Category: Science

“Folkman Persisted in His Genuinely Original Thinking”

(p. 141) As detailed by Robert Cooke in his 2001 book Dr. Folkman’s War, the successful answers to these basic questions took Folkman through diligent investigations punctuated by an astonishing series of chance observations and circumstances. Over decades, Folkman persisted in his genuinely original thinking. His concept was far in advance of technological and other scientific advances that would provide the methodology and basic knowledge essential to its proof, forcing him to await verification and to withstand ridicule, scorn, and vicious competition for grants. Looking back three decades later, Folkman would ruefully reflect: “I was too young to realize how much trouble was in store for a theory that could not be tested immediately.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Evidence Some Flies Can Adapt to Climate Change

(p. D7) In the early 2000s, Ary A. Hoffmann, a biologist then at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, wondered how the many species in tropical rain forests would cope when their humid environment dried out.
. . .
. . . at the end of the experiment, the flies were no more resistant to dry air than their forebears. The flies seemed to lack the genetic potential to evolve. Those results suggested that if the rain forest home of Drosophilia birchii loses its high humidity, the flies will die off.
. . .
Recently, two of Dr. Hoffmann’s collaborators — Belinda van Heerwaarden and Carla M. Sgrò of Monash University — decided to rerun the experiment, but with a crucial twist.
Rather than expose the flies to 10 percent relative humidity, Dr. van Heerwaarden and Dr. Sgrò tried 35 percent. That’s still far drier than the moist air of rain forests, but it’s not the aridity one might encounter on a summer day in Death Valley.
“It’s a humidity that’s more relevant to the predictions for how dry the environment would become in the next 30 to 50 years,” Dr. Sgrò said.
. . .
Unlike the flies in the earlier studies, it didn’t take long for these to start evolving. After just five generations, one species was able to survive 23 percent longer in 35 humidity.

For the full story, see:
Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; Study Gives Hope of Adaptation to Climate Change.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 29, 2014): D7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 24, 2014.)

The recent paper discussed above, is:
van Heerwaarden, Belinda, and Carla M. Sgrò. “Is Adaptation to Climate Change Really Constrained in Niche Specialists?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1790 (2014): 1-1.

In Finding Cure for Ulcers, Marshall Was Not Constrained by the Need to Obtain Approval or Funding

(p. 113) Marshall was a youthful maverick, not bound by traditional theory and not professionally invested in a widely held set of beliefs. There is such a thing as being too much of an insider. Marshall viewed the problem with fresh eyes and was not constrained by the requirement to obtain approval or funding for his pursuits. It is also noteworthy that his work was accomplished not at a high-powered academic ivory tower with teams of investigators but instead far from the prestigious research centers in the Western Hemisphere.
The delay in acceptance of Marshall’s revolutionary hypothesis reflects the tenacity with which long-held concepts are maintained. Vested interests–intellectual, financial, commercial, status–keep these entrenched. Dogmatic believers find themselves under siege by a new set of explanations.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Warming of Northwest Is Due to Waves, Not Human Activity

(p. A19) Scientists have long known that sea surface temperatures are lower when strong winds whip up ocean waves, and higher when the seas are calm. Researchers generally have assumed that the phenomenon was but one factor in that warming, and that increased levels of carbon dioxide from human activity play a major role in driving rising temperatures.
But the new analysis, which relies on wind, barometric pressure and temperature data recorded from 1900 to 2012, concludes that human activity has little impact.
“The concept of winds controlling or affecting ocean temperature in that very way is not controversial, but the strength of that relationship was quite amazing” in the northwestern Pacific, said James Johnstone, a climatologist and the study’s lead author. “It explains practically every wiggle in the ocean temperature variations. It’s a phenomenal correlation.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL WINES. “Human Role in Warming of Northwest Played Down.” The New York Times (Tues., SEPT. 23, 2014): A19.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 22, 2014.)

The Johnstone paper, summarized above, is:
Johnstone, James A., and Nathan J. Mantua. “Atmospheric Controls on Northeast Pacific Temperature Variability and Change, 1900-2012.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online before print, September 22, 2014, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1318371111.

Ideas Should Not Be Rejected Just Because They Disagree with Reigning Theory

(p. 107) . . . Claude Bernard, the nineteenth-century founder of experimental medicine, . . . famously said, “If an idea presents itself to us, we must not reject it simply because it does not agree with the logical deductions of a reigning theory.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Needed Revolutionary Ideas Often Come From Outsiders

(p. 103) . . . where knowledge is no longer growing and the field has been worked out, a revolutionary new approach is required and this is more likely to come from the outsider. The skepticism with which the experts nearly always greet these revolutionary ideas confirms that the available knowledge has been a handicap.”

Source:
W. I. B. Beveridge as quoted in Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Ants Answer to Global Warming

(p. C4) While experts search for ways to cope with excessive atmospheric carbon, the world’s ants may have had a solution all along.
A new paper reports that ants radically accelerate the breakdown of some important minerals into chemicals that suck carbon dioxide–a byproduct of burning fossil fuels–out of the atmosphere to form new rocks.
. . .
Ants are so effective at promoting this process that they might have played an unheralded role in cooling the planet over millions of years, the author writes, adding that if we can figure out how they do it, we could investigate how to emulate them to sequester atmospheric carbon ourselves.

For the full story, see:
DANIEL AKST. “R AND D; Are Ants Cooling the World?” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 16, 2014): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 15, 2014.)

The paper on the ant solution to global warming is:
Dorn, Ronald I. “Ants as a Powerful Biotic Agent of Olivine and Plagioclase Dissolution.” Geology 42, no. 9 (Sept. 2014): 771-74.

Medical Innovator “Maintained a Healthy Skepticism Toward Accepted Wisdom”

(p. 103) Barry Marshall, a lanky twenty-nine-year-old resident in internal medicine at Warren’s hospital, was assigned to was assigned to gastroenterology for six months as part of his training and was looking for a research project. The eldest son of a welder and a nurse, Marshall grew up in a remote area of Western Australia where self-sufficiency and common sense were essential characteristics. His personal qualities of intelligence, tenacity, open-mindedness, and self-confidence would serve him and Warren well in bringing about a conceptual revolution. Relatively new to gastroenterology, he did not hold a set of well-entrenched beliefs. Marshall could maintain a healthy skepticism toward accepted wisdom. Indeed, the concept that bacteria caused stomach inflammation, and even ulcers, was less alien to him than to most gastroenterologists.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Why Did Waksman Not Pursue the Streptomycin Antibiotic?

What did Waksman lack to pursue the streptomycin antibiotic sooner? Enough independent funding? Alertness? Enough desire to make a ding in the universe? Enough unhappiness about unnecessary death? Willingness to embrace the hard work of embracing dissonant facts?

(p. 83) Waksman missed several opportunities to make the great discovery earlier in his career, but his single-mindedness did not allow for, in Salvador Luria’s phrase, “the chance observation falling on the receptive eye.” In 1975 Waksman recalled that he first brushed past an antibiotic as early as 1923 when he observed that “certain actinomycetes produce substances toxic to bacteria” since it can be noted at times that “around an actinomycetes colony upon a plate a zone is formed free from fungous and bacterial growth.” In 1935 Chester Rhines, a graduate student of Waksman’s, noticed that tubercle bacilli would not grow in the presence of a soil organism, but Waksman did not think that this lead was worth pursuing: “In the scientific climate of the time, the result did not suggest any practical application for treatment of tuberculosis.” The same year, Waksman’s friend Fred Beau-dette, the poultry pathologist at Rutgers, brought him an agar tube with a culture of tubercle bacilli killed by a contaminant fungus growing on top of them. Again, Waksman was not interested: “I was not moved to jump to the logical conclusion and direct my efforts accordingly…. My major interest at that time was the subject of organic matter decomposition and the interrelationships among soil micro-organisms responsible for this process.”

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)

Cancer Will Likely Be Cured by “Lone Wolves, Awkward Individualists, Nonconformists”

Morton Meyers quotes Ernst Chain, who received the Nobel Prize in 1945, along with Fleming and Florey, for developing penicillin:

(p. 81) But do not let us fall victims of the naive illusion that problems like cancer, mental illness, degeneration or old age… can be solved by bulldozer organizational methods, such as were used in the Manhattan Project. In the latter, we had the geniuses whose basic discoveries made its development possible, the Curies, the Rutherfords, the Einsteins, the Niels Bohrs and many others; in the biologic field… these geniuses have not yet appeared…. No mass attack will replace them…. When they do appear, it is our job to recognize them and give them the opportunities to develop their talents, which is not an easy task, for they are bound to be lone wolves, awkward individualists, nonconformists, and they will not very well fit into any established organization.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

“Seeing What Everybody Has Seen and Thinking What Nobody Has Thought”

Szent-Györgyi is onto something important below. But I think it would be more accurate to say that we all experience dissonant events (but usually not the same dissonant events, as Szent-Györgyi implies), and that most of us let the events pass without noticing, or remembering, or making use of them. What is rare is to notice the events, remember them and make use of them. Those who carry around with them the burden of unsolved problems, and unfixed frustrations, are more likely to see in unexpected events solutions to those problems and fixes for the frustrations. This all takes the effort of our better self (what Kahneman calls our System 2). It takes effort to carry around the problems, to bear the dissonant observations, and to suffer the indifference of friends and the ridicule of experts. But it is through such effort that we better understand the world and, most importantly, that we improve the world.

(p. 12) “Discovery (p. 13) consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought,” according to Nobelist Albert Szent-Györgyi.14
. . .
(p. 324) 14. Albert Szent-Györgyi, Bioenergetics (New York: Academic Press, 1957), 57.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)