Sometimes I think the defense of slavery has been as pernicious as slavery itself, if for no other reason than it discourages logical thinking.
Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.
Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.
One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.
Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.
The result is an attack on science itself.
Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.
The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.
Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.
Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.
The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.
Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.
Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
South Carolina - DNA Studies
Gregor Mendel was doing his pea inheritance experiments at the same time Darwin was developing the theory of natural selection, but the monk’s work was not publicized until 1900.
Breeders already had enough experience with the variability of hybrids to recognize the statistical patterns he described, that people with blue eyes inherit their eye color from both parents because the blue allele is recessive, and that crossing a red and white pea would produce a red or white flower 25% of the time, and a pink the rest.
Rose growers confirmed his work, especially when they took a hybrid and backcrossed it with one of its parents. It’s easy for them to say Chapmneys Pink Cluster introduced a recessive gene for reblooming because their efforts produced results that confirmed their expectations.
In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published their work on the structure of DNA and scientists began using sophisticated instruments to determine exactly where each gene resided, and what each controlled.
Results for rice specialists have not been as satisfying as those for roses. Dormancy, that single domestication event posited by earlier researchers, was no longer simple because dormancy isn’t a physical trait like color, but either results from the structure of the outer layer of the seed or from the embryo. Its appearance isn’t tied to a single gene, but to areas of DNA that exists on several chromosomes.
A Chinese team found five quantitative trait loci have been identified on five chromosomes, and that dormancy increased in only four cases when they introduced an allele from a highly dormant indica cultivar. They learned the more genes they altered, the greater the dormancy.
A group in Korea found similar complexity when they looked at the literature on shattering, another trait hypothesized to have been central to domestication. The ability for the seed to separate easily at maturity without breaking is the consequence of hormonal processes that create a hardened abscission layer on the pedicel stem that holds the seed to the head.
They found reports that four alleles on four of rice’s twelve chromosomes have been linked to shattering, of which two are involved with the creation of the abscission layer. They also found six broader quantitative trait loci had been identified on six chromosomes.
The group created a shattering mutation by treating a non-shattering japonica variety with N-methyl-N-nitrosourea, then crossed it with five cultivars, including its parent. The results suggested the recessive sh-h gene on chromosome 7 was responsible for shattering. They noted that area was closely linked to the Rc location that controls red hull color and the qSDs-7-1 experimentally tied to dormancy.
The level of amylose, a form of starch, is used to differentiate sticky japonica from fluffy indica rices. However, the tropical japonica javanica falls between the two.
In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. The gene has since been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice. In rice, the Wxa allele is associated with dryland indica and Wxb is found with wetland japonica.
However, a group of Japanese scientists found both existed in the two subspecies and that Wxb predominates. The distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT in nirvana and rufipogon mutates to AGTT.
In other words, the causative agent isn’t the genetic allele, but something working on that allele during reproduction. Further, the change isn’t permanent, but can revert in the next generation. Another Japanese team found the same kind of change in the African glaberrima rice came from deleting and inserting a new unit in the nucleotide sequence, rather than substituting a T for a G.
Scientists now know a great deal more about rice, but without specimens with known provenance, they can’t say where Hezeiah Maham or John Joshua Ward got his seed. Richard Porcher has found the plats to Maham’s plantation and hopes to unearth some grains. Depending on the results, geneticists may be able to guess if Ward’s Carolina Gold was the direct, but mutant, offspring of Ward, or like the Blush Noisette, has another as yet unidentified parent that blew in from another field.
Researchers have, however, done something more extraordinary, unintentionally duplicated the daily experience of planters who were constantly surprised when their gold hulled rice turned white, or their white turned red. The very randomness of such traits forced them to become better observers, and thus more open to an explanation like that provided by Darwin when it became available.
Notes:
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. “Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold,” The Rice Paper November 2009.
Ji, Hyeon-So, Sang-Ho Chu, Wenzhu Jiang, Young-Il Cho, Jang-Ho Hahn, Moo-Young Eun, Susan R. McCouch, and Hee-Jong Koh. “Characterization and Mapping of a Shattering Mutant in Rice That Corresponds to a Block of Domestication Genes,” Genetics 173: 995–1005:2006.
Shure, M., SR Wessler, N. Federoff. “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize,” Cell 35:225-233, 1983.
Umeda M, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo. “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns,” The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.
Wan, J. M., L. Jiang, J.Y. Tang, C.M. Wang, M.Y. Hou, W. Jing and L.X. Zhang. “Genetic Dissection of the Seed Dormancy Trait in Cultivated Rice (Oryza sativa L.),” Plant Science 170:786-792:2006.
Yamanaka, Shinsuke, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato. “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process,” Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.
Breeders already had enough experience with the variability of hybrids to recognize the statistical patterns he described, that people with blue eyes inherit their eye color from both parents because the blue allele is recessive, and that crossing a red and white pea would produce a red or white flower 25% of the time, and a pink the rest.
Rose growers confirmed his work, especially when they took a hybrid and backcrossed it with one of its parents. It’s easy for them to say Chapmneys Pink Cluster introduced a recessive gene for reblooming because their efforts produced results that confirmed their expectations.
In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published their work on the structure of DNA and scientists began using sophisticated instruments to determine exactly where each gene resided, and what each controlled.
Results for rice specialists have not been as satisfying as those for roses. Dormancy, that single domestication event posited by earlier researchers, was no longer simple because dormancy isn’t a physical trait like color, but either results from the structure of the outer layer of the seed or from the embryo. Its appearance isn’t tied to a single gene, but to areas of DNA that exists on several chromosomes.
A Chinese team found five quantitative trait loci have been identified on five chromosomes, and that dormancy increased in only four cases when they introduced an allele from a highly dormant indica cultivar. They learned the more genes they altered, the greater the dormancy.
A group in Korea found similar complexity when they looked at the literature on shattering, another trait hypothesized to have been central to domestication. The ability for the seed to separate easily at maturity without breaking is the consequence of hormonal processes that create a hardened abscission layer on the pedicel stem that holds the seed to the head.
They found reports that four alleles on four of rice’s twelve chromosomes have been linked to shattering, of which two are involved with the creation of the abscission layer. They also found six broader quantitative trait loci had been identified on six chromosomes.
The group created a shattering mutation by treating a non-shattering japonica variety with N-methyl-N-nitrosourea, then crossed it with five cultivars, including its parent. The results suggested the recessive sh-h gene on chromosome 7 was responsible for shattering. They noted that area was closely linked to the Rc location that controls red hull color and the qSDs-7-1 experimentally tied to dormancy.
The level of amylose, a form of starch, is used to differentiate sticky japonica from fluffy indica rices. However, the tropical japonica javanica falls between the two.
In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. The gene has since been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice. In rice, the Wxa allele is associated with dryland indica and Wxb is found with wetland japonica.
However, a group of Japanese scientists found both existed in the two subspecies and that Wxb predominates. The distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT in nirvana and rufipogon mutates to AGTT.
In other words, the causative agent isn’t the genetic allele, but something working on that allele during reproduction. Further, the change isn’t permanent, but can revert in the next generation. Another Japanese team found the same kind of change in the African glaberrima rice came from deleting and inserting a new unit in the nucleotide sequence, rather than substituting a T for a G.
Scientists now know a great deal more about rice, but without specimens with known provenance, they can’t say where Hezeiah Maham or John Joshua Ward got his seed. Richard Porcher has found the plats to Maham’s plantation and hopes to unearth some grains. Depending on the results, geneticists may be able to guess if Ward’s Carolina Gold was the direct, but mutant, offspring of Ward, or like the Blush Noisette, has another as yet unidentified parent that blew in from another field.
Researchers have, however, done something more extraordinary, unintentionally duplicated the daily experience of planters who were constantly surprised when their gold hulled rice turned white, or their white turned red. The very randomness of such traits forced them to become better observers, and thus more open to an explanation like that provided by Darwin when it became available.
Notes:
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. “Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold,” The Rice Paper November 2009.
Ji, Hyeon-So, Sang-Ho Chu, Wenzhu Jiang, Young-Il Cho, Jang-Ho Hahn, Moo-Young Eun, Susan R. McCouch, and Hee-Jong Koh. “Characterization and Mapping of a Shattering Mutant in Rice That Corresponds to a Block of Domestication Genes,” Genetics 173: 995–1005:2006.
Shure, M., SR Wessler, N. Federoff. “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize,” Cell 35:225-233, 1983.
Umeda M, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo. “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns,” The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.
Wan, J. M., L. Jiang, J.Y. Tang, C.M. Wang, M.Y. Hou, W. Jing and L.X. Zhang. “Genetic Dissection of the Seed Dormancy Trait in Cultivated Rice (Oryza sativa L.),” Plant Science 170:786-792:2006.
Yamanaka, Shinsuke, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato. “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process,” Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
South Carolina - Rice and Roses
Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are an unlikely pair to be the ones responsible for Charleston’s antebellum wealth and beauty. It’s even odder, given South Carolina’s current reputation for fundamentalism, that the actions of the two contributed to the growing body of experience that led people to accept Charles Darwin’s 1859 suggestion that natural selection was the operative cause of evolution.
After the war, Maham needed seed rice for his Pineville area plantation. He died four years later. In the years since he had been so deeply in debt, he must have had some success, because the next year, his younger daughter, Mary’s husband, George Haig died and left the slaves he’d acquired from Maham to his wife for her life.
In 1800, Joshua John Ward was born at Brook Green plantation to Maham’s niece, Elizabeth Cook, and John Ward. Thirty-seven years later, his overseer, James C. Thompson, noticed part of a rice head that was larger than any other Ward had seen.
Ward saved the seed, and planted it the next year on the margins of an old field where it was nearly destroyed by standing water and rats. The following year, he and Thompson planted the seed they’d been able to salvage in a large tub in Thompson’s yard, only to have a slave leave the gate open and a hog eat most of the crop. They transplanted the survivors, and most of the rice was sterile.
In 1840, they took what had survived the hog and rot, and planted half an acre. The next year, Ward planted 21 acres at Brook Green, which his factor sold above the market price. In 1842, Ward tried 400 acres, and the following year planted nothing but the new large grain.
In 1844, Ward made Carolina Gold available commercially. From then until the civil war, the Brook Green rice "commanded the highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London."
Ward claimed his 1838 seed was descended from that planted by his great-uncle in 1785.
Sometime in the early 1800's, either 1802 or 1810 or 1811, John Champneys found a new rose growing on his plantation which appeared to be a cross between a white musk, cultivated in Europe since the Crusades, and Parson’s Pink, which had been introduced to England from China in 1759.
Philippe Noisette, a son of the head gardener to the future Louis XVIII, had moved to Charleston in 1795 with his Haitian wife after the revolution there. He experimented with the rose, now called Champneys’ Pink Cluster, and in 1814 sent either seeds or plants to his brother who had a nursery in Paris. Either Philippe or Louis Claude crossed the plant with another rose; the hybrid was introduced in Europe as Blush Noisette in 1819.
Meantime, plant stock of some kind was sent to William Price, Jr., who had the best known American nursery on Long Island, and traded plants with his English suppliers. Two years before Champneys died, the Loddiges Nursery outside London offered a new rose, Champigny, in 1818.
Noisettes were the first roses to introduce the recessive gene for reblooming isolated by the Chinese into a fragrant European species. A number of new varieties appeared in France in the 1820's and 1830's. By the 1840's, they were crossed with tea roses, which led in 1867 to La France, the first hybrid tea released by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot the younger.
At the time, Louis Claude Noisette and other French growers were becoming aware of the mechanics of plant reproduction. When Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had argued in 1694 that plants had sexual organs, and pollen was the male agent of fertilization, most ignored him.
In 1729 a 22-year-old Carl Linnaeus expanded his ides to suggest a method of classifying plants in Introduction to the Floral Nuptials. He continued his work to make reproduction the basis for his description of the natural world and external characteristics, the morphology, the criteria naturalists would use to distinguish species.
The most important work for breeders appeared in 1793, when Christian Konrad Sprengel described his practical experiments with pollination. Still, more than a generation passed before the first controlled rose hybrid was introduced by Beauregard in Angiers in 1839. Safrano, a grandparent of La France, combined a yellow China with a Bourbon, itself a spontaneous hybrid of Parson’s Pink and a damask found on La Réunion in 1823 by Edouard Perichon.
At the time Maham acquired his gold husked seed and Champneys bought his pink shrub rose, observation and selection were the only methods available to farmers to improve their crops. In 1843, Ward’s relative through his mother’s sister, Robert Allston complained that poor rice came from the "commingling of the grain" which happened when different varieties were planted in adjacent fields, and planters were "careless" in selecting their seed stock.
The year before Ward introduced Carolina Gold, Allston described the types of rice then growing in the state. His classification criteria were morphological: seed husk color, size, shape, and awns, also called beards.
The most important variety, which he attributed to Maham, had a gold shell. This coexisted with white rice, which had a creamy hull; guinea rice, which he said looked like guinea corn, a form of African sorghum or millet, and proud rice, a red grain with a white husk and awn like gold seed.
Allston contrasted these with attempts to improve the quality of the crop, either through introducing new seed or careful selection. His example of the first was a bearded variety brought from the East Indies the year before. As an illustration of "improvement" through "a long-continued, careful selection of the seed," he mentioned the long grain rice about to be introduced by Ward.
At the time Carolina Gold and Safrano were introduced in 1844 and 1839, Darwin was back in England from his five year voyage on the Beagle and working out an explanation for the endemic species he’d seen in the Galapagos islands.
It’s his name we associate with the revolution in plant breeding, even though he drew on the work of men like Sprengel. Similarly, while J. J. Ward and Louis Claude Noisette received the credit and profits for developing new plant varieties, they needed the experience of Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys, and the support of men like Robert Allston and Philipe Nosette.
Innovation can only come from a combination of shared interests and special individuals.
Notes: Mary Charlotte Cook, Ward’s maternal aunt, married Benjamin Allston Sr. Allston’s uncle was William Allston, the father of Robert Francis Withers Allston.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob. Epistolae de Sexa Plantarum, 1694.
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. "Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold," The Rice Paper, November 2009; the "highest price" quotation.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, 1859.
Hurst, C. C. "Notes on the Origin and Evolution of Our Garden Roses," 1941, reprinted in Graham Stuart Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses, 1955.
Lineaus, Carl. Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1730.
_____. Systema Naturae, first edition 1735.
Spengle, Christian Konrad. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, 1793.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
After the war, Maham needed seed rice for his Pineville area plantation. He died four years later. In the years since he had been so deeply in debt, he must have had some success, because the next year, his younger daughter, Mary’s husband, George Haig died and left the slaves he’d acquired from Maham to his wife for her life.
In 1800, Joshua John Ward was born at Brook Green plantation to Maham’s niece, Elizabeth Cook, and John Ward. Thirty-seven years later, his overseer, James C. Thompson, noticed part of a rice head that was larger than any other Ward had seen.
Ward saved the seed, and planted it the next year on the margins of an old field where it was nearly destroyed by standing water and rats. The following year, he and Thompson planted the seed they’d been able to salvage in a large tub in Thompson’s yard, only to have a slave leave the gate open and a hog eat most of the crop. They transplanted the survivors, and most of the rice was sterile.
In 1840, they took what had survived the hog and rot, and planted half an acre. The next year, Ward planted 21 acres at Brook Green, which his factor sold above the market price. In 1842, Ward tried 400 acres, and the following year planted nothing but the new large grain.
In 1844, Ward made Carolina Gold available commercially. From then until the civil war, the Brook Green rice "commanded the highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London."
Ward claimed his 1838 seed was descended from that planted by his great-uncle in 1785.
Sometime in the early 1800's, either 1802 or 1810 or 1811, John Champneys found a new rose growing on his plantation which appeared to be a cross between a white musk, cultivated in Europe since the Crusades, and Parson’s Pink, which had been introduced to England from China in 1759.
Philippe Noisette, a son of the head gardener to the future Louis XVIII, had moved to Charleston in 1795 with his Haitian wife after the revolution there. He experimented with the rose, now called Champneys’ Pink Cluster, and in 1814 sent either seeds or plants to his brother who had a nursery in Paris. Either Philippe or Louis Claude crossed the plant with another rose; the hybrid was introduced in Europe as Blush Noisette in 1819.
Meantime, plant stock of some kind was sent to William Price, Jr., who had the best known American nursery on Long Island, and traded plants with his English suppliers. Two years before Champneys died, the Loddiges Nursery outside London offered a new rose, Champigny, in 1818.
Noisettes were the first roses to introduce the recessive gene for reblooming isolated by the Chinese into a fragrant European species. A number of new varieties appeared in France in the 1820's and 1830's. By the 1840's, they were crossed with tea roses, which led in 1867 to La France, the first hybrid tea released by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot the younger.
At the time, Louis Claude Noisette and other French growers were becoming aware of the mechanics of plant reproduction. When Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had argued in 1694 that plants had sexual organs, and pollen was the male agent of fertilization, most ignored him.
In 1729 a 22-year-old Carl Linnaeus expanded his ides to suggest a method of classifying plants in Introduction to the Floral Nuptials. He continued his work to make reproduction the basis for his description of the natural world and external characteristics, the morphology, the criteria naturalists would use to distinguish species.
The most important work for breeders appeared in 1793, when Christian Konrad Sprengel described his practical experiments with pollination. Still, more than a generation passed before the first controlled rose hybrid was introduced by Beauregard in Angiers in 1839. Safrano, a grandparent of La France, combined a yellow China with a Bourbon, itself a spontaneous hybrid of Parson’s Pink and a damask found on La Réunion in 1823 by Edouard Perichon.
At the time Maham acquired his gold husked seed and Champneys bought his pink shrub rose, observation and selection were the only methods available to farmers to improve their crops. In 1843, Ward’s relative through his mother’s sister, Robert Allston complained that poor rice came from the "commingling of the grain" which happened when different varieties were planted in adjacent fields, and planters were "careless" in selecting their seed stock.
The year before Ward introduced Carolina Gold, Allston described the types of rice then growing in the state. His classification criteria were morphological: seed husk color, size, shape, and awns, also called beards.
The most important variety, which he attributed to Maham, had a gold shell. This coexisted with white rice, which had a creamy hull; guinea rice, which he said looked like guinea corn, a form of African sorghum or millet, and proud rice, a red grain with a white husk and awn like gold seed.
Allston contrasted these with attempts to improve the quality of the crop, either through introducing new seed or careful selection. His example of the first was a bearded variety brought from the East Indies the year before. As an illustration of "improvement" through "a long-continued, careful selection of the seed," he mentioned the long grain rice about to be introduced by Ward.
At the time Carolina Gold and Safrano were introduced in 1844 and 1839, Darwin was back in England from his five year voyage on the Beagle and working out an explanation for the endemic species he’d seen in the Galapagos islands.
It’s his name we associate with the revolution in plant breeding, even though he drew on the work of men like Sprengel. Similarly, while J. J. Ward and Louis Claude Noisette received the credit and profits for developing new plant varieties, they needed the experience of Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys, and the support of men like Robert Allston and Philipe Nosette.
Innovation can only come from a combination of shared interests and special individuals.
Notes: Mary Charlotte Cook, Ward’s maternal aunt, married Benjamin Allston Sr. Allston’s uncle was William Allston, the father of Robert Francis Withers Allston.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.
Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob. Epistolae de Sexa Plantarum, 1694.
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. "Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold," The Rice Paper, November 2009; the "highest price" quotation.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, 1859.
Hurst, C. C. "Notes on the Origin and Evolution of Our Garden Roses," 1941, reprinted in Graham Stuart Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses, 1955.
Lineaus, Carl. Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1730.
_____. Systema Naturae, first edition 1735.
Spengle, Christian Konrad. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, 1793.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Aluminum and Steel
One of the most striking things about the current group of fundamentalist thinkers who dominate the media is how little regard they have for what is literally true. It’s as if their argument that everything described in Genesis actually occurred allows them to say anything they like about things not included in the holy book.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
The separation of what one wants to be true from what, in my undergraduate days, my philosophy student friends used to call really real reality has become so commonplace, I sometimes wonder how people manage to drive home safely. The laws of physics that state two objects can’t fill the same space at the same time still prevail, no matter how optimistic the passer.
A couple weeks ago, my boss’s eighty-some-year-old mother was working on making a rent sign. I had bought the white metal blanks, she had had a stencil made, and her son’s foreman had painted the signs. She discovered she would need to buy several sets of self-sticking numbers to get enough zeros for the prices, and was wondering what would be cheaper.
The foreman suggested refrigerator magnets.
She answered they were too expensive.
I looked at them both and said it’s aluminum.
They looked as me as if to say "so," and returned to the pros and cons of using magnets.
I thought, how do I explain grade school science to a woman raised to be a flapper and a young man raised in another country?
I can still vaguely remember some boy bringing two of those gray and red horseshoe magnets to school and showing them attracting screws and repelling each other. The lesson, no doubt, was reinforced by Mr. Wizard.
The magic remains. Last summer I was in a mineral store with a friend, and there was a box labeled with the name of some iron ore, perhaps lodestone. Naturally, I wanted to know. The store owner knew his customers and had placed a magnet next to the box. Now I know.
I suppose the combination of cartoons and advertising that show things like sponges attracting and unattracting spills destroy the wonder of magnets for very small children. Perhaps they learn to use the refrigerator decorations before they can sense the physical attraction when the magnet gets close to the door and, even if they let go, will attach.
The virtual world of the media, the familiarity of the commonplace destroy the sense of wonder that made iron workers so important to early man. It’s a link with a very ancient past that’s being lost.
The woman’s next idea was using a magic marker and turpentine. I didn’t even want to consider explaining the properties of powder coating or surface adhesion or any of the other aspects of physics that made that a questionable idea, and so just shouted back "Cheap, cheap, cheap!"
After they left, I took a magnet from the steel file case and put it near the white frame where spots of red showed through. The excitement still exists when the power of attraction takes over. Then I put it on the sign and watched it slide to the floor.
My world view was reified. Aluminum’s still aluminum and steel’s still steel, and all the blathering otherwise won’t change those facts.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Malaria and Men
It all began with a grammar error.
On August 3rd of this year, Nathan Wolfe told readers of the Huffington Post "today, me and my colleagues from Cameroon, Germany and the United States announced our discovery of the origin of malaria."
If he had said "my colleagues and I," I wouldn’t have noticed the many violations of scientific etiquette embedded in his posting. But instead, he baldly declared "me discovery."
Now anyone who’s read the history of science or novels by C. P. Snow knows scientific etiquette is, at best, a veneer disguising ambition, jealousy and all the other human emotions that characterize the interactions of competitive individuals. Wolfe’s comment is only noteworthy for revealing the contemporary narcissistic form, "it’s all about me."
The National Academy of Science did indeed publish an on-line article that day, "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," with Stephen Rich as the lead author. After whatever jockeying for credit occurred, Wolfe came out last in the list of 14.
He wasn’t the only co-author to promote an independent narrative. Number 13, Francisco Ayala, used the University of California at Irvine as his more discrete, third-party platform. Unlike Wolfe, he at least did admit Rich was the lead author, but not without emphasizing Rich had been one of his students.
Reuters apparently used the Irvine news release for its story the next day, while the Associated Press relied on Wolfe. The New York Times picked up the latter, thereby giving Wolfe the edge in kudos for the team’s research.
Ayala, now in his 70's, is of an age when men secretly hope to win a Nobel Prize to recognize their lifetime achievements, and he has been one of the pioneers investigating the evolution of the malaria parasite. Irvine’s story emphasized that his work probes one of the great questions of contemporary medicine, how diseases like AIDS and influenza migrate between animals and humans.
But, as is the way with science, he is not alone in his presumed quest for recognition from that notoriously factious, political group in Sweden. In May of this year another team, this one centered in France and Gabon, published their findings that documented genetic similarities between the human and primate forms of malaria. Either team could make the final breakthrough that might receive the award.
Wolfe is younger and no doubt knows only one prize is awarded each year in any field and every year there are more scientists in more countries doing innovative work. He probably also knows that historians have found most scientists make their most important contribution before they are 30, and if they haven’t achieved some fame by then, they probably won’t. He’s nearing 40.
California has developed an alternative paradigm for the young that promises them celebrity at an early age if they can patent something that can be sold. Wolfe has already been tempted by that siren. Last year, Frank Rijsberman, of Google’s philanthropic group, gave money to support Wolfe’s work with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and declared "Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field." Wolfe’s Huffington Post release emphasized the possibilities of a sellable product, a vaccine.
Ayala represents pure science grappling with the workings of nature, while Wolfe is promoting practical applications for that knowledge. A malaria vaccine would certainly be useful, but will face the same cultural and financial impediments the Bill Gates’ foundation confronts now in fighting malaria in Africa. The individual or group who finds the best way to convince humans to change their behavior without coercion may be the one who should win the prize.
Notes:
Associated Press. "First Origin of Malaria May Have Been Found," 3 August 2009.
Fitzenberger, Jennifer. "Scientists Report Original Source of Malaria," University of California at Irvine news release, 3 August 2009, has best discussion of research in the field.
Ollomo, Benjamin and 7 others. "A New Malaria Agent in African Hominids," PLoS Pathog, 29 May 2009.
Reuters. "Malaria May Have Come from Chimps," 4 August 2009, edited by Xavier Briand.
Rich Stephen and 13 others. "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," National Academy of Sciences, online Proceedings for 3 August 2009.
Svoboda, Elizabeth. "Nathan Wolfe: Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic," The New York Times, 20 October 2008.
Vasich, Tom. "Biologist Francisco J. Ayala Wins National Medal of Science," University of California at Irvine news release, 9 May 2002.
Wolfe, Nathan. "The Origin of Malaria: Discovered," Huffington Post, 3 August 2009.
On August 3rd of this year, Nathan Wolfe told readers of the Huffington Post "today, me and my colleagues from Cameroon, Germany and the United States announced our discovery of the origin of malaria."
If he had said "my colleagues and I," I wouldn’t have noticed the many violations of scientific etiquette embedded in his posting. But instead, he baldly declared "me discovery."
Now anyone who’s read the history of science or novels by C. P. Snow knows scientific etiquette is, at best, a veneer disguising ambition, jealousy and all the other human emotions that characterize the interactions of competitive individuals. Wolfe’s comment is only noteworthy for revealing the contemporary narcissistic form, "it’s all about me."
The National Academy of Science did indeed publish an on-line article that day, "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," with Stephen Rich as the lead author. After whatever jockeying for credit occurred, Wolfe came out last in the list of 14.
He wasn’t the only co-author to promote an independent narrative. Number 13, Francisco Ayala, used the University of California at Irvine as his more discrete, third-party platform. Unlike Wolfe, he at least did admit Rich was the lead author, but not without emphasizing Rich had been one of his students.
Reuters apparently used the Irvine news release for its story the next day, while the Associated Press relied on Wolfe. The New York Times picked up the latter, thereby giving Wolfe the edge in kudos for the team’s research.
Ayala, now in his 70's, is of an age when men secretly hope to win a Nobel Prize to recognize their lifetime achievements, and he has been one of the pioneers investigating the evolution of the malaria parasite. Irvine’s story emphasized that his work probes one of the great questions of contemporary medicine, how diseases like AIDS and influenza migrate between animals and humans.
But, as is the way with science, he is not alone in his presumed quest for recognition from that notoriously factious, political group in Sweden. In May of this year another team, this one centered in France and Gabon, published their findings that documented genetic similarities between the human and primate forms of malaria. Either team could make the final breakthrough that might receive the award.
Wolfe is younger and no doubt knows only one prize is awarded each year in any field and every year there are more scientists in more countries doing innovative work. He probably also knows that historians have found most scientists make their most important contribution before they are 30, and if they haven’t achieved some fame by then, they probably won’t. He’s nearing 40.
California has developed an alternative paradigm for the young that promises them celebrity at an early age if they can patent something that can be sold. Wolfe has already been tempted by that siren. Last year, Frank Rijsberman, of Google’s philanthropic group, gave money to support Wolfe’s work with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and declared "Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field." Wolfe’s Huffington Post release emphasized the possibilities of a sellable product, a vaccine.
Ayala represents pure science grappling with the workings of nature, while Wolfe is promoting practical applications for that knowledge. A malaria vaccine would certainly be useful, but will face the same cultural and financial impediments the Bill Gates’ foundation confronts now in fighting malaria in Africa. The individual or group who finds the best way to convince humans to change their behavior without coercion may be the one who should win the prize.
Notes:
Associated Press. "First Origin of Malaria May Have Been Found," 3 August 2009.
Fitzenberger, Jennifer. "Scientists Report Original Source of Malaria," University of California at Irvine news release, 3 August 2009, has best discussion of research in the field.
Ollomo, Benjamin and 7 others. "A New Malaria Agent in African Hominids," PLoS Pathog, 29 May 2009.
Reuters. "Malaria May Have Come from Chimps," 4 August 2009, edited by Xavier Briand.
Rich Stephen and 13 others. "The Origin of Malignant Malaria," National Academy of Sciences, online Proceedings for 3 August 2009.
Svoboda, Elizabeth. "Nathan Wolfe: Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic," The New York Times, 20 October 2008.
Vasich, Tom. "Biologist Francisco J. Ayala Wins National Medal of Science," University of California at Irvine news release, 9 May 2002.
Wolfe, Nathan. "The Origin of Malaria: Discovered," Huffington Post, 3 August 2009.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Language - Part 2 - Art
In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.
When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.
The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.
Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.
Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.
Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.
Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.
I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.
I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.
Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.
This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.
I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.
The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.
I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.
The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.
I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.
The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.
My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.
I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.
With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.
The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.
Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.
Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.
Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.
When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.
The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.
Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.
Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.
Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.
Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.
I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.
I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.
Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.
This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.
I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.
The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.
I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.
The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.
I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.
The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.
My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.
I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.
With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.
The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.
Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.
Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.
Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Language - Part 1 - Science
The fate of scientists like botanists, entomologists and astronomers is sad. They start as children awed by the wonders of nature, and end with methods that never allow them to look out the window.
The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like
or
The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.
With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?
There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.
Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.
I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.
And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.
The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.
Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.
Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.
Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .
Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.
Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.
The first thing they lose is language. Men concerned with precision have not only banished the poetic, but even the coherent. Much of the challenge of introductory college science courses is simply learning vocabulary, and graduate students know they must master arcane rhetoric to be published. I often wonder if they can even put statements into English like
Affected animals necropsied at time of death presented with hydrothorax with as much as 2 to 3 L of straw-colored thoracic fluid.
or
We also investigated the influence of different levels of N fertilization (1, 5, and 10 mM) on the modification of the allelopathic potential of amended soils, in terms of their effect on soil total phenolics and radish seedling growth.Once scientists have their advanced degrees, many follow research into laboratories where machines do the looking and they do the writing. Genetics and DNA are answering important questions, but still you wonder if people despair when they spend months of their lives reducing morning glories to
The mutable allele is caused by an intragenic tandem duplication of 3.3 kb within a gene for transcriptional activator containing a bHLH DNA-binding motif.
The alternative for botanists and entomologists is research in how to kill what it is they loved. Instead of marveling that pigweed and horseweed have mutated to survive the active agent in Round-up, they’re paid to find something that will eradicate the survivors in cotton and soybean fields.
With the systematic separation of science students from their subject, it’s not surprising so much research has moved abroad. Why would someone who cares want to put the years of work into producing what seems inconsequential?
There are few independent seed companies left in the United States. Most have been bought by European conglomerates or chemical companies like Monsato. It’s easy for business students to say they are following the pattern of globalization pioneered by the steel companies.
Along with ownership we disdain anything that’s not immediately pragmatic. Along with the loss of seed companies has been the loss of breeders looking for new varieties. It’s the Japanese who’ve joined the Dutch and Germans as the leading breeders of new varieties of ornamental plants.
I’m not ridiculing the scientists I quoted. They are involved in things that matter. The agent in crownbeard that kills sheep and inhibits the growth of food crops like radishes is galegine, which has been synthesized into a treatment for type 2 diabetes. It may sound silly to learn sheep who die are ones who eat sweet things instead of nutritious ones, but the consequences of knowing a glucose chemical was involved could not have been anticipated by the researchers.
And those doing the various kinds of DNA research aren’t just looking for miracle cures. They’re also deepening our understanding of evolution. Morning glories happen to be interesting because new varieties are not hybrids, but spontaneous mutations. All the Heavenly Blues we see today probably came from one plant noticed by an amateur named Clarke in Colorado.
The chasm between passion and procedures is not unique to science. Many English professors have felt the same loss when their love of literature is channeled into formal literary criticism. Historians may want to know why and how something happened, but they’re forced to use statistics or other standard methods that deliberately eliminate the special so they write without biases.
Amateurs have options. They buy popular historians or read historical fiction or watch documentaries. People who love novels or poetry don’t even know professors write books. But for those of us interested in natural history, the barriers are greater. There are no ways to surmount the language barrier except by trying to comprehend the technical.
Perhaps the rigors of professionalism have had the unintended consequence of making outsourcing technology easier, for when people cannot read or write about things they care about the formative culture that produces innovation is destroyed. When that’s gone, outsourcing is only a cosmetic term for having to buy what we once created.
Sources:
Description of research at Division of Gene Expression and Regulation I, headed by Shigeru Iida, on internet .
Inderjit, Chikako Asakawa and K. M. M. Dakshini, "Allelopathic Potential of Verbesina Encelioides Root Leachate in Soil," Canadian Journal of Botany 7:1419–1424:1999, abstract on internet.
Keeler R.F., D. C. Baker, and K. E. Panter, "Concentration of Galegine in Verbesina Encelioides and Galega Officinalis and the Toxic and Pathologic Effects Induced by the Plants," Journal of Environmental Pathology Toxicology and Oncology, 11:11-7:1992, abstract on internet.
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