The Work of Human Hands

[R.C.] Benedíctus es, Dómine, Deus univérsi, quia de tua largitáte accépimus vinum, quod tibi offérimus, fructum vitis et óperis mánuum hóminum . . . [CofE] Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation: through your goodness we have this wine to set before you, fruit of the vine and work of human hands.

We've been down in Tramore for the week, minding my venerable FiL, Pat The Salt. He'll be 99 - and I don't mean the ice-cream - at the beginning of June; and is getting increasingly frail. At one stage even, the priest came, but the trajectory is still bouncing up and down. Accordingly, a number of his friends, relations, previous carers and neighbours have been in to visit. It's been fine mulling over the past and having inconsequential disagreements about the timeline of distant events. One of his old pals (not that old! = my age) came out from town on the bus. He's quite shook himself [f*&% Parkinson's!] and I gave him a lift home in The Grape. As old buffers do, we fell to chatting about what three-score-and-ten even means. Whatever about us being dots in the immensity of the universe [his trope], I reflected on the immensity of human achievement, exemplified by the construction of ocean liners a million times larger than any of the engineers and rivetters who made them . . . the work of human hands.

The next day, I woke up early to prepare The Blob . . . coursing over the Interweb for copy. Which is my contribution to The Work of Human Hands and was presented with a stunning picture of Castel del Monte an octagonal castle in Apulia. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, originally built 800 years ago and carefully restored by the Italian government in the 20thC. The eight octagonal towers at each corner are 3m = 10ft in diameter so, as castles go, this one is kinda cosy. You could imagine building it yourself - so long as you had a clever stonemason, 100 pals and some sort of crane to lift the blocks . . . and 20 years. You may be sure that Federico II, The Money commissioning Holy Roman Emperor didn't get off his horse to help in the construction. Unlike a lot of medieval building projects, Castel de Monte is all of a piece rather than an accretion of cunning plans and clever ideas for improvement. One reason for that is that the castle really didn't get a lot of use being more in the nature of a vanity project to show what emperors can do.

It turns out that the red soil in the neighbourhood was caused by the metabolic presence of Streptomyces peucetius a species of Actinomycetota = Actinobacteria - not to be confused with Ascomycetes one of two major sub-divisions of Fungi. Streptomyces are found everywhere - they are responsible for the smell of damp soil after rain - and each one has to fight its corner in a busy competitive microscopic world. Rather than spears or cruise missiles, microbes tend to use an array of biochemical assault weapons - chemicals that will do a number on the replication of competing species. Anything will do, so long as it unlevels the playing field for rivals. In the 1950s Italian scientists from Farmitalia discovered that Streptomyces peucetius isolated near Fred's Chateau produced an anti-cancer drug which they called Daunorubicin.  We've been at dirt-derived Streptomyces cures before with Eleftheria terrae in Co. Fermanagh.

Farmitalia were actively looking for biologically active compounds and Daunorubicin turned out to be a potent knocker-on-the-head of rapidly growing cancer cells from mice. It's the topo-isomerase innit? In order to grow, cells need to replicate their DNA and that requires unravelling a l o o o o n g helical string. Any beachcomber will tell you that unravelling rope only moves the tangle along. Topo-isomerase allows controlled breaks in the DNA strands to relieve this tangle-tension. Daunorubicin is an inhibitor of topo-isomerase and so replication grind to a halt. No replication in the competition gives Streptomyces peucetius the edge. Farmitalia mobilised this effect and started to market Daunorubicin in the 1960s as a therapeutic against lymphoma and leukaemia. By 1967, however, the side-effects (fatal cardiac toxicity etc.) started to pile up and researchers dug up (literally) a related compound Doxorubicin which did less damage to the heart while still being effective against a wider range of cancers. Big Pharma doesn't do this sort of blue skies soil-grubbing anymore, the ROI [return on investment] doesn't satisfy the shareholders. Odd that the build unit in organic chemistry is so often hexagonal [thanks Kathleen Lonsdale!] while big boy builders prefer things square or, on Sundays, octagonal.

The Work of Human Hands doesn't have to be Big to be impressive /useful. 

Because we love each other very much y coincidence, yesterday Dau.I sent me a Postcard with Stieglitz' The Hand of Man on the picture side. It's another take on this theme.