The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

This is a story of validation. This is a story of redemption. It is the kind of story that we like, a feel good story. In April 1982, Dan Shechtman was looking at images from his electon microscope when he saw something that all of the textbooks and theories of the day said was not possible. In solid matter, it was known that all atoms were arranged in a repeating, periodic manner. This was the basis for crystal formation by solids and had been conventional wisdom for almost 200 years. In Shechtman’s images, the patterns were regular, but they did not repeat themselves. The patterns looked much like medieval Islamic mosaics. These crystals were deemed quasi-crystals.

Shechtman publicized his controversial findings but because they were against the conventional wisdom, they were dismissed by the scientific community. The situation was so bad that he was asked to leave his research group and had to find another scientific home. It took 2 years to get his work published and another 3 years for someone else to confirm it. During this time, 2 time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling went so far as to say, “there are no quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists.”

The scene at the end of the movie where the hero is vindicated occurred today when the Nobel Committee awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Dan Shechtman for his discovery of quasi-crystals. This is one of those awards for a concept that overturned a convention of science. Textbooks had to be rewritten because of Professor Shechtman’s work. Quasi-crystals are now used in razor blades as well as tools needed to perform delicate cuts on eye tissue during surgery.

Congratulations to Professor Shechtman on a well-deserved honor. Having his name appear alongside Linus Pauling as a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry is Hollywood-like justice.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

How did all of this get here? It’s a question that has puzzled philosophers, scientists, theologians, and all mankind since the time we first gazed up into the sky and noticed objects of light and fire that would come and go regularly over time. Today the Nobel Committee awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was constantly expanding by looking at the light emitted from distant galaxies and realizing that the velocity of the galaxy was proportional to its distance from Earth and to other objects in the universe. The implication was that all objects in the universe were moving away from each other at a constant speed and that all of the mass of the universe was originally contained at a single dense point that was dispersed by The Big Bang. If the universe is expanding constantly, it is hypothesized that at some point, gravity would cause the universe to collapse back on itself into that small point resulting in a fiery end to the universe.

In the late 1990s, this year’s Nobel laureates were studying very distant stars called supernovae and observed that those stars were actually accelerating away from Earth contrary to Hubble’s observations. These new discoveries were enabled by higher powered telescopes and more powerful computers that Hubble did not have. The observation has led to the hypothesis that there exists “dark energy” that is causing this acceleration. The nature of this “dark energy” and its other implications is one of the most pressing questions in physics today. It is important to note that this years winners are NOT being awarded for “dark energy”. That is apparently the subject of a future prize – to be awarded to the people that figure it out.

What are the implications of an accelerating universe? In contrast to an eventual collapse of the universe due to gravity in the case of Hubble’s observations, an accelerating expansion of the universe suggests that bodies will continue to move apart until interactions between them become so weak that the entire universe cools to a very low temperature – a cold death of the universe.

And so this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for a fundamental discovery of the origins of the universe with implications on how it might all end. Congratulations to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Adam G. Riess.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

What if you awarded a Nobel Prize and one of the laureates had died? That is exactly what happened this morning. The Nobel committee announced this morning that Bruce A. Beutler, Jules A. Hoffmann and Ralph M. Steinman had been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work in understanding how the immune system functions. A few hours later, it was announced that Professor Steinman lost his battle with cancer last Friday. It is the practice of the Nobel Committee not to award prizes posthumously. Perhaps the most well-publicized instance of this practice occurred when Rosalind Franklin died before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins for their elucidation of the double-helical structure of DNA. Her x-ray data of DNA were critical to the determination of the double helix. The committee decided after today’s announcement to allow Steinman to retain the honor.

The events that have occurred are unique and, to the best of our knowledge, are unprecedented in the history of the Nobel Prize. In light of this, the Board of the Nobel Foundation has held a meeting this afternoon.
According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, work produced by a person since deceased shall not be given an award. However, the statutes specify that if a person has been awarded a prize and has died before receiving it, the prize may be presented.

An interpretation of the purpose of this rule leads to the conclusion that Ralph Steinman shall be awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The purpose of the above-mentioned rule is to make it clear that the Nobel Prize shall not deliberately be awarded posthumously. However, the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel Laureate was alive. This was true – though not at the time of the decision – only a day or so previously. The Nobel Foundation thus believes that what has occurred is more reminiscent of the example in the statutes concerning a person who has been named as a Nobel Laureate and has died before the actual Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.

The decision made by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet thus remains unchanged.

Professors Beutler and Hoffmann were awarded their share of half the prize for their work in how innate immunity works. Innate immunity is the body’s natural reaction to general challenges from microbes. This initial reaction is non-specific, i.e. the immune system reacts to the foreign invader regardless of whether this particular invader has been recognized previously. For this to work properly, there must be some general characteristics of pathogenic microbes that the immune system must recognize. This turns out to be the case and Beutler and Hoffmann identified receptors on cells that are responsible for recognizing these characteristics. These receptors are known as Toll-like receptors and are found in both vertebrates and invertebrates as well as plants suggesting that they are some of the most ancient components of the immune system. Recognition of a pathogenic invasion via the Toll-like receptors triggers an inflammatory response as the first defense in fighting the infection. It is for their discovery of the role of Toll-like receptors in this response that Beutler and Hoffmann were recognized with the Nobel Prize.

Professor Steinman was honored for his work in the second part of the immune response, adaptive immunity. Anyone who has received a vaccination is familiar with the concept of adaptive immunity. Your system is challenged by a modified pathogen which triggers a response that allows your body to fight off a recurring attack by that same pathogen. In the early 70s, Steinman discovered a new type of cell, the dendritic cell. Steinman proposed that these cells played a role in the activation of the immune response by activating T-cells. He later showed this to be the case and demonstrated that this activation could be triggered by signals from the initial innate immune reaction. It is this process that is key to the “self or enemy” paradigm and under normal conditions protects the immune system from turning on the body.

These studies have laid the ground work for fundamental applications in immunity related to vaccinations against dangerous infections as well as to the promising area of vaccines against cancer. In fact, Professor Steinman was being treated for a very deadly form of pancreatic cancer using some experimental treatments of his own devising. Whether this treatment was effective is probably up for debate but he lived 4 years post-diagnosis with a cancer with a 4% survival rate at 5 years.

Congratulations to Professors Beutler, Hoffmann and Steinman and a special kudos to the Nobel Committee for allowing the continued awarding of the prize to Professor Steinman.

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai died this week. I first learned of her from a blogging friend and then bought the book The Challenge for Africa. Professor Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in the late 70s to help women improve their lives by improving their access to firewood and clean water. She became passionate about the environment and sustainability, especially pertaining to preserving native forests in Kenya and the impact of reforestation on climate. Her movement started planting trees near her homeland. Her efforts have resulted in the planting of over 30 million trees and helped almost 1 million women in Kenya. She was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Dr. Maathai was an amazing woman. It’s a shame she is not widely known. She will have a state funeral in Kenya – a well-deserved and untimely honor. In her book The Challenge for Africa, she wrote:

My grandparents and others of their generation measured their happiness, their material and spiritual well-being, in ways far different from today. Their medium of exchange was goats. They kept domestic animals, which they used carefully for survival and treated humanely, and cultivated a variety of food crops on their land. Because most of their basic needs were met, they didn’t consider themselves poor. They lived within a community of rituals, ceremonies, and expressions of their connection to the land and their culture; they didn’t feel alienated or adrift in a meaningless, highly materialistic world that assigns value only in dollars and cents, because their world was animated by the spirit of God. They took what they needed for their own quality of life, but didn’t accumulate and destroy in the process – and they did all this so that future generations would survive and thrive. By the time my mother died, in 2000, everything could be sacrificed for money: forests, land, goats, values, and people.

I was hoping that on my visit to Kenya next year that I might have the opportunity and honor to meet her. I can now only hope to carry on her legacy by finding a way to help poor farmers in her home country. Well done, good and faithful servant.

My Boy is a Baseball Player

I played baseball. My boy is a baseball player.

This statement would have seemed absurd a year ago. It was then that K. decided he wanted to play baseball. So, we bought some baseballs and a cheap glove and tried to throw the ball around. He couldn’t catch it – he was afraid of it. A natural reaction. I remember being afraid of that hard ball when I was first starting to play when I was 10. So, I tossed lightly to him so he could get used to the ball coming at him and landing in his glove. After a few weeks, he got it. Then, I could really throw it to him. He also wanted to learn to bat, of course. His older nephews had given him bats from their little league days, but they seemed a lot beat up and a little too heavy for him. I showed him the proper stance – knees bent, bat back, step to the ball, head down, contact. Well, in theory anyway. The whole fear of the ball coming at you reared its ugly head again, manifested this time in stepping back instead of toward the incoming pitch. Flashback 35 years to a schoolyard practice and a coach putting a lineup of bats just behind a kid learning to bat – one step backward and said kid finds himself on his backside. So, out came the rest of the too heavy beat up bats to be placed perfectly behind K. Stepping backward problem solved. We continued to practice in the yard and at the park over the summer, as well as taking in the local minor league teams to soak up as much baseball as possible.

Then came the opportunity to play real baseball. K signed up for a fall league, which here is much more laid back and more just so the boys don’t get rusty over the long offseason until spring. The Bearcats agreed to let him play with them as a season-long tryout. He got his jersey, a leftover from a kid who wasn’t very good and quit – #99, the “cursed jersey” according to his teammates. During his first game warmup, he missed a catch and took a ball to the face – bloody nose. He shook it off and got out on the field. First at bat – beaned right in the knee. He dropped the bat and ran to first base. As the fall days got shorter, he got better. He could throw the ball across the infield from 3rd base to 1st base. He could catch the ball most of the time. And in his last at bat of the season, he got his very first hit. K was finally playing baseball. A couple of weeks after the season ended, the coach sent an email asking if K would be a permanent member of the team. He made it. The “curse” of the #99 jersey had been lifted. We continued to throw the ball and take batting practice until the days were too short and too cold. And he continued to get more confident.

Spring rolled around and practice began. K fit in with his team now and he improved by the week. He was asked to pitch to the coach in practice one night. He didn’t have much velocity, he’s a small kid after all, but he was accurate. Early in the season, he was told he might pitch an inning. When it came around, he pitched like a pro – giving up no runs and striking out two hitters. He was getting more confident at the plate, putting the ball in play and getting on base regularly.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed something different about how K plays the game. He has “it,” whatever “it” is. Whenever he bats, he has the correct mechanics most of the time. He has an incredible eye for the strike zone. He often gets two quick strikes, but then he will work the count full and either take a walk, or get a hit. Incredible plate discipline. He steps out of the box, takes a full practice swing. Incredible concentration. When he pitches, he has “it” down, too. He holds the ball in front of his face before the windup. He rubs the ball down between batters. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with his hat. He has all the nuances of a real baseball player. At his game a couple of days ago, we were warming up together and I was tossing him ground balls on the infield. His free hand was going right on top of his glove and covering the ball as it entered the pocket. I had never noticed him doing this before and asked, “where’d you get that?” He just simply shrugged and said, “I don’t know.” It was at that point that I thought about all these other little things and his comment that I realized it. He pitched two innings in that game, holding a two-run lead in his first inning shutting the other team down. In his team’s next at bat, they scored the maximum five runs and put the game safely out of reach. They went on to win, beating a team that had not lost yet this season.

A year ago, K could barely catch a baseball. Now, he’s a real baseball player.

On Globalization

This morning I had the pleasure of attending a talk at the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center as part of their Seeds of Change event. The keynote speaker was Richard Longworth who is a member of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism.

The premise of the talk was that the economic decline of the Midwest is essentially due to the decline of the manufacturing sector and the failure of the midwestern cities to embrace globalization effectively, i.e. realizing that the competition is in Beijing and Bangalore, not San Francisco or New York. Longworth used Chicago as an example of embracing being a “global” city paying dividends in their successful bid to attract the Boeing headquarters over Dallas and Denver (not considered “global” cities). But in spite of this positive example of Chicago embracing globalization, he admitted that Chicago still hasn’t rebounded from a huge population decline from its peak. As I was sitting there listening to his talk, I thought of Bobby Kennedy’s famous quote on the GDP in the context of our economic decline in the age of globalization:

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

As I thought about this quote in the context of globalization, I couldn’t help but think that globalization has been driven by our thinking that has been dominated by the ideas in the first paragraph of Bobby’s quote. These days, we are driven by the almighty dollar. We measure our value in material things. Our companies are valued not by what they create, but the value of the stock. Those are related, you say? If that is true, the value created by outsourcing jobs to China and India thereby increasing the company’s bottom line has created decaying inner cities in the Midwest. The increased value of the stock has created a high dropout rate in the public schools of large midwestern cities. That higher stock value has created a jobs market lacking in good paying middle class jobs – those jobs that were key to building a vibrant Midwest. I would argue that our focus on the financial bottom line which has driven economic globalization has created the exact environment that Bobby spoke of more than 40 years ago.

What we need are leaders with Bobby’s vision, that focusing our efforts on things that make life worthwhile – the strength of our families, the health of our public schools, the social safety net, the elevation of our public debate – will begin to reverse the economic decline driven by globalization. Sadly, there are no politicians on today’s stage espousing these ideas. Instead, we have leaders who are embracing globalization with pushes toward more “free trade” agreements. Instead of increasing our quality of life, we are apparently in a race to the bottom.

Remembering Bobby

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

Amen. Rest in peace, Bobby. 43 years later, our country still needs you and the ideals for which you stood.

Pitching

Thirty plus years ago, I played organized baseball for the first time. I was not athletic, but a friend was playing little league and I thought I had to play as well. Being a rookie, I was relegated to play in the outfield, a safe proposition given that the ball was rarely hit that far by 10 year olds. One night in practice I asked if I could try out for pitching. I did and the result was brutal. I had no idea what I was doing. Midway in the season we played a long game where we used all of our normal pitchers. The coach had to decide between me and another kid that frankly would rather kick at the dandelions in the outfield. So, I went into the game and surprisingly did not suck. I managed to pitch my way into the regular rotation for the remainder of the season and did fairly well. The next season I was too old to pitch in the league and ended up playing catcher, which turned out to be big fun. But there was always something about going out there and being the starting pitcher.

Now, my son has started to play baseball. And just like that night more than 30 years ago, he tried his hand at pitching in practice. Except unlike his father, he did reasonably well and was slated to pitch in a tournament game the next week. Unfortunately, the game did not make it to his scheduled inning, but he had confidence that he would one day get the call. Last week, the coaches wanted to see the “non-pitchers” pitch to hitters in a practice game. K got the call to give it a shot. Since the team was short a few players in practice, I hung out in the outfield and chased balls. K was very deliberate in his pitching motion. We had worked on making it simple and compact so that he could focus on the pitch. After getting a few pointers from the coach, the batters stepped in to bat. It was fun to watch him throw off the mound from my position. He pitched the ball well, many pitches close to the strike zone. He is clearly not the fastest pitcher on the team. But batters can hit the ball and the defense is able to put the hitter out. K got several attaboys from the other coach in the dugout. I suspect he managed to pitch himself into the rotation for at least part of the season.

As I was standing out there watching him, I noticed he was doing the little things that real pitchers do. He’d get the ball back from the catcher, step back off the pitching rubber and look out in the field before stepping on the rubber. When he stepped on the rubber to get ready to pitch, he reached up with his free hand and wiped the bill of his hat. Then it was set, windup, and throw. His high leg kick in the follow through completed his almost-perfect form. None of these mechanics are things we’ve worked on. I suspect that much of it has come from watching the major leaguers on tv along with a little bit of natural talent.

There’s just something about pitching. Perhaps it’s standing on the mound with the ball, just a little higher than all the other players, starting every play. Perhaps it’s the graceful windup and the eager anticipation of the ball flying toward home plate. Perhaps it’s the one-on-one duel between the pitcher and the batter. Whatever it is, every little boy at some point wants to be a pitcher.

Hi

I’m still here

More to come soon…

Red Sox

In case you didn’t know, this is Red Sox territory!!!
And the Sox beat the damn Yankees 5-3 in spring training tonight!!!