Boring Scientists

I am going to be a victim of my own success; with the debut of ‘Irresistible Ben’ (my grandson, not the Big Ben) on my blog, it might attract more people to the site.  And that will be all they want to read ignoring the ‘real stuff’ on the blog.  I am more of a self-effacing guy than of a self-aggrandizing one, but, when talking about Ben, I can not but talk like a bragging blogger.

I plan to move the ‘Irresistible Ben’ to the bottom of the page, and Jo already warned me that will change nothing, as one can always fast scroll down to it.

I am fully aware that few people will be intrigued by the likes of Dirac, Feynman, or Glauber. I always bought those yearly The Best American Science Writing books in the bargain books section. Janice, I got another one at Harvard Square when we last visited you.

In Political Scientist (a profile of Harold Varmus in the June 7, 1999 issue of The New Yorker), the author lamented how Harvard Crimson was full of mockery abut this nobody who had been invited to give the Commencement Address (1996), Dr. Varmus began the Address by repeating some of the responses reported on the Crimson: “Who is he?” “Wow, that’s boring.  Everyone got someone exciting.” and he said “Editorials criticized the process by which 'Dr. Who' was selected.  I was featured in entertaining cartoons, something that hasn’t happened during three years in Washington [He was appointed as the Director of NIH by then President Clinton in 1993.  He is now the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.]  I may never be this famous again.”

Harold Varmus was actually on the list of my Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science list (more to come about this Nobel laureate).  And if this could happen in the intellectual Harvard, then it is no surprise that my writing of those ‘boring’ scientists will interest few, if any.  Recruiting Irresistible Ben is my desperate attempt to keep the traffic flowing. 

Intellectual Colognes

Cologne is nonessential in my life; never feel any need of it.  I was never attracted to it until now.

Inspired by New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter’s cologne, Driven, Steve Mirsky wrote a humor column in the November 2006 issue of Scientific American with a title of Uncommon Scents.  He makes up 18 colognes, each honoring or ‘exploiting’ a scientist.  I’ll mention a few here and say a few things to make it more educational; so you would have fun while learning something.  The aim of my blogging is to educate, enlighten and entertain, after all.

I wonder how Avon would market Driven in the Red Sox Nation? Big Poppi and Manny Ramirez, lovable though they may be, probably not fit to sell cologne.  I think the best answer from Boston to the New York Yankees' Jeter would be Patriots’ Tom Brady.

Alessandro Volta’s Charge   (Charge is the name of the cologne to be marketed)

Ingredients:  Cat hair, amber, balloons.

Slogan:  Make sparks fly.

Volt (unit of electric potential) and voltage derives from him.  If your name became a unit of scientific measurement or a constant, you are a scientific great or a Nobel laureate.  But, Volta (1745-1827) was in pre-Nobel era.  His Voltaic pile is the forerunner of modern battery.  He used copper (or silver) and zinc (this is what we learn in high school chemistry—electrochemical cell) to produce electrons (of course, we have to wait another 100 years or so to learn that it was electrons flowing that does the trick)

My slogan to sell Alessandro Volta’s Charge  would be “When 陰 (Yin) and  陽 (Yang) meet, let it spark!”

陰 (Yin) is female or negatively charged, and  陽 (Yang) is male or positively charged.

Antoine Lavoisier’s Chemistry

Ingredients: Hydrogen, oxygen.

Slogan:  When the elements come together, you may lose your head.

Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry (included in the Britannica Great Books) is very modern; no wonder he is touted as the Father of Modern Chemistry.  Many concepts are credited to him:  hydrogen combines with oxygen yields water, Laws of Conservation of Mass, diamond is the crystalline form of carbon, and role of oxygen plays in combustion.  Lavoisier (1743-1794) was beheaded during the French Revolution.  When he was sentenced to death, he requested time to complete some scientific work, the presiding judge was said to have answered “The Republic has no need of scientists.”  This judge symbolizes the collective French National Disgrace and Shame.

The slogan of ‘you may lose your head’ was twisted into somewhat different meaning that is fitting for selling cologne.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Cataclysm

Ingredients:  Desert sand, enriched geranium.

Slogan:  Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, but with a delicate floral hint.

I read Oppei’s biography: American Prometheus this past summer.  On his reflection of seeing the mushroom clouds rising from the first test explosion of atomic bomb (code name Trinity), he wrote, quoting from the Hindu sacred Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

My campaign slogan for Cataclysm  would be: Let this American Prometheus steal fire and passion to stir your static mind, so when the moment is right, you will be ready!  (I must have watched too much Cialis TV commercial)

The following colognes are my own invention.

Kary Mullis’ Flamboyant Flame

Mullis’ polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is simplistically beautiful, matching that of DNA structure—the best tool we ever had in propelling the genetic science to the one as we come to know today.  I am still trying to understand this flamboyant ‘playboy’ Nobel laureate (1993, Chemistry)

My slogan to sell Flamboyant Flame:  Get out of Lab, play the game, not necessarily by the rule, be uninhibited and outrageous, explore the world, get a life, be all you can be.

Hwang Woo Suk's Blind Ambition or Cheating Heart

When the South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk announced his creation of many new lines of embryonic stem cells last year, critics claimed the American counterparts had fallen behind because of President George Bush's stem cell policy.  Then the superstar scientist fell like a rock after his fraudulent scheme was exposed.

Shortly after the Blind Ambition or Cheating Heart was launched, it was discovered all the ingredients are fake, so the product was quickly pulled out of shelf and its marketing slogan was deleted from this page

Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer's greatest gift is his intellect, quick mind, and capacity to understand things esoteric; he spreaded the 'gospel' of quantum mechanics in the States after he returned from Europe.  Oppie was a “cultivated scholar, a linguist of eight tongues.”  He read Marcel Proust in French, Dante in Italian, and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in German.  He studied Greek and Latin before going to Harvard in 1922, and where he read the entire 3000 pages of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.  (The New York Times wrote in his obituary that he read it on a train trip from California to the East Coast.)  He gave a lecture in Dutch six weeks after arriving Netherlands to study with Ehrenfest.

On his reflection of seeing the mushroom clouds rising from the first test explosion of atomic bomb, he wrote, quoting from the Hindu sacred Scripture, "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." and “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

Cultivated Renaissance Men in Science: Roy Glauber

Richard Feynman, the ‘Genius’ (the title of his biography by James Gleick) was thrilled when he learned that the Descriptive Astronomy can be considered a required humanity course at MIT.  He couldn’t enjoy reading anything other than math or sciences.  “He tried to read Goethe’s Faust and felt he could make no sense of it.”

Not all scientists are alike; the following is from the Banquet Speech by Roy Glauber (see photo – one of the three Nobel laureates in Physics in 2005, still teaching at Harvard at age of 81) If there are two or three recipients, the Banquet Speech is usually presented by the elder, the more seasoned one.  He also mentioned A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“These dark days in emphasize the importance of light in our lives. It is equally important in our literature. The word, 'light', has vastly many meanings. Shakespeare, in Love's Labours Lost, has one of his cleverer characters make fun of that by speaking the line, 'Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile ...'  Loosely translated, that means: Intellect, seeking understanding, easily fools reason. - Or perhaps it's the other way around.”

The following is how he ended his Nobel Lecture:

Einstein at Princeton in 1951--by Roy Glauber

“I’d like, as a final note, to share with you an experience I had in 1951, while I was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Possessed by the habit of working late at night – in fact on photon statistics13 at the time – I didn’t often appear at my Institute desk early in the day. Occasionally I walked out to the Institute around noon, and that was closer to the end of the work day for Professor Einstein. Our paths thus crossed quite a few times, and on one of those occasions I had ventured to bring my camera.  He seemed more than willing to let me take his picture as if acknowledging his role as a local landmark, and he stood for me just as rigidly still. Here, [Left Figure], is the hitherto unpublished result. I shall always treasure that image, and harbor the enduring wish I had been able to ask him just a few questions about that remarkable year, 1905.”

Glauber’s Nobel Lecture gives a good summary of the birth of quantum mechanics—during 1924-26 when Louis de Broglie, Heisenberg and Schrodinger were working on the atoms. But, Glauber makes it clear that it was Dec. 14, 1900 when Max Planck announced his revolutionary idea that energy emitted by a resonator could only take a discrete value (quanta, hence quantum mechanics) that separates the classical physics and quantum mechanics.  Based on Planck’s concept, Einstein proposed in 1905 that light is also quantized—his photoelectric effect earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 (his more famous E = mc² never got him a Nobel), and Planck was so honored in 1918.

Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria seated between the Nobel Laureates in Physics

While watching Glauber’s Nobel Lecture video, I lost him when he came to his work; my limited math (calculus) background deprives me of so much joy.  In summer reading_6/2004, I wrote I struggled for many years trying to better understand quantum mechanics and eventually gave it up when I couldn’t fully understand Schrodinger’s wave function equation.  I have come to realize that without higher level calculus, I can’t ever grasp the concept.  And Dirac’s equation of electrodynamics is the extension of Schrodinger’s and Feynman’s Dirac’s.  The point I try to make is that without a good foundation of math (calculus), one can not do physics.

 

Writing about Glauber’s Nobel Prize in fall reflection_10/8/2005, I wrote, “Let there be light: and there was light.”  I am pleased to note that on Dec. 8, 2005 when he gave the Nobel Lecture, he also began with something like this:  Our good Lord said, “Let there be quantum electrodynamics.” . . . that was the modern translation of the Hebrew.  We quote the same Scripture, but he said it in a more poetic, aesthetic, subtle and dynamic way, no doubt.
(photo comes from nobelprize.org site)

In Celebration of the Great Life of Dr. Daniel Paul Greenlee

(This was written on March 6, 2005 when Dr. Greenlee passed away. In a post of “Pittsburgh” by Dr. Cheng-Hung Lin, he showed the picture of Cathedral of Learning and mentioned the graduation today; a day like this I always think about Dr. Greenlee.

Dr. and Mrs. Greenlee are our “American parents”; Dr. Greenlee passed away at age of 102 five years ago and Mrs. Greenlee is now in her 90s. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Greenlee went to Mayo Clinic for surgical training in early 1920s. He helped fund-raising to build the Cathedral of Learning. Their grandson, Dr. Adam Greenlee, graduated from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine today. Congratulations!)

In searching for my final tribute to Dr. Greenlee, I came across what Homer Koch of Kansas spoke of Lincoln in the House of Representatives February 12, 1923. A towering figure Dr. Greenlee was, this fits him well.

 

 

“There is no new thing to be said about Dr. Greenlee. There is no new thing to be said of the mountains, or of the sea, or of the stars. The years go their way, but the same old mountains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds; the same mysterious sea beats upon the shore; the same silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world. But to the mountains and sea and stars men turn forever in unwearied homage. And thus with Dr. Greenlee. For he was a mountain in grandeur of soul, he was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness, he was a star in steadfast purity of purpose and service. And he abides.”

When I said of all the people that I came to personally know, Dr. Greenlee was the one I respected the most; Josephine said regardless how great or how respectable he was, he will always be her loving Grandpa Greenlee. Janice most remembers learning patience and steady work from working in the garden with him as well as the simple pleasures of watching baseball and football games on TV.

Every one he touched was blessed; everyone he cut (as far as his profession goes) was blessed. A surgeon trained at Mayo Clinic in 1920s at the time when the Mayo Brothers were still operating and when the great surgeons in the nation were produced at the legendary pioneering institution. And yet he practiced medicine following what Dr. William Osler said about the character of a good doctor: availability, affability, and ability, and in that order.

We learn his humility in his daily life, and his humanity from the trips to the farm we took with him. His love, devotion and tender care extended beyond his families and patients to all the ‘children’ in the farm.

When we first had the good fortune to be his neighbor in 1976, we visited the Agway store. Knowing we were the newcomers in town, the owner asked us where we lived. I replied that we live next to Dr. Greenlee. And much to my surprise that the owner said, “I know him, he is a good farmer!” That was the beginning that we learn medicine was not the only profession he had.

II Timothy 4:7

Apostle Paul said, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

No doubt we have heard our dear Paul said the same thing justifiably.

II Timothy 4:8

“In the future there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but also to all who have loved His appearing.”

We now know where Dr. Greenlee is, and we’re assured that he will continue to touch us, to bless us, and will ‘reserve’ a seat for us, and we shall meet again.

And above all, we all know he was and will always be the Number One of the Audrey [Mrs. Greenlee] Fan Club.

A dinner with a Nobel laureate, Dr. Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲教授) in 2004

Professor Yuan Tseh Lee

On October 26, 2004, members of the Taiwanese American Association (TAA), Pittsburgh Chapter, had a very pleasant and congenial dinner with a Nobel laureate, Professor Yuan Tseh Lee (李遠哲教授). After being informed by Professor Fu Tyan Lin (林富田教授) that Dr. Lee was coming to University of Pittsburgh, and with the help of Mrs. J.Y. Tzeng (鄭如玉, a family friend of Dr. Lee), Katy (then TAA, Pittsburgh Chapter president) organized the dinner at LeMonte Restaurant, Pittsburgh.

Inspired by Madame Curie, Dr. Lee wanted to be a scientist at a young age. His excellent academic foundation was built at the National Taiwan University and the National Tsinghua University. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965, Dr. Lee joined Professor Dudley Herschbach (at Harvard—Janice’s freshman chemistry professor) for post-doc research in 1967. They shared the 1986 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry with Professor Polanyi for ‘reaction dynamics’—a new field they helped to create in 1960s and 1970s.

To create a new field in science per se is an extraordinary accomplishment. It is next to impossible to describe in this writing what Professor Lee did to be worthy for a Nobel Prize. But, I’ll give it a try.

I like to say that in the end all chemical reactions are physical. “A chemical reaction is fundamentally a mechanical event, involving the rearrangement of atoms and molecules during a collision.” (from Dr. Lee’s Nobel Lecture) Professor Herschbach pioneered the crossed molecular beam to study what happens to the two atoms the ‘moment’ (a time span of the order of a millionth of a millionth of a second) when they collide. With this technique they were able to ‘visualize’ the detail traveling paths of the colliding atoms during a chemical reaction.

You just have to trust them how they can ‘see’ it, using the quantum mechanical calculation of the angular and velocity distribution. i.e. measuring the direction, velocity, and potential energy, etc. one can locate the new position of the product. (Skip this paragraph if you must)

Katy and Professor Yuan Tseh Lee

Dr. Lee carried this technique to a higher level so that chemical reaction dynamics of a large, complex molecule can be studied. Being a physical chemist, he worked at two departments while at Harvard. After spending $80,000 (in 1967 dollars) in 10 months, using the money Dr. Herschbach borrowed from the Department of Chemistry, Dr. Lee built a ‘supermachine’ incorporating mass spectroscopy to the crossed molecular beam machine, thus taking Herschbach’s research of the chemical reaction dynamics to ‘beyond the alkali age.’

Despite much confidence in Lee during the course of machine construction, much concern and worry was expressed about this unprecedented endeavor of building the supermachine. At one point Herschbach said, “Yuan, if this machine doesn’t work, you have to shovel the snow in Harvard Yard for five years to pay back the money I borrowed.” Dr. Lee said of Herschbach in his Nobel Lecture,

“In February of 1967, I joined Dudley Herschbach’s group at Harvard as a post-doctoral fellow. There, I was exposed to the excitement of the crossed molecular beams research and participated in the construction of an universal crossed molecular beams apparatus. Dudley’s contagious enthusiasm and spectacular insight motivated not only me, but a whole generation of chemical dynamicists.”

Jer-Yuan Tsai, Professor Yuan-Tseh Lee and Katy Tsai

Lee’s late father was a fine artist. Katy asked him about the famous Niagara Fall painting. Dr. Lee said when he was at Harvard, his parents came to the States for a visit, and he took them to Niagara Falls. His father took lots of pictures and did that painting when he returned to Taiwan.

Lee also reminisced his childhood days when he wanted to learn painting from his father, who discouraged him or any of his seven siblings to take up painting, as his father said, “A poor artist can’t even make a living.” Thanks to his father insight, we have a super scientist furthers our basic science research to a higher level. His mother was a kindergarten teacher and Dr. Lee said he had the best teacher from the very beginning.

Among his numerous prestigious awards are National Medal of Science, Peter Debye Award and Nobel Prize, all in 1986. When Lee received the Nobel Prize, Dudley R. Herschbach described him as "The Mozart of physical chemistry...not only because Dr. Lee was a prodigy but also because in the laboratory he has 'a precise touch.'" (by James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius—Richard Feynman’s biography).

In my baseball posts I have mentioned how Herschbach and Lee boasted and claimed the credits of the championships of their baseball teams. When he came to Pittsburgh for two lectures in October 2004, the Red Sox - Cardinals World Series was going on, and I have no doubt about it that the Red Sox finally broke the Curse only because Dr. Lee returned to the States then. During his lectures at Pittsburgh Dr. Lee claimed the credits that Red Sox went to the World Series in 1967 when he went to Harvard and Oakland Athletics won the World Series champion in 1974 when he returned to Berkeley.

Dr. Lee has been the President of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan since 1994. There is a 22-minute interview of Dr. Lee that took place during the 55th Nobel laureates meeting in June 2005. Listening to the interview, one may gain further insight about this extraordinary Taiwanese Nobel laureate.

Prof Lee, Katy and Jer-Yuan

Immodest Francis Crick--Theoretic Biologist

(While writing my version of Crick’s obituary, I received an e-mail from Janice informing me that Francis Crick succumbed to colon cancer--the was originally written in 2004)

“I have never seen Francis Crick (see photo) in a modest mood.” So James Watson began his story of Double Helix.  And Crick had every reason not to be in that mood.  Janice, I bet it was quite a surprise when his grand-daughter told you that “He is my grand-father!” at Harvard computer room some years ago.)  Reading about him for so many years, I feel like I knew him by heart.

“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”--Letter to the Nature (April 25, 1953). Almost every molecular biology professor put this passage in the lecture notes.  This was a compromised statement between Watson and Crick who was 12 years senior to Watson.  The aggressive, quick-witted Crick wanted to elaborate the detailed copying mechanism on the original article of April 25, 1953 (Molecular structure of nucleic acids), the younger, but more cautious Watson was afraid if their hypothesis of copying mechanism were not quite true, it might ruin the whole thing.  They quickly wrote the follow up article (Genetic implications of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid) that showed up on May 30, 1953 issue of Nature.  It has turned out Crick was correct in the first place.

Sydney Brenner once said Crick was the only one he knew that can make a living by being a theoretic biologist (Crick was working on the PhD in physics when WWII broke out, he then worked on the magnetic and acoustic mine in the British Admiralty.)  After moving to Salk Institute, Crick devoted his life in ‘the scientific search for the soul’ (this is the subtitle of his book Astonishing Hypothesis)—hypothetic neuroscience.

When Watson and Crick constructed that famous DNA model in April 1953, Sidney Brenner (originally from South Africa, born of Jewish parents) was in Oxford University and went to Cambridge to see it.  Brenner and Crick were also together in the Woods Hole Lab and Cold Spring Harbor Lab (in Long Island) in 1954.  Brenner joined Crick at Cavendish Lab in 1956 and “spent 20 years sharing an office with Francis Crick.”  Crick moved to Salk Institute at La Jolla, in 1976 and Brenner rejoined him there again in 2001. Brenner began to work on the ‘elegant’ C. elegans in late 1950s and for which he just received the Nobel Prize (programmed cell death or apoptosis) in Medicine in 2002—exactly 40 years after Watson and Crick did.  Brenner’s Nobel Lecture, Nature’s Gift to Science, talking about the importance of choosing the model organism for the intended research.

It is now almost a ‘common knowledge’ that how DNA uses its four bases to pass along the ‘secrets of life’ to the making of proteins.  It was Crick that first proposed his ‘adaptor’ tRNA (transfer RNA) hypothesis.  It was actually never published; it was just a letter to the then so-called RNA Tie Club. He also worked with Vernon Ingram (who discovered the replacement of Glu by Val at 6^th position of β-globin chain in sickle cell HbS, as predicted by Linus Pauline) and Sydney Brenner in this field.  Brenner was twice a visiting professor at Harvard, as was Crick.

“Crick is very different: brighter than Watson, but he talks a lot, and so he talks a lot of nonsense.” This was from Erwin Chargaff whose discovery of ‘A = T’ and ‘C = G’, along with Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkin’s X-ray crystography of DNA (see photo) were the most important hints to Watson & Crick, in my view.  I have read many reports that Chargaff had a lot of resentments (hence sour grape) that he was ‘so close’ and yet he let the ‘glory’ slip away. He was one of the 20 members of RNA Tie Club.  By the way, Chargaff was another Jew who fled Hitler’s Nazi. (my favorite topic that I mentioned in summer reading.2_2004)

It took many years before the DNA structure hypothesis was firmly accepted.  Matthew Meselson’s semiconservative replication provided the first confirmation.  Meselson took his Ph.D. from Linus Pauling at Cal Tech and who got an honorary degree at Joy’s graduation at Northwestern in 2003.

A few years ago, Time published 100 most influential people of the last century; both Watson and Crick are on the list.  Watson gave an introductory talk on the 2001 Nobel Symposia (Beyond genes) in Sweden, and Crick was no where in sight.  Throughout 2003 there were numerous activities celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of DNA structure.  Watson savored the glories on many functions, and Crick none.  He was not in his best health then, but that was not the main reason.  He preferred to read and think and hypothesize his science.