. So I didn’t have a Nobel Prize yet, but I needed first to deserve one. I needed to solve my core life mechanism: RNA synthesis. RNA synthesis is as big a problem now as DNA synthesis was over 50 years ago. I was pretty pleased with what we were doing and how well it was going. I was pretty confident this was a problem we could solve in significant detail. You will never understand anything completely, but, as a scientist, you are honor bound to try.
Although I hadn’t thought much about it before, I needed a Nobel Prize. There really wasn’t another kind of acknowledgement available for a scientist. Beneath the prize there was only survival, and, based on my experience, barest, grasping survival.
It is strange to live in a world devoid of opportunity: a world of theft and pernicious greed. The only enterprise free enterprise, and it was neither free nor very enterprising, except in a white collar criminal sense. It was a grim revelation to turn on the TV and try to watch.
Except in the vast and powerful arena of white collar crime, it was a society without vision or value. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, about summed up the American present. Much was stolen and much was gained, but more from modified pyramid and Ponzi schemes than from the manufacture of quality products. Honest business had given way to the paper economy, the purest dream of Republicans everywhere: vast wealth without value: a life of theft motivated by pernicious greed, compounded instantaneously. This was an immense, seemingly complete victory for the far, far ultra-right Christian-Republican movement: a country without value or values: dedicated to endless theft and greed.
Best to think of other things. What cannot be cured, must be endured. We voted for them, and now we had to live with their vicious and senseless brutality.
Sputnik, the Russian satellite, motivated President Eisenhower to force a shameful Congress into supporting research and development creating a boom in America’s power and economy. That was when Republicans yet had a shred of patriotism, when stealing money was not their only motivation. President Kennedy shamed another shameful Congress into putting a man on the moon. These investments in research have driven the United States forward, ultimately into the current frenzy of profit taking: the W. Bush Presidency. It is a shame to have a shameful President bringing shameful bills and issues to a shameful Congress: men without spirit or vision, except in a white collar criminal sense.
Artsies think they are creative, but, in general, they do not seem to know much about what creativity is about. I used to think on this. I would sit in the Jean Arp Dadaist sculpture in the UCLA sculpture garden and watch the pretty co-eds walk by. The girls were prettier at the artsy side of campus, so we science types would come to visit. My brother Alex had a book of Arp sculpture, which I investigated. All the sculptures were similar to this one: simple bronze vaginaesque arcs.
I sometimes wonder whether great artists of the past would be artists today or scientists. I often think Mozart would be a physicist. Maybe he would study early cosmology or elementary particle physics. Music would not now capture his genius. Of course, he would suffer as much for his art today as he did then. People hate creativity now as much as ever: maybe more.
To college, I sometimes wore an Army surplus flight suit, gray with zippered pockets everywhere. Granny had paid a few dollars for it at a rummage sale. I put my small slide rule in the knife pocket along the left thigh.
There were others crazier than I. One lunatic bounced around campus asking weird and unexpected questions in lectures. Once I saw him on Bruin Walk in an animated debate with an advocate for some radical political cause. The discussion was heated and passionate. I was unsure that converting a lunatic to one’s cause was the best plan, but the zealot persisted.
Another lunatic appeared draped in white robes looking like Lawrence of Arabia. One day, I wondered to a friend, “Did he forget his camel?” Lawrence accosted me in the hall to proselytize. We were dooming my soul to endless pits of fire, “That is the road that leads to Hell!!” He explained. “Anyway,” I offered, “I have to stop off at the Chemistry Library.”
I would have starved to death in college if not for my grandmother. I would bicycle to her worn Spanish style court on my rusty green bicycle. She’d feed me a steak and talk my head off. She’d tell me stories, complete with dialogue, of events from her childhood. Many stories I heard many times without any changes that I could discern either in the details or the conversations. I was amazed by my grandmother’s memory. I cannot remember any of the stories now. My father gruffly opined that none of the stories was true the first time they were told. She was my mother’s mother, but my father never had a bad word to say about anyone. I never learned more about this little family friction. My father was losing his grip on the world.
I was a lousy checker player. One day I played Pop, Granny’s husband, my maternal grandfather. He beat me handily twice. Then I beat him one game. His heart sank, I could tell. He knew he was losing his grip and he feared that he wouldn’t live long. I loved the lathed, green wooden bars on his bedroom window, the rhythmic thump of his old typewriter, and the smell of his pipe tobacco. I remember the wrinkles on his paper skin.
The little court looked like it was built of white adobe. About 15 people lived next door in one little apartment. Many of them were undocumented aliens from Guatemala scratching out a living in the depths and pits of LA. There were other saddish stories that I won’t tell here. The court was a miniature community: part of a better, poorer, more humane, past world that was dying because it was being killed. It was a shame to see it fail. I loved my grandparents. They were truly good and loving people.
I was on the grass studying at UCLA. A very pretty girl with large brown eyes, oversize freckles and a shy manner walked toward me, and said, after an unsettling pause, “You know Jesus loves you!” She looked at the ground. I told her I had to study, and she went away. I guess, “Speak for yourself, John Standish!” would have been better.
In graduate school, I went to a debate between an evolutionary biologist and a special creationist, John Gish, “From fish to Gish!” The biologist was a devout Catholic who didn’t see any particular conflict from belief in God and belief in evolution: one was faith, the other science. Gish proved the existence of God from gaps in the fossil record and the dissimilarity of different skeletons, which looked similar to me. I was afraid the audience, mostly Jesus freaks, would start to chant. It all seemed like wishful thinking. I thought of the debate between the politico and the lunatic.
What convinced me that evolution was probably right was reading a Scientific American article by Dick Dickerson on the conservation of cytochrome C sequences, building an evolutionary tree based on protein sequence comparisons. Nothing I had heard in school on the subject was nearly as helpful or as convincing. In high school biology, confronted with the procession of lemurs to monkeys to man, there was always the temptation to draw oneself at the head of the evolutionary parade. Many years later I met Dick. I tried to induce him to talk science. I was trying to learn something about interactions between RNA and HIV-1 (AIDS virus) reverse transcriptase, and I was searching my muddled brain for a good question to ask. He wanted to tell jokes instead. He was charming and funny, although the jokes were not memorable in themselves. They bubbled up frequently and spontaneously. I listened and tried not to bore him.
I avoided service during the Vietnam War. I did not do this by doing anything clever. I drew a high number in the draft lottery. Richard Blinder was not so lucky and ended up a name on the black wall. He was two months in Vietnam when he stepped on a landmine and was blown apart. Richard was a gymnast, who enlisted just out of high school. He was strong and handsome. My father got the call early one morning. I saw my father emerge from the toilet just after being sick. He blanched white as a ghost. “Richard Blinder was killed in action!” He growled through the taste of his vomit. “Richard was killed in an accident?” I asked stupidly. My father repeated himself and staggered back toward his room wiping the corner of his mouth. The Blinders were close friends from the sailing club. Richard had been a skilled sailor.
We didn’t get much for that war.
I grew up on sailboats. We would sail and troll a lure, catching fish frequently: bonita, mackerel, barracuda, sometimes bass. The ocean used to churn with fish, like a boiling kettle. We would see yellowtail and gigantic sunfish amid the schools of bonita and mackerel and smaller fish. Schools of anchovies, grunion and squid would range north from Mexico, and the bigger fish would follow. Now the world has changed. The bait fish are caught in nets in Mexico, and the larger fish stay far offshore, if they come at all. The Pacific Ocean is dying or dead.
During red tides we would go night sailing. The small, spinning wake of the sailboat was a brilliant, electric blue. Fish were lightning, torpedo streaks in the water. Small fish pursued by bigger ones splattered the surface. I loved the soft song and gurgle of water mixing against the hull.
At the red tide, the beach at night was magic. The waves spit blue fire.
Before college I worked on an archaeological dig near San Luis Obispo. The site was just south of Morro Bay. I was working where they would build the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. The dig was a salvage project, prior to construction. The natives dug clams and picked mussels. There were acorns in season and deer to hunt. The people had musical instruments and beads from the sea. I have never seen anywhere so alive with shore animals and sea life. We bathed in the stream after a dusty day’s work, black loam wedged in every crack of skin. My 18 year old face had creases I hadn’t known about: signs of care to come. I never felt so wild.
This jewel of the California coast is dead now too: killed by human encroachment.
We enter a brave new world of wanton destruction driven by the immense pressures of gross human overpopulation. There is no check on this crushing horror. Humanity has fully committed to this unhappy future.
In Madison, I bought a canoe: deep forest green fiberglass over mahogany ribs with oak decks and rails: almost silent on the water. Ann and I spent a lot of time on the water.
Another favorite was American Players Theatre, an outdoor Shakespeare theatre in Spring Green, WI. We would camp and walk over to see plays. Thunder and a rising storm set the backdrop for Romeo and Juliet. As we walked back to camp, the heavens opened. Tybalt mercifully stopped and offered us a ride. We got his old car very wet. He dropped us at our tent where we peeled off and stowed soaked clothes, still laughing. We tried to mend the old tent against more leaks. Not such a bad guy after all, Tybalt. During the day, we were canoeing on the Wisconsin River. We anchored to read the play.
My son Sam had big eyes and a serious manner. When he was an infant, I would walk him around the house on my shoulder for 45 minutes at a time, hoping he would settle and sleep. Some friends explained that for new parents, “Sleep is for wimps!” This was the most useful advice I remember from those days.
So, we were trying to figure out how life worked: how RNA was synthesized. The plan was to study the elongation reaction: how fast an RNA chain was made from a DNA template. We were using rapid chemical quench-flow, in which reactions are started and stopped within a few milliseconds. This was a 30 year old technology, but we had applied it to a new problem. As we went into these studies, neither we nor anyone knew they were tractable. We were surprised at how powerful the approach turned out to be.
Kinetics gives you rates (how fast the reaction goes), but you want mechanism: how the reaction works. In this regard kinetics is frustrating because the output is indirect: mechanism must be inferred from measured reaction rates.
The advantage of the human RNA polymerase II system was that different rates were well resolved. Each measured rate represented a different step in the mechanism. Ordering the steps would give a pathway, like a street map, so the human RNA synthesis mechanism could be inferred from the kinetics. Also, the system could be perturbed in various ways. By altering the system, any proposed mechanism could be challenged to see whether it was adequate to satisfy the strained situation.
Anyway, I was in heaven. The data were of very high quality and amazing beauty. The intellectual challenge was satisfying. I was clearly in over my head. I had to learn a new science in order to make full use of the fascinating new information I was now able to obtain. I had to do some mathematical and computer modeling that I did not initially know how to do. I wasn’t sure that anyone knew exactly how to do it. What could be better than that? I loved to learn new things.
Science does not work on a human time scale. You’d like to go to work, finish something, have someone tell you that you did a good job. Science never works like that. You work forever on something you don’t know how to do. You can bang your head against a problem for months without figuring out how to solve it. And, when you succeed, no one understands or cares—not even your closest colleagues. Everyone is stuck in their own little world working their own little crossword puzzles. It takes a certain kind of patient spirit to endure that kind of fruitless frustration. Not everyone is suited to it. Perhaps no one is really suited to it. Science is a restless, bitter occupation.
Jeremy is my second son. He was cheerful and outgoing from birth. Before, we thought he might be a girl, but he clearly was not. I guess we did not inspect the ultrasound critically. As Jeremy was first handed to me, he reached his purple arms around my neck to hold on. Sam has never been like that.
They are three years apart in age but very different souls. Sam is somewhat dour, intense. Sam is quick with symbols and school. Sam loves sports. Jeremy is social and friendly, popular. We nag Jeremy to sweat every day, so he won’t get too fat. Despite much gentle encouragement by two Ph.D.s, Jeremy struggled initially at school. Since then, he became a more accomplished student, although he needs lots of help with homework, maybe to satisfy his instinct for social interaction.
Together they are very funny. They roll around on the floor like puppies. They joke and talk. Grandma, Verna, Ann’s mom, can’t believe how little they fight. We encourage them to get along. They get more freedom if they behave.
We read aloud to our kids every night, if we can. There are many competing activities and issues. Ann and I used to read Shakespeare aloud to each other on the Wisconsin River.
Jeremy reads himself to sleep. Sam used to, but now he has an hour of math to do every day. It seems excessive. If he didn’t have so much schoolwork, I would try to teach him some things. I may be a better teacher than those at school.
After 18 years plus at Michigan State University, my insight into teaching is that learning is self-inflicted: it is something you do to yourself. The students who learn material well teach it to themselves. The teacher learns the material very, very well to minimize embarrassment during presentation to an unfriendly audience. The teacher organizes the material to encourage the students to be more orderly in their own thinking. Teachers try to be motivating, but generally motivation comes from within. If you wish to learn material well, you study and teach the material to your self, just as the teacher teaches himself or herself to avoid looking too foolish: a little foolish is inevitable. One can sing or dance or tell bad jokes, but generally these are mistakes. Be a conduit to information. Don’t be a stand up comic. I wish I had understood the teacher-student relationship better when I was a student. It would have made things much easier.
Real life and science don’t mix and are constantly at odds. One tries. One fails. It’s the way of the world. Keep fighting and keep your head down, as best you can.
At middle age, life is opera. One looks backward to childhood and adolescence and forward toward failure and death. One worries about children, trying to gird them against the rising storm. Fingernails are bloody as they cling to a failed career. The heart grows ever more sentimental as passions rise. The body fails. It is an odd time of life. For many men, this is the time the core and heart begin to fail.
Intellectually, it has been a great time for me. I am much smarter and more able than I used to be. I grow in power and capability. But I need to get my left hip fixed. The ball joint is fused with osteoarthritis. In the x-ray, the joint looks like the crooked grin of a jackolantern.