Friday, 12 June 2015

Mary Mulvihill

I was at the funeral, on Tuesday, of the father of the chap who used to sit behind me in 1st Year Chemistry.  It was sad, there were weeping grand-children beside stoic parents and lots of hugs but it was alright because The Principal was, at 86, in the fullness of his years. I said to a mourner of my age that it would soon be the turn of our generation. Not a very clever prophecy but last night I heard that Mary Mulvihill had died; and she's much younger than me.

She is being remembered on the Irish Times as a geneticist and Scholar of Trinity College Dublin, as well as being a journalist, author and a founder member of WITS [Women in Science and Technology].  Far more important than being a geneticist, Mary was a generalist.  She was interested in much more than a narrow specialism and so would not have been happy following a career in academia where, as the cliché has it, researchers get to know more and more about less and less.  She pushed forward a career as a science journalist years before it was a recognisable job in Ireland. You'd hope when developing a novel career path that after some time pushing the bus uphill over the bumps of inertia and round the obstacles of vested interest you'd eventually get to a plateau or some blessed downhill coasting.  I suspect that there was precious little coasting for Ms Mulvihill. I've mentioned her on The Blob as one who could have done a far better job reporting science than somebody's cousin because she wrote the book on Irish scientific ingenuity.  That book, Ingenious Ireland, was a far better resource for Irish scientists than Wikipedia as I found when writing about Maude Delap.

The future of Ireland as a technological nation [FITNa] depends on having people out there who can look boldly over the parapet of their specialisation and talk to people in trenches opposite. Mary showed that, through desperately hard graft, you could make a career in STEM outside of academia and Megacorp.  That's a role-model for all those youngsters, boys as well as a girls, who love science but don't fit the standard model. Pursuing science as a hobby, at the weekend and after work, is difficult.  There are only a few niche areas where you can do original research and get it published.  Most journals, for example, require an academic address as surety that you are not an off-the-wall space-cadet - especially if you have ideas that rock spaceship science a bit.

In recent years, Mary started Ingenious Ireland walking tours in Dublin. That was a great idea for developing an income-stream from the deep biographical knowledge that she had accumulated researching the book.  A few years ago TCD commissioned her to make a map and a series of podcasts about their great men of science but after the first print-run of the map, it was never reprinted, nor was the concept developed; that's a missed opportunity.  I had my own go at getting youngsters interested in TCD's contributions to science by making a scavenger hunt of it rather than a guided tour.

There may be only a few niches where outsiders can make genuine contributions to science but for FITNa we need opportunities where youngsters can be sat down in the real world and be encouraged to ask questions about what they see around them.  From Tyndall's answer to the question "Why is the sky blue?" to why does hawthorn but not ash fall out of ditches when the wind blows?  Reading Ingenious Ireland to see how scientists think is a good place to start.
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Thursday, 11 June 2015

Pipe-work

If you wind me up, I will go on and on and on about modern medicine and unnecessary, expensive and invasive therapies wrought on the elderly in a vain attempt to make them live forever. In the US, 25% of your lifetime medical expenses are incurred in your last year of life when it should be 1/80th. The implication is that drugs and surgery don't really work to extend life if you are on your terminal illness. The likelihood that this illness is the terminal one, and so shouldn't really be treated, increases [exponentially?] as we get older. In my book, if there is a bottleneck in Intensive Care, then we should privilege young wage-earners with dependents: if they can be pulled through it will have beneficial utilitarian consequences. Me, I'm genetically dead, my kids have left home, and I've nothing new to say, so I should find me a nice ice-flow to die on rather than blocking some young chap's ICU bed. But some medical devices are so damned elegant, you have to tip hats to the engineers and doctors who thought them up and then designed them.

It is a peculiarity of evolution that we re-use and re-purpose bits and bobs which exist for one function, so that they are used for something else.  There are two useful sets of plumbing which serve a number of purposes.  The first is the urino-genital tract which is a long old tube that leaks urine from the bladder and also takes cocktail of ingredients (stirred not shaken) of semen from the testes+seminal vesicles+prostate+Cowper's glands and delivers that to the outside as required. Silly to have two parallel pipes. Another example of this is the common duct that connects two tubes, the bile-duct from the gall-bladder and one from the pancreas, which allows these two digestive glands to dump their product at the very top of the small intestine.  If you have a blockage in this common bile-duct you feel crook and your skin turns yellow because the pigmented bile is not leaking away into the gut.

You can get jaundiced from a whole rake of different mis-functions: it could be liver cancer, or hepatitis from viruses or bacteria, or gall-stones or pancreatic cancer. You'd like to know which of these is the case before you implement a curing regime.  Viral hepatitis from, say, HCV needs interferon-alpha to control the concentration and replication of viruses. Gall-stones need to be removed, and the medical device of choice for doing this is Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography or ERCP [see L].  This a flexible steel and plastic tube that you can push down the throat, through the stomach, out through the pyloric sphincter and have a look at the end of the common duct.  The ERCP has a teeny-tiny camera for determining what treatment is appropriate and an on-board tool-kit for doing what's necessary. It's moderately invasive and usually isn't used for purely investigative work - a lot can be worked out with a CAT scan or even an old-fashioned X-ray.  The pyloric sphincter is a little ring of smooth muscle that keeps your dinner in the stomach until it is ready for the intestine.  There is another even tinier ring of muscle at the neck of the common duct called the sphincter of Oddi.  That sphincter will effectively prevent a gall-stone from passing into the duodenum, and can be trimmed back with a hot wire from end of the ERCP, so that the stone can be shed.  A little cut from the inside and the problem is solved.  Not sure if and how effectively Oddi's sphincter repairs itself afterwards but clearly its better to clear the obstruction and risk a little leakiness afterwards.  If you're 90+, then there may not much afterwards to worry about and at least you won't die the colour of a sou'wester.
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Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Island Index

I've had rather a lot to say about islands since January 2013.  Now they deserve parity of esteem with Women of Science: another of my slightly obsessive themes.  Not quite sure how to classify, order or islandex them but at the moment a straight list - America; Europe; Atlantic; Antarctic; Misc - may suffice.
Doubtless the list will get longer.
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Camões

Hoje é dia de Portugal! [today is Portugal Day]  I'm hoping that someone close to me will be delivering a Torta de Noz to the mountain.  This is a confection made from ground walnuts, condensed milk, eggs and a glass of port [recipe and method and an elementary lesson in spokjen Portuguese] which my gaffer and I used to consume almost every night when we were on our last field trip to Portugal.  Portuguese cakes are a bit on the robust side: their bolo de berlim donut is the size and weight of a baseball and beats madelaines or petit-fours any day.  Failing a Torta, I shall for sure be tucking in to a tuthree bowls of caldo verde when I get home from work tonight - that is a different stick-to-ribs sort of delicious.

Why today? Because it is the anniversary of the death of Luis de Camões, their equivalent of Shagsper, in 1580. They celebrate his death, partly because Iberians tend to be half in love with easeful death but mostly because nobody knows where or when he was born. English people call him Camoens giving the tilde above the õ the nasalisation that Portuguese requires on that accent.  Actually Camões is known outside of Portugal, if at all, only for a single epic poem Os Lusíadas which bundles the history of the Portuguese explorations of Vasco da Gama into 10,000 tum-de-tum-de-tumlines starting:
As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por mares nunca de antes navegados,
Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,
Em perigos e guerras esforçados,
Mais do que prometia a força humana,
E entre gente remota edificaram
Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram;
It is in conscious imitation of the start of the Virgil's Aeneid "Arma virumque cano . . ." [I sing of arms and the man] which served a similar patriotic purpose for the Romans. It was 'Englished' by, among others, Richard Burton the interesting chap who translated the Arabian Nights and wrote a treatise on pederasty. Camões was an interesting bloke as well having lost an eye while having all good fun fighting the moors at Ceuta. Legend has it that he saved the manuscript of poem by holding it above water with one arm when he was shipwrecked. I guess there are unfortunate Portuguese people of my age and older who can even now recite chunks of Os Lusíadas because they were compelled to do so in school before the First War.

Every year, the President of the Portuguese Republic denotes a city to host the principal celebrations on the day.  This year it is Lamego the antient capital of Trás-os-Montes, the most remote and isolated province in the country.  Lamego is a 'city and municipality' but, with a population of 25,000, is only the size of a small Irish town.  Nevertheless, I'm sure the celebrations will be mighty there today and into this evening.  I've always wanted to go to Trás-os-Montes because it has such a romantic name.

ANNyway, this is all by way of giving you a heads-up to give a Portugoose and hug today to show you care.
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Tuesday, 9 June 2015

Bienvenue au Canada

Back in the depths of winter, I had a bit of an island binge and said something about the Îles-de-la-Madeleine / Magdalen Islands which are stuck out in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as hazard to shipping  One part of the archipelago is called Grosse-Île which is so unromantic that the Anglophones are ashamed to call it Big Island, but use the French term as well.  It's a little confusing because there is another Grosse-Île in the St Lawrence further up-river nearer to Québec. Pedantically there is also a Grosse-Ile (no accent) in Michigan, and Grosse Isles in Louisiana and Manitoba. But today we treat of the other Grosse-Île Québecois. It is part of the strung out, low-slung archipelago of Isles-aux-Grues named for the cranes Grus canadensis that were abundant when European explorers first cruised past. Isles-aux-Grues itself is the only permanently inhabited [N=140ish] island among the 21 specks and wisps of mud-flat and salt-marsh that make up the archipelago. The kids go to school every day by Cessna - how cool is that? Saint-Antoine-de-l'Isle-aux-Grues, the parish, is now famous (presumably a relative term, because I'd reckon that 95% of the people who are reading this have never heard of the place, let alone its manifold delights) for bird-watching [it's the cranes], goose-hunting [potatoes roasted in goose-fat, mmm, so good] and cheese-making [any cheese is good with me and I'm sure that I-aux-G cheese is Woebegon above average].

In the past, Grosse-Île was enormously well known as Canada's Ellis Island, serving as a quarantine station, immigrant reception depot and, sadly, grave to thousands of Europeans who had crossed the Atlantic in a coffin ship. It was opened in 1832 and closed in 1937 a little over 100 years later and processed about 4 million people. Over that century only 14% of the immigrants hailed from Ireland, but in the early years they contributed a much higher proportion: 60% from 1830-1850. The data I have is for arrivals to the Port of Quebec but the vast majority of the arrivals were stopped for processing at Grosse-Île. That sounds like a leisurely 100/day but of course they didn't arrive with the ticking of a metronome, but in floods that would overwhelm the facilities and then die down, indeed die off, a lot of them. In the days of sail, with the wind being sporadic, a fleet of ships would arrive within a couple of tides of each other and have to anchor off shore until the authorities could process them.
The data for arrivals, hospitalizations and deaths can be seen as long columns of figures. But they also hint at tragic stories.  I could display these data better, indeed a child of six could do better but they summarise the number of arrivals in the Port of Quebec as well as the number of admissions to hospital; but on very different scales.  Arrivals varied from a a couple of hundred to a couple of hundred-thousand in a particular year, while the numbers admitted to hospital varied between 0 and 1500 except in the tragic year on 1847 when there was an off-the-page spike of desperately poor immigrants from Ireland in the midst of the great potato blight [caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans] famine.

Not a few arrived, especially in 1847-1848, with ship-fever raging on board and much of the human freight went direct from ship to the graveyard without getting processed through the hospital. Ship fever aka camp fever, jail fever or Epidemic louse-borne typhus is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, which is carried from person to person by lice Pediculus humanus. We've met Rickettsia before as a close relative of the ancestor of mitochondria it is an alpha-proteobacteria, quite closely related to  Rhizobium spp. which fix nitrogen in the roots of peas and beans. In 1834 and again in 1854, the killer was cholera [Vibrio cholerae a gamma-proteobacteria] which scythed though the berths down in steerage. And in other years it was just death which killed people.

The data show a rise and rise of arrivals in the first decade of the 20thC, peaking at 225,000 in 1914.  WWI gave everyone other things to worry about and army-recruiting gave poor men an option other than leaving their country for the New World. They were not to know it was a Faustian bargain as so many of them left their country for the Other World. Crossing the Atlantic in war-time posed additional hazards as well. Immigration accordingly dried up reaching its nadir in 1918 when only 77 people arrived at Grosse-Île and of these 42 got a permanent billet ashore in the graveyard.  The striking thing is that after 1914 there were no more hospital admissions, although there were still sporadic deaths presumably aboard ship. That is due largely to the enormous strides made by microbiologists and sanitation experts in the years since Florence Nightingale gathered her statistics of death in Crimea.

You can search for your rellies. Or visit the Irish Memorial National Historic Site, where it looks like there is a long glass wall with names etched thereupon.
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Monday, 8 June 2015

Two degrees of separation

Just over 25 years ago, The Beloved's [TB] senior sister [SS] was living in a garden flat in one of the leafier Dublin suburbs. She got to be quite friendly with the people in the big house next door - an architect and his wife. She knew that they had a holiday home near Annestown, Co Waterford but didn't make much hay out of that bit of information. At about the same time, after 20 years of gypsying round the country in rented accommodation, TB&SS's mother and father came to shore in their own house a mile from the sea just outside Bunmahon, Co Waterford. Buying the teeny-tiny cottage with an acre [0.4 ha] of salty meadow out back was quite a process. The auctioneer maintained that there was another party, with remarkably deep pockets, who was also interested in buying the property. A rather shady bidding war ensued until the other chap suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke leaving a whiff of sulphur suspicion that the auctioneer had been taking 'bids off the wall' to inflate the price. We were all jubilant when a deal was eventually struck and a section of family went round the corner from the solicitor's office for a massive Chinese meal to celebrate.  A couple of days layer SS heard that her neighbours were delighted to have off-loaded their dacha at a sparkling price given that the country was still in the 1980 recession and the housing market was stagnant. If the said neighbours hadn't snobbishly held that their cottage was in tony up-market Annestown rather than honest mining-village Bonmahon, a better deal might have been had by all and a shady auctioneer might have been cut out of the equation.  My college landlady had had similar pretensions of grandeur in 1973.

Last week was mad busy for TB&SS's family because her father turned 90 on Thursday 4th June and they had decided to trib their old man with a big party on the following Saturday. Everyone chipped in their contribution of some essential detail: the birthday cake; birthday cards; a pipe-band; a battery of barbecues and slabs of meat to throw on them; dhrink; a couple of dogs; a soccer team of grandchildren; salads for health; desserts for the heart; a tea-urn; borrowed china because paper-plates wouldn't be strong enough to hold it all; an industrial packet of dish-washer tablets. It was mighty and noisy and family.  The following day at noon, TB had arranged with local historian and guide my pal Russ to lead a walk in search of the house where her great-grandparents had farmed at the turn of the last century. It was all really interesting not least because Russ had made contact with another branch of the family, several of whom were still living in the area and some of whom had also been to sea like the Old Man. In the chat, it turned out that the house in Bunmahon was party to another striking coincidence. The architect's wife had inherited the cottage from her grandfather, who had a sister who was grandmother to the chap to whom I was talking. The other sept of the family all knew that TB's parents were living in "Batty Casey's place out along the coast" and knew to a gene who was related to whom. As Martin's mother says "It's a small world".

I had a bit of that shrinking world sensation on my own account because I fell to talking with the wife of Batty Casey's gt-nephew, a lovely woman from across the river in Wexford. When we were nippers, pretty much every year my father would drag us across the Irish Sea to visit a steadily diminishing store of elderly female relatives. When in the Sunny South East we always had a week in The Hotel, Duncannon which I wrote about for RTE's Sunday Miscellany a few years ago. Later I remembered the long days on the beach, digging dams and castles and trekking huge quantities of sand across the lino of the hotel bedrooms. RTE didn't want their listeners to hear my reminiscences about the lightness of Nan Doyle's scones and sponge-cake or her deliciously fat-heavy fries, but the gt-nephew's wife did. She had worked in The Hotel during school holidays and remembered Nan far better than me. Six degrees of separation??  Not at all: two degrees is plenty for anyone in Ireland.
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Sunday, 7 June 2015

All is vanity

We've a small fodder crisis with the sheep.  They are separated into two flockettes: one of mothers-and-lambs (all doing well enough, thanks) and the other of 'empties'.  The former are privileged over the latter and we are waiting a few weeks to get a cut of hay off the 4 big meadows before turning everyone out to graze the aftermath.  Accordingly, empties are on short commons and for the last few days, I've let them (N=5) out, under strict supervision, into the yard in front of the house where there is loads of grass which I'd have to mow aNNyway.  Strict supervision is necessary because there are a handful of roses (mmm, good) and other shrubs around the edge of the yard.  It's working well, they gallumph out and start scarfing up the grass (because they are all hank); I read a book or fill buckets of water or fetch in some firewood and give them the hairy eyeball if they start in on the roses.  After an hour they are full up and more or less willing to be turned out of the yard again.

Turns out that one of the sheds has a pair of glass doors and a few times one or other of the sheep has looked up from hoovering grass to see a strange ewe gazing back at them with grass spilling out of her chops.  I would interpret the reaction as being mild curiosity, what they see (but don't smell) is more interesting than more grass but only for a few seconds and maybe a second look.  Not much data there but I was reminded of these ovine stares when I found this io9 report about jungle animals and their reaction to a mirror in their territory.  At the moment, the list of animals which have 'self-awareness' is rather short.  Self-awareness is what remains when you overcome the shock of the new and turn a mirror into a tool to see the back of your head or realise that the image and yourself are both scratching their arm-pits at the same time.  Chimps, dolphins and elephants are demonstrably able to make this cognitive transition and this makes an unsurprising trinity in the folklore of 'animal intelligence'. But pigeons have been shown to be as good at recognising themselves as a 3 year old child! Whereas gorillas, our nearest rellies after chimps, don't seem to get it and nor do cats and dogs. It takes a lot of patient training to accumulate the scientific evidence that animals are actually doing what we attribute to them with 20/20 anthropomorphism. I reckon that the list self-aware species will get longer as people devote the time to carefully controlled observation.

I don't think there is any evidence that sheep follow the advice of Solon [and a dozen other ancient sages] to γνῶθι σεαυτόν know themselves.  But they certainly know each other, even at a significant lapse of time.  In 2001, the scientific world was surprised and delighted to learn that face-recognition had been applied to sheep and that they could recognise their pals even after several years separated. Humans and sheep have been shown, by MRI scans, to fire up certain particular regions of the brain when processing faces. I haven't seen whether they are the same regions in both species - must find out! What awes me about psychologists is how they are able to dream up experimental procedures that answer some pressing conundrum of the human condition in a fully scientific, reproducible manner.
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