Category: Science

Dolly Parton Sings and Donates with “Effective Sympathy”

The above is an “embed” from a YouTube video posted by singer (and English Professor) Ryan Cordell. The lyrics were written by Gretchen McCulloch and the tune is from Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” The YouTube URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCwNQtnI64I

In my book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, I write about “effective sympathy” which I describe as “actions taken by sympathetic observers that actually save or improve the lives of those who are suffering” (p. 110). I admire Dolly Parton for donating copies of The Little Engine That Could to poor children. I also admire Dolly Parton for donating a million dollars to help start research on the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. Dolly Parton knows how to practice effective sympathy.

(p. 12) She wrote “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the same day and built a theme park around herself. She has given memorable onscreen performances as a wisecracking hairstylist and harassed secretary. She even helped bring about the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Now, Dolly Parton’s fans are crediting her with saving the world from the coronavirus. It’s an exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek claim, to be sure. But for legions of admirers, Ms. Parton’s donation this spring to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drugmaker Moderna to develop a coronavirus vaccine, was another example of how her generosity and philanthropy have made her one of the world’s most beloved artists.

. . .

“Her money helped us develop the test that we used to first show that the Moderna vaccine was giving people a good immune response that might protect them,” Dr. Denison said on Tuesday.

Ms. Parton told the BBC on Tuesday [November 17, 2020] that she was excited to hear her contribution provided a “little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world.”

. . .

On Monday [November 16, 2020], after Moderna announced that early trials of the vaccine showed a 94.5 percent effectiveness rate, fans reacted rapturously.

. . .

Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, filmed himself singing a song about the vaccine to the tune of “Jolene.”

For the full story, see:

Maria Cramer. “Dolly: A Star of Country, a Songwriter, a Virus Hero.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, November 22, 2020): 12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 17, 2020, and has the title “Dolly Parton: Singer, Songwriter, Pandemic Savior?” The online version says that the title of the New York print version was “Dolly: Country Music Legend, Songwriter, Pandemic Hero” and its page number was 8. The title of my National print version was “Dolly: A Star of Country, a Songwriter, a Virus Hero” and its page number was 12.)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The use of The Little Engine That Could to encourage entrepreneurial perseverance is analyzed in:

Yandle, Bruce. “I Think I Can! Does the Little Engine That Could Matter?” Journal of Private Enterprise 26, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 127-42.

Arthur Ashton’s Serendipitous Invention of Optical Tweezers

(p. B11) Arthur Ashkin, a physicist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize for figuring out how to harness the power of light to trap microscopic objects for closer study, calling his invention optical tweezers, died on Sept. 21 [2020] at his home in Rumson, N.J.

. . .

Dr. Ashkin’s discovery was serendipitous.

In 1966, he was head of the laser research department at Bell Labs, the storied New Jersey laboratory founded by the Bell Telephone Company in 1925, when he went to a scientific conference in Phoenix. There, in a lecture, he heard two researchers discuss something odd that they had found while studying lasers, which had been invented six years earlier: They had noticed that dust particles within the laser beams careened back and forth. They theorized that light pressure might be the cause.

Dr. Ashkin did some calculations and concluded that this was not the cause — it was most likely thermal radiation. But his work reignited a childhood interest in the subject of light pressure.

Light pushes against everything, including people, because it comprises tiny particles called photons. Most of the time the pressure is utterly insignificant; people, for one, feel nothing. But Dr. Ashkin thought that if objects were small enough, a laser might be used to push them around.

. . .

Then, in 1986, he and several colleagues, notably Steven Chu, achieved the first practical application of optical tweezers when they sent a laser through a lens to manipulate microscopic objects. Their results were published in another paper in Physical Review Letters. Dr. Chu began using the tweezers to cool and trap atoms, a breakthrough for which he was awarded a one-third share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.

Dr. Ashkin, it was clear, was irked that the Nobel committee had not recognized his foundational work in awarding the prize. But he had already begun to use the tweezers for a different purpose: trapping live organisms and biological material.

Other scientists thought this application would not work, as he explained in an interview with the Nobel Institute after he was awarded the prize in 2018.

“They used light to heal wounds, and it was considered to be deadly,” he said. “When I described catching living things with light, people said, ‘Don’t exaggerate, Ashkin.’”

. . .

Dr. Ashkin was awarded one-half the 2018 physics prize, . . . . In so doing he became, at 96, the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize at the time.

. . .

Dr. Ashkin’s retirement from Bell Labs did not stop him from continuing his research. When he received word of his Nobel Prize, he was working on a project in his basement to improve solar energy collection. Asked if he was going to celebrate, he said: “I am writing a paper right now. I am not about celebrating old stuff.”

For the full obituary, see:

Dylan Loeb McClain. “Arthur Ashkin, 98, Dies; Nobel-Winning Physicist.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 29, 2020): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Oct. 5, 2020, and has the title “Arthur Ashkin, 98, Dies; Nobel Laureate Invented a ‘Tractor Beam’.”)

The essay about Aoyagi mentioned above is:

Severinghaus, John W. “Takuo Aoyagi: Discovery of Pulse Oximetry.” Anesthesia & Analgesia 105, no. 6 (Dec. 2007): S1-S6.

“Slavery Without Private Property”

(p. B11) Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and disillusioned former Communist who publicly held Moscow accountable for failing to protect the rights of dissidents and was imprisoned and exiled for his own apostasy, died on Sunday [September 27, 2020] at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.

. . .

A credulous Communist Party member since college, Professor Orlov began having doubts about the party based on a growing foreboding under Stalin over what he later described as “slavery without private property.” He was further alienated by the subsequent Soviet repression of civil liberties movements in Hungary and what he called the “savage suppressions of workers’ unrest” in Czechoslovakia.

. . .

In 1956, after publicly advocating democratic socialism, Professor Orlov was fired as a research physicist at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and expelled from the Communist Party. In 1973, in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the party, he denounced the stultifying effect of repression on scientific research and presciently proposed “glasnost,” or openness, long before that word was in common use.

. . .

Professor Orlov was arrested in 1977 and, after a show trial, sentenced to seven years in a labor camp, followed by five years in Siberian exile, for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Yuri Orlov, Dissident Of Soviet Union Sent Into Exile, Dies at 96.” The New York Times (Friday, October 2, 2020): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Oct. 1, 2020, and has the title “Yuri Orlov, Bold Champion of Soviet Dissidents, Dies at 96.”)

Science Is a Process, Not a Fixed Body of Truths

(p. 14) Both writers exemplify the humanity of science: Seager and Johnson laugh, grieve, hope, fail, try, fail and try again. “We started from almost nothing,” Johnson writes about Mars, though she could be talking about pretty much every human endeavor. “We’ve gone careening down blind alleys and taken countless wrong turns, yet somehow, miraculously, the passion, ingenuity and persistence we have brought to the enterprise have moved us toward a truer understanding of another world.”

Why keep searching for life elsewhere when we sometimes seem to have a hard time appreciating it in our own backyard? What does it say about us?

“It says we’re curious,” Seager writes. “It says we’re hopeful. It says we’re capable of wonder and wonderful things.”

For the full review, see:

Anthony Doerr. “Galaxies Far, Far Away.” The New York Times Book Review (Saturday, September 6, 2020): 14.

(Note: ellipses added. In both the print and online versions, “WSJ” and “Mr. Mackey” are bolded, as are the questions asked by Jaewon Kang. The bolding is not visible in the theme used for this blog.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. [sic] 18, 2020, and has the title “These Books Transport You to a Galaxy Far, Far Away.”)

The two books under review are:

Johnson, Sarah Stewart. The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World. New York: Crown, 2020.

Seager, Sara. The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir. New York: Crown, 2020.

“Biology’s Many Unanswered Questions”

Unanswered questions in science provide grounds for thinking that future scientific advances may provide grist for the innovation mill. Some argue innovation has slowed because we have picked all the low-hanging fruit. I doubt it. But if so, the fruit can grow back.

(p. C9) The irresistible enthusiasm of “Great Adaptations” couldn’t come at a better time—science is under assault not merely by know-nothing deniers but in how it is taught and presented to the general public. It’s dispensed as a collection of facts, recitations of what past research has uncovered, findings to be understood, which all too often means just “memorized.” By contrast, as Mr. Catania clearly understands, and demonstrates beautifully in his book, science offers adventures in trying to decode the mysteries of the natural world.

This open-minded, openhearted attitude toward biology’s many unanswered questions is the organizing principle of “Great Adaptations”: how to recognize those mysteries, how to go about solving them, and most important, how to appreciate them. In science, working out the solutions to a puzzle inevitably raises new questions in a process not unlike nuclear fission, in which splitting one nucleus generates the energy to split more—except in this case, the energy released isn’t dangerous but illuminating.

For the full review, see:

David P. Barash. “Biology’s Unanswered Questions.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, September 5, 2020): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sep. 4, 2020, and has the title “‘Great Adaptations’ Review: Survival of the Weirdest.”)

The book under review is:

Catania, Kenneth. Great Adaptations: Star-Nosed Moles, Electric Eels, and Other Tales of Evolution’s Mysteries Solved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

How “Blind” Is a Double-Blind Trial When Volunteers Know the Side-Effects of the Vaccine?

(p. A8) George Washington University had vaccinated 129 people since its share of the trials started. I would be No. 130. Altogether, Moderna planned to enroll 30,000 people in its trial. Half would be given the actual vaccine and half would get the placebo. The protocol called for two shots spaced a month apart.

Finally, it was time for my injection, which is when things got a little weird.

“We have to leave you now, because this is a double-blind study and we are blinded,” Dr. Malkin said. “You’ve been randomized.”

Before I could ask her to translate what she had just said, she was gone, and two nurses arrived with my vaccine. The first nurse left, and the second nurse, Linda Witkin, asked whether I was right-handed or left-handed, then proceeded to inject my right arm.

“Which one are you giving me, the vaccine or the placebo?” I asked. She gave me a look, clearly not pleased with my questioning.

. . .

With the Moderna trial, the side effects reported so far have been typical: fever, chills, muscle and joint soreness.

. . .

The night after my shot, I took my temperature: 97.5. I felt under my arms for glandular swelling and felt only mild joint pain.

. . .

“You all gave me the placebo, didn’t you?” I demanded of Dr. Diemert on Wednesday, during my one-week checkup. “I cannot believe I went through all of this and got the placebo.”

He told me that the actual vaccine shot was more “viscous” than the placebo, which was why neither he nor Dr. Malkin could be in the room when I got it, because they would have been able to easily determine. And so he really couldn’t answer because the double-blind program is meant to protect doctors like him from patients like me. He said I wasn’t to badger Ms. Witkin, if I ever even saw her again. He also said that most people reacted more to the second shot than the first one.

I texted the peanut gallery, “I feel no different.”

For the full story, see:

Helene Cooper. “From Reporting on Ebola to Being a Volunteer in a Covid-19 Vaccine Trial.” The New York Times (Saturday, September 12, 2020): A8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sep. 11, 2020, and has the title “Covering Ebola Didn’t Prepare Me for This: I Volunteered for the Covid-19 Vaccine Trial.”)

Leo Szilard Was “Ever-Resourceful”

I remember Milton Friedman, in an aside during his price theory class at Chicago, telling us that Leo Szilard used to walk up to him as he walked across campus, and articulately raise some issue in economics. Friedman was clearly impressed with the range of Szilard’s mind. My thought was ‘what’s the big deal about this guy Leo Szilard?’ Since then I have learned that he indeed was a big deal, at least for fans of the survival of Western civilization.

(p. 12) Fatefully, the Fermis sailed from Italy the same week that two Berlin radiochemists discovered nuclear fission.

That discovery was totally unexpected. In spring 1939, working at Columbia with the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, Fermi set out to answer a crucial question about it. Uranium atoms release a burst of energy when they fission, enough per atom to make a grain of sand visibly jump. But what then? Was there a way to combine those individual fissions, to turn a small burst into a mighty roar?

Szilard, ever-resourceful, acquired hundreds of pounds of black, greasy uranium-oxide powder from a Canadian mining corporation. Fermi and his students packed the powder into pipe-like tin cans and arranged them equally spaced in a circle within a large tank of water mixed with powdered manganese. At the center of the arrangement they placed a neutron source.

Neutrons from the source, slowed down by the water, would penetrate the uranium atoms in the cans and induce fissions. If the fissioning atoms released more neutrons, those “secondary” neutrons would irradiate the manganese. Measuring the radioactivity induced in the manganese would tell Fermi if the fissions were multiplying. If so, then a chain reaction might be possible, one bombarding neutron splitting a uranium atom and releasing two neutrons, those two splitting two other uranium atoms and releasing four, the four releasing eight, and so on in a geometric progression that could potentially produce vast amounts of energy for power — or for an atomic bomb. The experiment worked.

For the full review, see:

Richard Rhodes. “Quantifying the World.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, January 28, 2018): 12.

(Note: italics in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 24, 2018, and has the title “A Remarkable Man Among Remarkable Men and Women.”)

The book under review is:

Schwartz, David N. The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Infectious Disease Specialist Asks If Chinese Labs Did “Gain of Function” Research on Covid-19

(p. D7) For decades, Dr. Daniel R. Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, has crisscrossed the globe to study epidemics and their origins. His attention now is on the Covid-19 pandemic, which first came to public notice late last year in Wuhan, China. Its exact beginnings are sufficiently clouded that the World Health Organization has begun a wide inquiry into its roots. The advance team is to leave for China this weekend, and Dr. Lucey has publicly encouraged the health agency to address what he considers eight top questions.

“It’s not a legitimate investigation if the team doesn’t ask them,” Dr. Lucey said in a recent interview. He cited public reports and scientific articles as starting points for his queries, adding that Beijing “has never come out and answered these questions.”

Clear answers, Dr. Lucey said, would cast light on how the deadly pathogen spread so rapidly and, perhaps, how exactly the outbreak began. China has not been forthcoming with information, . . .

. . .

The sixth and seventh questions go to whether the deadly pathogen leapt to humans from a laboratory. Although some intelligence analysts and scientists have entertained that scenario, no direct evidence has come to light suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan’s labs.

Even so, given the wet market’s downgrading in the investigation, “It is important to address questions about any potential laboratory source of the virus, whether in Wuhan or elsewhere,” Dr. Lucey wrote in his blog post.

To that end, he urges the W.H.O. investigators to look for any signs of “gain of function” research — the deliberate enhancement of pathogens to make them more dangerous. The technique is highly contentious. Critics question its merits and warn that it could lead to catastrophic lab leaks. Proponents see it as a legitimate way to learn how viruses and other infectious organisms might evolve to infect and kill people, and thus help in devising new protections and precautions.

Debate over its wisdom erupted in 2011 after researchers announced success in making the highly lethal H5N1 strain of avian flu easily transmissible through the air between ferrets, at least in the laboratory.

In his blog, Dr. Lucey asks “what, if any,” gain-of-function studies were done on coronaviruses in Wuhan, elsewhere in China, or in collaboration with foreign laboratories.

“If done well scientifically, then this investigation should allay persistent concerns about the origin of this virus,” he wrote. “It could also help set an improved standard for investigating and stopping the awful viruses, and other pathogens, in the decades ahead.”

Finally, Dr. Lucey asks the W.H.O. team to learn more about China’s main influenza research lab, a high-security facility in Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province. In May [2020], he notes, a Chinese paper in the journal Science reported that two virus samples from Wuhan were studied there in great detail early this year, including in a variety of animals. It reported that cats and ferrets were highly susceptible to the pathogen; dogs were only mildly susceptible; and pigs, chickens and ducks were not susceptible at all.

For the full story, see:

William J. Broad. “Disease Detective Puts Forth Pointed Questions.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 14, 2020): D7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 8, 2020, and has the title “8 Questions From a Disease Detective on the Pandemic’s Origins.”)

The blog posting in which Dr. Lucey asked his eight key questions, is:

Lucey, Daniel R. “Covid-19: Covid: Eight Questions for the Who Team Going to China Next Week to Investigate Pandemic Origins.” Science Speaks: Global ID News blog, posted June 30, 2020.

Covid-19 More Severe If You Inherited a Neanderthal Gene on Chromosome 3

(p. A6) A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Scientists don’t yet know why this particular segment increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. But the new findings, which were posted online on Friday [July 3, 2020] and have not yet been published in a scientific journal, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history.

. . .

Last month, researchers compared people in Italy and Spain who became very sick with Covid-19 to those who had only mild infections. They found two places in the genome associated with a greater risk. One is on Chromosome 9 and includes ABO, a gene that determines blood type. The other is the Neanderthal segment on Chromosome 3.

But these genetic findings are being rapidly updated as more people infected with the coronavirus are studied. Just last week, an international group of scientists called the Covid-19 Host Genetics Initiative released a new set of data downplaying the risk of blood type. “The jury is still out on ABO,” said Mark Daly, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who is a member of the initiative.

The new data showed an even stronger link between the disease and the Chromosome 3 segment. People who carry two copies of the variant are three times more likely to suffer from severe illness than people who do not.

. . .

(p. A7) Tony Capra, a geneticist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study, thought it was plausible that the Neanderthal chunk of DNA originally provided a benefit — perhaps even against other viruses. “But that was 40,000 years ago, and here we are now,” he said.

It’s possible that an immune response that worked against ancient viruses has ended up overreacting against the new coronavirus. People who develop severe cases of Covid-19 typically do so because their immune systems launch uncontrolled attacks that end up scarring their lungs and causing inflammation.

Dr. Paabo said the DNA segment may account in part for why people of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom.

For the full story, see:

Carl Zimmer. “String of Neanderthal Genes May Increase Risk of Severe Illness.” The New York Times (Monday, July 6, 2020): A6-A7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 8, 2020, and has the title “DNA Inherited From Neanderthals May Increase Risk of Covid-19.”)

The unpublished paper, mentioned above, is:

Zeberg, Hugo, and Svante Pääbo. “The Major Genetic Risk Factor for Severe Covid-19 Is Inherited from Neandertals.” bioRxiv (posted July 3, 2020).

Wearing Even Homemade Masks Could Bring Covid-19 “Under Control”

(p. A6) Face masks are emerging as one of the most powerful weapons to fight the novel coronavirus, with growing evidence that facial coverings help prevent transmission—even if an infected wearer is in close contact with others.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the pandemic could be brought under control over the next four to eight weeks if “we could get everybody to wear a mask right now.” His comments, made Tuesday [July 14, 2020] with the Journal of the American Medical Association, followed an editorial he and others wrote there emphasizing “ample evidence” of asymptomatic spread and highlighting new studies showing how masks help reduce transmission.

. . .

Researchers from around the world have found wearing even a basic cloth face covering is more effective in reducing the spread of Covid-19 than wearing nothing at all. And many are now examining the possibility that masks might offer some personal protection from the virus, despite initial thinking that they mostly protect others.

. . .

“It was surprising in a good way to see that a homemade mask could do so well . . . that we don’t have to get a very fancy mask,” Dr. Verma said.

. . .

Wearing a mask is “one of the most urgent things we can do to get our country under control,” said Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology. “We’re all waiting for the vaccine, we’re waiting for therapeutics, and we’re not there.”

For the full story, see:

Caitlin McCabe. “Evidence Mounts That Masks Help Curb Infections.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, July 19, 2020): A6.

(Note: ellipses between passages, and bracketed date, added. Ellipsis internal to passage, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 18, 2020, and has the title “Face Masks Really Do Matter. The Scientific Evidence Is Growing.”)

The editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), mentioned above, is:

Brooks, John T., Jay C. Butler, and Robert R. Redfield. “Universal Masking to Prevent Sars-CoV-2 Transmission—the Time Is Now.” JAMA (published online, in advance of print, on July 14, 2020).

Some of the new evidence supporting the use of masks can be found in the following two academic articles:

Verma, Siddhartha, Manhar Dhanak, and John Frankenfield. “Visualizing the Effectiveness of Face Masks in Obstructing Respiratory Jets.” Physics of Fluids 32, no. 6 (published online on June 30, 2020).

Wang, Xiaowen, Enrico G. Ferro, Guohai Zhou, Dean Hashimoto, and Deepak L. Bhatt. “Association between Universal Masking in a Health Care System and Sars-Cov-2 Positivity among Health Care Workers.” JAMA (published online, in advance of print, on July 14, 2020).