Scientists are people like you and me — although, sometimes, a bit more interesting. Showing that is the point of these profiles I've been doing for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute:
The Sweet Smell of Exhaust
“I’ve been around sports cars and racing cars for as long as I’ve been around science,” says neurologist Peter St George-Hyslop. His work deals with molecular mechanisms that cause neurons to degenerate in Alzheimer’s disease. And the coffee table in his office is the engine block from a vintage Jaguar. More
A Brew of Bitter
If you mix lab skills, nostalgia, and a hankering for diversion, what do you get? For HHMI professor Graham F. Hatfull, the answer is the Plowman’s Lunch: bread, cheese, and beer. “Maybe this is coincidence,” he says, “but the things I really like to eat and drink are, fundamentally, experiments in microbiology.” More
The Magic of Ham
A little spark of wonder can persist for a lifetime. As a boy in Montgomery, Alabama, HHMI investigator Ed Stone was the kind of kid who disassembled radios and puzzled over music from faraway cities that came in only after sundown. Radio continues to delight him because, "It's magic." More
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The Sweet Smell of Exhaust
“I’ve been around sports cars and racing cars for as long as I’ve been around science,” says neurologist Peter St George-Hyslop. “My parents were scientists, and my father had a passion for cars. I distinctly remember the smell of racing fuel and Castrol R from when I was two.”
St George-Hyslop is an HHMI international research scholar at the University of Toronto. His work deals with molecular mechanisms that cause neurons to degenerate in Alzheimer’s disease. And the coffee table in his office is the engine block from a vintage Jaguar that he’s rebuilding.
Sports-car restoration is, refreshingly, “a more constrained problem” than probing the internal machinery of a cell, he says. “When something doesn’t work in the car, you can hit it with a spanner, swear at it, and walk away. With science, if it ain’t working, you’ve still got to keep plugging.” Still, “biology does give you fewer skinned knuckles.”
St George-Hyslop did a bit of racing as a student in the 1970s, and never really hung up his driving gloves. “No hairy crashes, but I checked out the grass and weeds in the ditch on several occasions. Severely injurious to one’s pride, but not necessarily to one’s car. Since then, I’ve owned Jaguars and similar sorts of sporty cars, including a souped-up combination VW-and-Porsche and a Triumph TR6.
“What I’ve always done with my cars has been to take the engine out, tear it apart, and put it together according to [competition] blueprints. The car I’m working on now is a 1974 V12 E-type Jaguar roadster.”
He pats the engine-block table. “This car’s been rebuilt to the specifications we used in Sports Car Club of America production racing in the 1970s. With a roll bar and some proper seats, I could qualify it for racing. But I’m not allowed to do that —” a sigh slips out “— due to, ah, family edicts.” (The family includes a wife and three teenage daughters; one of the girls, he notes with satisfaction, “is a car nut.”)
On the highway, at least, St George-Hyslop can revel in automotive sensations.
“The vibrations, the feeling of acceleration and cornering and wind in your face. The sweet, aromatic smells of hot oil and racing exhaust,” he murmurs, his intonation picking up speed. “The rumble of the 12-cylinder’s exhaust pipe, straight from the headers out. This deep, bass rumble: it starts out low and somewhat uneven and then, as you accelerate up to seven or eight thousand rpm, it becomes a shriek.
“The policeman at the side of the road looks up and wonders, ‘Am I going to chase after you and book you, or turn a blind eye? Because, by the time I could get in my car, you’d be long gone.’”
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If you mix lab skills, nostalgia, and a hankering for diversion, what do you get? For HHMI professor Graham F. Hatfull, the answer is the Plowman’s Lunch: a chunk of bread, a slab of cheese, a pint of beer.
Hatfull is a professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh. His day job is studying mycobacteriophages—viruses that infect mycobacteria, like the kind that cause tuberculosis. Outside the lab he plumbs the mysteries of bread, cheese, and beer. Especially beer.
“Maybe this is coincidence,” he says, “but the things I really like to eat and drink are, fundamentally, experiments in microbiology.”
His quest: “the perfect pint of British bitter.” For beer drinkers in this country, a bitter is a pale ale, with what Hatfull calls an “artisanal” touch. He cultivated that touch during a 1980s flirtation with kitchen-sink brewing, while earning his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh.
By 2006, an established researcher plagued by bureaucratic chores, he thought, “I really need something to take my mind away from the administrative details.” So he blew the dust off his British-made equipment, sorted out voltage differences, located a Pittsburgh source of hops and grain, and was soon happily brewing away in his garage. Five gallons at a time, no two batches exactly alike.
With afternoon sunlight glancing off his John Lennon glasses, Hatfull elaborates in his campus office. “Both brewing and what we do in the lab require appreciation and respect for the power of microorganisms. They can make you very ill, but you can view them as essential pieces of civilization.” He bakes bread as well, another traditional mainstay that employs yeasts. “And I just started getting into cheese, which is microbiology of yet another sort."
Each new batch is a mild surprise, and Graham relishes the impact of tiny, random variations on taste, aroma, and color. "I like the sense of being an artisan. It depends, from batch to batch, on you, and on the microorganisms."
At the same time (here he slips into a mock-professorial tone), “There are clearly a lot of scientific elements: You have a hypothesis as to how a particular brew is going to be made. You devise a recipe that you hypothesize will give you that kind of brew. You go in and do the experiment — right? — and at the end, you get to drink the experiment.”
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A little spark of wonder can persist for a lifetime.
As a boy in Montgomery, Alabama, Ed Stone was the kind of kid who disassembled radios and puzzled over music from faraway cities that came in only after sundown. He learned how the ionosphere bounces AM signals around the earth's curve more readily after dark. He advanced from tuning in Chicago rock stations to monitoring shortwave from ships at sea. By the time he entered grad school, he was on the air himself, after earning the most advanced amateur ("ham," for short) license the FCC issues. Radio continues to delight him because, he says, "It's magic."
An HHMI investigator at the University of Iowa, Stone spends his days working to cure eye diseases through molecular genetics. In his off hours, he relaxes by flipping the switch on one of his ham sets and conversing wirelessly (call sign NV5K) with people beyond the horizon.
One dimension of radio magic is the universal fraternity of those who believe in it, says Stone. "There's a certain sequence of things that you share: 'What equipment are you using? How long have you been in amateur radio?' Then, maybe, 'What do you do for a living, where do you live, what's the weather?
"People who don't have the radio gene — the vast majority — say things like, 'You talk to people you don't know? Why not just pick up the phone and dial 10 random digits and strike up a conversation with whoever answers?'"
Stone responds with a story:
"When I was doing my residency, I had a radio in my car so I could talk to people while I drove to the hospital.
"One day I'm on the road, talking with some guy named 'Al.'" (Ham etiquette requires only first names.) "He asks where I'm headed, and I tell him — maybe a little pompously — I'm on my way to morning rounds. 'I'm an ophthalmology resident,' I say, half expecting him to ask, 'What's ophthalmology?' There's a pause, and he says, 'That conference room you're going to...'"
"'Yeah?'
"'The Braley Conference Room...'
"'Yeah?'
"'That place,' he says, 'is named after me.'
"And that's how I met Alson E. Braley, one of the first surgeons to perform corneal transplantation in this part of the world."
Another side of Stone's magic is closer to alchemy.
"Here we have the notion of a simple device — it may be as small as a tuna-fish can — built with your own hands. Buy a handful of little parts, get out your soldering iron, measure the wire precisely, wrap the correct number of turns around a little ferrite core, connect the right poles of the battery, fuss over it for a few hours' time. Then measure another length of wire, tie the end of it to a weight, and throw it up into a tree."
Excitement shades his ordinarily level tone. "With this odd little assortment of stuff, you can talk with somebody hundreds of miles away!"
"That," Stone says, "is absolutely magic — of the very best kind."
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"The Sweet Smell of Exhaust," "A Brew of Bitter," and "The Magic of Ham" were originally published in the HHMI Bulletin. Copyright 2008, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.