NYTimes Science Times: Who is Eric Lander?; Inchoate “animal studies”; fiddlesticks to old masters myths; Millipedes mimic Maginot…
Lots of science journalists will recognize that fellow to the right. “Eric Lander! That smart guy in Cambridge Mass, knows genomics like nobody’s business, everybody likes him, good source to talk with.” Okay, anything else? That’s about all that I could have said about him before this morning without looking something up. Gina Kolata has the lead story in this morning’s ScienceTimes and fills in his life to intriguing, memorable effect. The story includes a funny picture of him at high school age, when this kid from a working class neighborhood was already a total phenom. In the pic the late Glenn Seaborg, Nobel laureate chemist and US science policy leader, stands behind him grinning down at the victor in a science talent search. Kolata’s portrait includes Lander’s characteristically incisive pooh-pooh of any effort to see foresight or logic in his career’s looping trajectory: “You live your life prospectively and tell your story retrospectively, so it looks like everything is converging.”
One might call Landers’s life so far somewhat inchoate, which is a weak transition to another piece where that word does come up. James Gorman, also on the print section’s front, describes the rise of a new academic discipline – not yet disciplined – of animal studies. The idea is to extend academic interest in human-nonhuman beyond such fields as toxicology (think lab rats) and ecology to include psychology, film, literature, cultural sociology, and other more creative arts.
Inchoate seems to me to apply to two other stories, too, and perhaps only because I must read these stories pretty fast. For these, it does not imply a welcome quality, but rather perplexion. Donald G. McNeil and Denise Grady, in the first instance, report on the ongoing controversy over ability to create in labs more-contagious and hence dangerous variants of the bird flu virus. An insightful story that helps readers toward sensible reaction – fear, or confidence, etc – would be good. This one wanders from what seems almost a step-by-step guide to weaponizing bird flu which is what all the worry is about, to discussion of deep lung infections and on to the hazards of raw duck pudding and tigers that ate infected chickens, and more. It’s a dizzying array of quick cuts, as in an edgy video, but didn’t add up to much for me.
Similarly hard to digest is Nicholas Wade‘s story on assertions that the genomes of African-Americans reflect evolutionary, post-Africa adaptation. It is full of discussion of SNPs and other genetic markers, and of such things as malaria resistence. And naysayers too, mingled with buts and howevers. Both this and the piece on bird flu do reflect how science-as-process is, full of meanders and counterexamples, but one doubts that is the message the writers sought. Again, maybe it’s just me, rushing along too fast.
However, Wade has a second story and it’s a gem. This could be because it agrees with what I hoped it’d say. This one did blind testing – really blind, as in blindfolded – of musicians’ preferences when asked to play or listen to violins. Some were top-rated new ones. Some were venerated old ones that the likes of Stradivarius and Guarnari made, many centuries ago. When thus tested, the well-tuned ears of violinists could not judge the old ones as consistently better, suggesting as myth the belief that the Old Masters’ had now-lost secrets that cannot be duplicated by today’s luthiers. I’d love to see this done in wine tasting, with experienced eonocritics told blindly to ascribe snooty adjectives to various vintages: oaky, or tinged with buttercups, traces of persimmon, a blush of boysenberry, or whatever they say after sniffing and slooshing. Would there be any consistency in which fruits or other perceived parallels are applied to different wines by differnet people. Acidic, harsh, oxidized, astringent, those I could see. But one person’s “dry aromas of some apple” may be another’s “silky mouth feel serving up plum.” Just guessing.
Other headlines to note:
- Sindyan H. Bhanoo: A Tasmanian Maginot Line for two Millipede Species ; Wonderful short story. However – one wonders at the hed’s use of Maginot Line as metaphor for a stout wall against invasion. After all, the original is famous because it did not work. The German Blitzkrieg simply raced around it. Millipedes, one must concede, would make for slow blitzkriegers.
As ever, much more. Whole Section.
- Charlie Petit
