Sunday Mix 28 July 2019

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Back from Bath Enga-lond yest arvo. We live (as you read on the side>>>bar) half way up a mountain in the Sunny South East of Ireland. As a fine example of vernacular architecture the house is tucked into the hill, sheltered from the elements but also protected / prevented from any long view to the sea. You have to walk up higher for the panorama vistas. If the weather is clear-ish, you can see the sun-glint off Wexford Harbour and make out Rosslare ferryport 60km away beyond. After passing the Tuskar light on the brexit ferry, it is time to gaze NW to check if our Red Hill Knockroe is still there. Yesterday tea-time it was!

Yesterday breakfast-time otoh we were gazing at hot-air balloons drifting across the City of Bath. There are three in sight but you have to clean your screen of flyshit to be sure of the third single-pixel vehicle between the other two and the horizon.

• The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing again and again expecting a different result. If you attribute that to Einstein, you're probably wrong. In an RTE story about road-toll refusniks: "the court was told he had a history of 610 trips, no payments and 1,800 letters were sent but the M50 operators did not receive any contact." That's €1,800 just for the stamps.
• Nenagh's most famous son, J Desmond Bernal [prevs], had some ideas about The Two Cultures
• Ireland? Ten words peculiar to Hiberno-Ingles: smacht, moryah, give out, asthore, hames, cat, yoke, thick, and acushla machree.
• Enough of West Europe? Here's some quintessentially Greek singing ξενiτιά του έρωτα - The love of love. (body percussion bonus!)
• We could have some more of that: Νανούρισμα - Lullaby
• Classical voilinists crit talent-show fiddlers without making it a hatchet job.
• We were on about Hard Chaws on the cycling world.
• Here's an extension: Celtman triathlon (swim, bike, run) Fraser clocked 5th.
• Nowness makes a mug in five restful minutes
• A while back I wrote about water-hammer
• Follow up <tonk tonk tonk> by an engineer

Who am I?

After What is Life? and Is there a God? the fundamental existential question might be Who am I? and Where do I come from? For most of us it's straightforward: we have a Mammy and Dad, siblings, a birth certificate. If we ever want to know Where are my people buried? then we can just ask The Folks . . . or Auntie Em, if the parents are reticent or dead. Things are not so easy when the birth-cert father turns out not to be the genetic father. But that can provide an interesting insight into the relative weight of genes and environment nature vs nurture.

My Brother txtd me one evening to ask if I'd ever sent some spittle to 23andMe [prev], or equivalent, for DNA testing. My response "I wouldn't do it without you. These tests are grand for telling you that you have red hair and cystic fibrosis [which you surely knew already] but are much less reliable at telling you how much Neanderthal, Jewish or Xorgian 'blood' you have and therefore not worth $100 of edutainment".  It is marginally more interesting to send in a batch of sibling spit because that will give everyone a handle on what the error-of-estimate is when they say that you are 43% Cajun. otoh, if the genetic pedigree answer is wildly different between sibs, it strongly implies non-paternity in some members of the family. Which is not necessarily something that we all wish to bring to the surface. I've ruminated on the issue before.

It turned out that The Brother's after-dark interest in paternity was triggered by the fact that he was talking to 'one of Berthold Wiesner's children'.  Maybe even the swaddled infant on Wiesner's lap [R]??
Never 'eard of 'im!  But I assumed, in the conversational context, that Wiesner was one of the pioneers of DNA sequencing technology.

Turns out Wiesner is rather the opposite of non-paternity, having been the sperm-donor for an estimated 600 children born 40 weeks later in and around the London Fertility Clinic of his wife Mary Barton. In those patriarchal times, it was unthinkable that failure to conceive might be anything other than the woman's fault. In her previous marriage, as a medical missionary at the frontier of the British Raj, Mary had seen the shitty end of the stick being brought down violently on the heads of women for failing to deliver a son. She realised that it takes two to tango and that male infertility was going to be at least as much of a problem among affluent Brits as among Pathans up the Khyber. In 1939 she was divorced and in 1943 married Wiesner an, originally Austrian, physiologist who was interested in the hormonal control of pregnancy.

Over the next few years Dr Barton told her clients that she could sort them a teaspoonful of quality semen from a stud of highly intelligent, good looking donorS. But the most convenient source of this precious bodily fluid was her husband who was at least symmetrical and not demonstrably stupid. When they published their interim findings in the BMJ in 1945, there was a predictable shit-storm of condemnation from Geoffrey Fisher, the predecessor of Michael Ramsey as AB of C, and Pope Pius XII. The full text of the 1945 paper is a real eye-opener about the causes of infertility and practicalities of insemination. Cases of married men with viable sperm who just cannot get it up make me wonder whether the poor chaps just weren't excited by women. For blokes who have a very low sperm-count, the clinic could provide an in vitro centrifugal sperm concentration service. The authors realise that asking the husband's brother for a contribution is fraught with ethical and practical difficulties. AI provided an opportunity to check the semen for infective microbes . . . and do something about it.

After the very public hoo-har, the clinic pulled in its horns [fnarrr!] but carried on the same services discretely and profitably for another 20 years. By the time Wiesner was all wanked out retired, an estimated 1500 successful conceptions had been carried out at the clinic. The clinic closed in 1969 and the records were discretely disappeared. Jonathan Wiesner, the legitimate son of Barton and Wiesner got his DNA sequenced in 2007, which data serves as a template against which possible half-sibs can identify themselves. Thirty, all above average of course, have since joined the club.  Not ALL of Mary Barton's deliveroos were 'by' Wiesner. Other suspects include JD Bernal [prev] and JBS Haldane [prev] - the still [R] is from the film Offspring by Barry Stevens Not a Son of Wiesner but who has discovered a congenial half-brother in his search for genidentity.

Because patriarchal me knows where I come from [King's County etc.]. I'm tickled, rather than shamed, by the idea that my great-grandfather was the 'natural' son of the Laird and his red-headed cook.

Interglossa

One of the questions which Gardner asked of the stakeholders in his enquiries about The University in the 21stC was "What one book would you give to all the students at graduation?".  He found that was really revealing about the interviewee and where they stood on what mattered.  It's rather like asking what is the book that you would preserve through Armageddon to stand as a beacon and foundation for any civilisation to arise from the ashes. Richard Feynman was famously able to take post-apocalyptic truth down almost to a a tweet "I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."  I think that requires far too much base-line knowledge to be useful.  I'd put put forward "Mathematics for the Million" (1937) by Lancelot Hogben an extraordinarily comprehensively and accessible history of maths.  You can buy a more recent edition for 40c on Amazon.

Last year when library at The Institute was shedding some stock to make room for new books, I picked up The Mother Tongue . . . by Lancelot Hogben.  It's a bit schoolmasterish but gives an insight into where English came from; with asides about other European languages. We're not the only ones to have borrowed words [beef, pastry, craic] from our neighbours: French canife was absorbed from gothic knife, Irish seomra is clearly ripped from French chambre. If Hogben can write a killer book on maths, is he really qualified to write about language?  Well [duh!] yes, he can write books about language because he invented one Interglossa which was at one time a rival for Esperanto.  There's a revealing moment in Mother Tongue when Hogben takes time off for a swipe at Esperanto for retaining accusative case endings like Latin.  Well really, he says, it's always clear from word order which is the object in a sentence.  Interglossa: a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order, being an attempt to apply semantic principles to language design [phew!] was published as a blue Pelican paperback in 1943. The guff about democratic world order is from Higben being one of a group of high-profile leftist scientists in the 1930s, many of whom were formally members of the Communist Party. We've met JBS Haldane before, and JD Bernal in passing, Sinologist Joseph Needham was another who needs to be visited.

As it happens, Hogben's rep as a scientist is in neither linguistics nor mathematics but as an endocrinologist.  He was the man who put Xenopus laevis the African clawed toad on the map as a standard model organism. While working, briefly and in political pain, in South Africa he injected urine from a pregnant woman into one of his toads and noted that it immediately started to ovulate!  This procedure was developed as the Hogben Pregnancy Test and was the gold standard for several decades - it's the progesterone in the pee, silly.  You have to ask what combination of circumstances caused him to think the experiment was a good idea.

Back back to the Mother Tongue which is a germanic language overlain with Norman French, Latin. Greek and everywhere the Brits colonised: bungalow, chutney, gong, pyjamas, hammock. But little words are still patently from the same branch of PIE as Frisian, Dutch and Swedish.  Try reading this:

Se ealda man beneothan tham treowe neah thaere brycge wuneth on tham huse uppan than hylle begeondan tham streame mid his hunde and twa cattum. His wife is nu dead. He ne haefth bearn and friend ne cumath oft to his dore. On tham gearde behindan his huse beoth twa gaet feawa henne and beon. he maketh ciese to etenne of tham meolce fram his gatum and baecth his agenan bread. Hogben helpfully strips off the endings which we have shed in modern English.  For the things that really matter, we are still speaking Olde English from 1000 years ago.  Alexander Pope expressed the sentiment.
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
                            In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
                            In winter fire.

Rosalind Franklin Day

Rosalind Franklin was born on St James's Day (today) in 1920.  Although I doubt if she paid any attention to her tenuous connexion with the Son of Zebedee.  She was born into a prosperous and well-connected family of London Jews and grew up an agnostic.  I daresay any sense of attachment to Christian saints would have fallen on St Paul because she went to St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith.  In the context of Jocelyn Bell Burnell's birthday earlier in the month, I reviewed some of the hoo-har about women who should have got a Nobel Prize but didn't.

As is well known, Franklin, didn't get a share of the Nobel Prize that was divvied three ways between Crick and Watson from Cambridge and Maurice Wilkins, who thought he was her boss at King's College London.  She was under the impression that she was an independent researcher and the pair of them were too British to actually have a conversation to straighten things out.  Nevertheless she produced beautiful, crisp and reliable X-ray defraction pictures of DNA which showed Jim Watson that the structure of the molecule-of-life was helical and allowed him to abstract some key dimensional measurements.  It took a while - 9 years - before the revelations about the structure of DNA made The Boys a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962.

Franklin had meanwhile left King's College where her XX chromosomes made her too dangerous to eat lunch with in the Senior Common Room, and started other projects in neighbouring Birkbeck where she was recruited by JD Bernal.  Bernal, far from despising women, was one who loved them all too well and at the same time; although there is no suggestion he made a pass at Franklin.

Franklin got sick with cancer at the beginning of 1956, had two tumours removed by surgery at the end of the year, got sick again in 1957, was in and out of hospital and finally died in April 1958.  There is circumstantial evidence that, like Pierre Curie, long association with mutagenic X-ray radiation may have triggered her cancer.  What I most admire about her was that she continued doing first rate science all through her long time a-dying. Mentoring her students and colleagues by example to fulfill their best potential and strive for excellence.  Chutzpah has far too many negative connotations, so let's just say she had immense courage and remove our hats

The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell