And it’s gorgeous. Holbo has found a set of scans from a 1972 biology textbook (and an associated blog) that will blow your mind, baby. Here are some eukaryotic cells.
I think this is a very trippy metaphor for the synapse.
I like it. It’s got style. I’m going to have to cruise some used bookstores to see if I can find a copy of Biology Today. If nothing else, I can imagine using some of those illustrations for talks…I’m also going to have to get a polyester suit with very wide lapels and a paisley print shirt, let my hair grow out, and shave the beard, but keep the mustache. Oh, I remember the 60s and 70s!
//I’m also going to have to get a polyester suit with very wide lapels and a paisley print shirt, let my hair grow out, and shave the beard, but keep the mustache. Oh, I remember the 60s and 70s!//
You should totally do it, but we’ll need photographic evidence, naturally.
Paisley and mustaches are making a comeback in the “indie” crowd, so you would probably fit in rather nicely.
I’ve seen those illustrations before. I think it was a dead show.
But we called them Blotter.
Oh wow, we are missing out!
Santiago Ramon y Cajal (the founder of modern neuroscience and all around genius) called synapses “protoplasmic kisses”… makes you wonder what that metaphorical picture of the synapse faces would be doing if active.
Those look like they should be dipped in Owsley’s Old Original…
Wow. That’s like totally… dude.
The Psychedelic Experience
PSYCHEDELICS
(Hallucinogens)
Give me a button of wild peyote
To munch in my den at night,
That I may set my id afloat
In the country of queer delight.
So ho! it’s off to the land of dreams
With never a stop or stay,
Where p
s
ychiatri
s
ts meet with fairy queens
To sing a foundelay.
Give me a flagon of mescaline
To wash o’er my mundane mind,
That I may feel like a schizophrene
Of the catatonic kind.
So hey! let in the vision of light
To banish banality,
Then will I surely catch a sight
Of the Real Reality.
Give me a chalice of lysergic
To quaff when day is done,
That I may get a perceptual kick
From my diencephalon.
So ho! let all resistance down
For a transcendental glance,
Past the superego’s frosty frown
At the cosmic underpants.
Give me a pinch of psilocybin
To sprinkle in my beer,
That my psychopathic next-of-kin
May not seem quite so queer.
So hey! it’s off for the visions bizarre
Past the ego boundary,
For a snort at the psychedelic bar
Of the new psychiatry.
F. W. Hanley, M.D.
“Oh, I remember the 60s and 70s!”
Then you didn’t live them. Apparently. I’m 21.
Now I remember why I don’t remember the biology I learned back then.
Dude, seriously, dendrites have faces?
Wow…I have a copy of that book.
Woah… Trippy…
“We were in the biology department, just outside the lecture hall, when the drugs began to take hold. . . .”
Speaking of which, does anybody know where I can get a safari suit like James Burke wore in Connections? (My Carl Sagan wardrobe is getting pretty respectable, so I can already rock it like it’s 1980. . . .)
What, no yellow submarines?
Whoaah, dude – what’s the thing with the rainbow colored lightning bolts shooting out of it?
Medical Illustration, ur doin it wrong.
You, sir, are awesome.
……
I love this book! I have a collection of textbook art. I remember that onece in middle school I had a teacher that wasn’t allowed to talk about the E-word or the “supposed” age of the earth according to “science” so he made us a non-educational comic book which illustrated these lies. I still have the thing. He drew it all. I wish I could find that guy out there just to write him a letter to tell him he was a great teacher. But he left this awful State and has a very common name.
While searching for copies of this textbook online, I found copies of the accompanying film guide. There’s a FILM of this!
Thanks for the link to a wonderful blog. I think I could spend way too much time with the book treasures he has displayed on those posts.
if illustrations are for conveying information these convey far more than just physical appearance. wonderful! So many times illustrations are forgettable and are little more than decorations that only add expense to a book.
Yow. The Peter Max of biology texts.
Like…wow.
These are both Oughta Sight and Far Out.
This one is particularly evocative of Yellow Submarine.
Now if they’d just glow under blacklight…
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
My stepfather has photographic evidence that he was at Woodstock. Unfortunately his memories of Woodstock are not nearly as clear.
If you let your hair grow out, you will need to wear it in a hippy ponytail.
If the axons have mouths, then the dendrites should just be big ears…
Is ergot a eukaryote?
If the axons have mouths, then the dendrites should just be big ears…
One word, PZ:
Sideburns.
Oh, and a brown leather jacket with lightblue pants.
OFF TOPIC: I guess of all scientists who hang around here, there must be some Wikipedians? (and grammar nerds?)
Do scientific theories have actual names, or are they just referred to by descriptive phrases? – How should the names or descriptive phrases of scientific theories be capitalized on Wikipedia?
The Theory of Evolution, or the theory of evolution?
Those are fantastic !
Don’t forget the bellbottoms on the pants.
Nixon couldn’t have liked this.
Duuuude, my hands are huge, they can touch anything but themselves….oh wait.
I know biologists must have dropped some acid to try and visualize the intimate workings of the cell.
I once ate some shrooms and I could swear I could see the individual cells that composed all the trees, flowers, people, and even inanimate objects. But alas, the 60’s and 70’s must have been a continuous mind altering experience.
The second one looks familiar. A lecturer musta used it once.
Given that I never paid attention in biology (and only got through with a passing grade), I don’t recall who.
So that’s what I saw!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dhO0iCLww
(don’t be fooled by the first 3 minutes)
I swear I had that textbook back in high school. And I am absolutely sure that the second illustration is used somewhere else, because those smily axons and dendrites are familiar…maybe they were used to illustrate something in Psychology Today? Or in a Time-Life book?
Those look like my Yes albums…
Some thoughts;
I think the middle one of the collection needs anchovies.
I prefer my insky fresh, not kan’d.
The bottom image reminds me of a D&D book on traps and pitfalls, this one with many tentacles
Blake Stacey:
Think carefully about the image you want to project. According to classical musician brother, conductors wear turtlenecks to hide the foreskin.
Nerd of Redhead beat me to it, but you can’t be authentic to the early ’70’s without bellbottoms, preferably knit polyester. Also white leather shoes look nice, with elevator heels if you’re short, with them. And don’t forget the tinted glasses.
PZ, I think I found a copy for you online. Email me and I’ll reply with the url.
I don’t want to post it here for fear some wanker will grab it.
I already found a source myself, and ordered it. Cheap, too!
Eukaryotic cells would seem to bear a striking resemblance to geological maps.
If you remember the 70s, you weren’t there.
Recently Joe Bageant posted a short remembrance of his early experiences with psychedelics.
Joe doesn’t write on science all that much, Joe is more into Class War and his astounding first hand knowledge and respect for the denizen’s of redneck Jesusland, where he grew up and has returned in his old age. But I enjoyed his description of the tech job he had many years ago.
From Skinny dipping in Reality – – “A coot’s account of the great hippy LSD enlightenment search party”
This is SO unfair!!!!! I love this art. I want to make a quilt out of it… Now if I could just get me hands on a copy of the bloody thing!!!! Anyone got any clues? My googling skills sucketh apparently…
I have a copy of this text I scored from our department library before the old textbooks were destroyed. I’d be happy to lend it for scanning. I was such a freaking awesome book in terms of the graphics (fold out figures too!). It was my first college level biology text.
Oooh, nice. It reminds me of the beautiful artist’s impressions in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series.
These remind me of the oil-and-water light shows they used to have at the Fillmore. Very liquid.
Some additional information about CRM, apparently the company that published Biology Today, I think.
From: http://www.afana.org/2003chrono.htm
Thursday, December 4, 2003… 1970s California Filmculture: A Tribute to CRM Films
Lately, I’ve been reviewing a selection of films made by CRM, which made a number of outstanding psychological and science films in the 1970s. Screening a succession of films from the same company affords the researcher the luxury of becoming immersed in the culture of the company, and has the effect of turning the reviewer into a predictor of sorts. “CRM would do this, at this juncture of the film I’m watching”, I’ll muse, or “If I know my EB, we’ll wrap the sequence in 30 seconds, and return to Kip Fadiman’s on-screen narration”. Somehow, I didn’t get to CRM until this year. Over the years, I’ve catalogued perhaps a dozen CRM titles, but tangents are the stuff of your ciné16 host, and last month, CRM caught my eye (and my fancy). Their films merit an evening or so unto themselves, and a brief history of the company will help, I think, to put them in better perspective.
CRM was a southern California film company specializing in films on sociological, psychological, and scientific subjects, and eventually evolved its marketing model to include mediated corporate training as well. CRM, which stands for Communications/Research/Machines, was founded in 1970 as the film division of Charles Tillinghast III’s Psychology Today group, which encompassed the popular magazine, and a textbook division. In 1970, Preston Holdner (b. September 25, 1940, St. Louis, MO), who had been at McGraw-Hill films since graduating from college in 1963, was brought in to become general manager, and Paul Lazarus was hired as the executive producer. Located in the sunny, surf-washed town of Del Mar, CRM was the quintessential laisser-faire California company of the early 1970s. “Friday afternoon, the whole staff would sit around and drink wine and smoke pot”, recalls Holdner. “Because of this laid-back atmosphere, it was not uncommon for people to work 60 hours a week instead of 40”. The staff photographs on pages 28 and 29 of CRM’s 1975 catalogue chronicle an era in style, dress, and demeanor, the women wearing sundresses and bell-bottomed pants, with many of the men sporting long hair, reflective of halcyon times before erstwhile sex partners sued each other for peccadilloes, and smoking a joint would run the individual afoul of draconian racketeering laws. A particularly memorable photograph documents director Steve Katten and producer Larry Logan kneeling behind an Arriflex, shooting in a field of poppies.
In 1973, Tillinghast sold the film division to Boise-Cascade, which, after several public relations snafus, was looking to appear to be a kinder, gentler corporation. Buying an educational film company seemed, at the time, to be the right step. The move resulted in a cultural disconnect for both parties. “The Boise folks would arrive on a corporate jet, and run into staff members leaving in bathing suits and surfboards”, recalled Holdner, “they wore three piece suits, and we wore bathing suits.” The uncomfortable relationship lasted a little over one year, at which time CRM was acquired by Ziff-Davis. Holdner remembers Bill Ziff as a “tough guy”, who was probably more interested in the Magazine than the film company, which was sold to McGraw-Hill in 1975. Holdner left that year to form the Media Guild film company. During his tenure, CRM produced approximately 50 films.
Brian Sellstrum ran the CRM division of McGraw Hill after Holdner’s departure, and after the mid-1980s, eventually became the editor of several magazines in the surfing/skateboarding genre. CRM’s notable filmmakers included Steve Katten (director of the exceptional ‘Biology Today’ film series) and Richard Miner. CRM today exists as CRM Learning, producer of industrial training films. Sadly, few of CRM’s finest titles from the 1970s era are still in distribution.
Tonight, we’ll see several of the films that made CRM notable. They are timeless in content, and reflective of an era gone by.
On tonight’s show:
‘Perception’ (1979) 28m, dir, Richard A. Miner. This fine industrial psych film explores observations vs. opinions as they relate to workplace conflict. Included are sequences on perception tricks, and there is an insightful vignette featuring political cartoonist Paul Conrad.
‘Group Dynamics: Groupthink’ (1973) 20m, dir. Steve Katten. An industrial psych classic, the film, based on the work of Psychologist Irving Janis, describes how the tendency to agree interferes with critical thinking. Here we have dramatized examples of concepts such as the Illusion of Invulnerability (which led to the disaster at Pearl Harbor), the Illusion of Morality, Self-censorship, the Illusion of Unanimity (the Bay of Pigs was one result).
‘Fruit Fly: a Look at Behavior Biology’ (1974) 21m, dir. Steve Katten. This fascinating film features wonderful cinematography by Larry Logan and Isidore Mankofsky, and includes shots form the electron microscope. On the way, we learn about homosexuality in the fruit fly world, mutations, etc. Dr Seymour Benzer of the California Institute of Technology is our host.
‘Cell Division: Mitosis and Meiosis’ (1974) 24m, prod. Steve Katten. This remarkable film utilizes cinemicroscopy and the scanning electron microscope to climb inside of cells as they evolve and divide, and was probably one of the first academic films to feature computer animation. The animated sequences involving DNA are exceptional.
PZ, you should definitely get a copy of the book. The evolution-related images are really interesting (the A Journey Round My Skull blogger hasn’t scanned many of them). Here’s the title image for the chapter on “Life and the Origin of Species”:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragesoss/3530704769/
The “Noah’s Ark” painting, with the people and all the animals copulating, is also cool (and, apparently, one of the reasons why they had to completely change the book for the second edition).