Lewis Wolpert has died

This is sad — Wolpert was one of my favorite developmental biologists. Years ago I wrestled with my choice of developmental textbook, between Scott Gilbert’s Developmental Biology, which is very very good, and Wolpert’s Principles of Development, which I eventually decided was a better fit to how I taught the course. I also appreciated his work on positional information and patterning. And now he has died at the age of 91, and only now do I find out that he lived an interesting life.

He studied civil engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he became involved in progressive politics, helping to distribute communist literature in the townships; in 1952 he met Nelson Mandela. After two years working on soil mechanics as assistant to the director of the Building Research Institute in Pretoria, he hitchhiked to Europe, working briefly for the water planning board in Israel before studying soil mechanics at Imperial College London.

His life was changed when a friend in South Africa wrote to suggest he apply his knowledge of mechanics to the study of dividing cells. The biophysicist James Danielli at King’s College London accepted him as a PhD student, and with a Swedish colleague, Trygve Gustafson, he went on to measure the mechanical forces involved in cell division. He was promoted to lecturer and reader (in zoology) at King’s before taking up the chair of biology as applied to medicine at the Middlesex (transferred to University College London after the two institutions merged), where he remained until he retired aged 74.

He was also a great popularizer with a radio show discussing science in the UK, which I’ve had difficulty finding here — he does have a debate with William Lane Craig on YouTube, which I’ve avoided ever watching, because I can’t stand that sanctimonious Christian liar. Wolpert also has some things I disagree with, such as his gender essentialist leanings, a common problem with older developmental biologists steeped in model systems and lacking exposure to population thinking.

It wasn’t all an upward ascent for him. He suffered from a crippling depression.

The marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce, and in 1993 Wolpert married the Australian writer Jill Neville. It was when his working and home lives were at their most secure and harmonious that a suicidal episode led to him spending three weeks in hospital. He recovered after treatment with antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. Jill died suddenly of cancer in 1997.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate how devastating depression can be. And cancer sucks.

Do the COVIDiots even understand actuarial statistics?

Because I find this rather convincing that COVID-19 is much more than “just a flu”.

The Minnesota numbers are in, and they don’t look good.

Minnesota suffered more than 50,000 deaths in a year for the first time in recorded state history in 2020, mostly because of COVID-19 but also due to rising drug abuse and worsening racial health disparities.

A 15% increase in mortality from 2019 to 2020 demonstrates that the pandemic actually caused more deaths in Minnesota and wasn’t just a substitute cause for people who were likely to die anyway.

Hey, can we simplify that and just call all the deaths due to the neglected pandemic response, the erosion of our social safety net, and racism the Republican death toll?

One never knows what wonders await in abandoned spaces

How about a happier story? About finding treasure?

A fellow in upstate NY bought an old building and was renovating it, when he discovered an attic that had been closed and sealed over with drywall for about a century. He peeled away the old drywall, climbed up, and found…

With his friend Ian Boni, owner of Twisted Rail Brewing Company who also owns property in Geneva, the men stacked several chairs upward. Standing atop the teetering tower with a flashlight in hand, Whitcomb spotted several dust-and-soot covered gold-framed photographs.

He turned to Boni and said, “I think we just found the Goonies treasure.”

The two men came across what appeared to be a storage site of a vintage photography studio. The vaulted attic was filled with vintage photographs, framed pictures and photography equipment and boxes of materials.

They had uncovered contents of a turn-of-the-century photography studio, complete with props, chairs and backdrops. Boni said he didn’t recognize suffragist Susan B. Anthony or any of the other people featured in the dozens of photos he helped remove from the attic.

It had been owned by James Ellery Hale, a photographer from the turn of the previous century who was well known for his photos of the suffragette movement, so there are all these dusty photos and photographic plates of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other, not yet identified figures of the early movement. This is amazing.

I checked out my house’s attic (it was built in the 1940s), but I’m afraid all I found was mouse poop and fiberglass insulation, darn it. But we do have a lot of old buildings in Morris, and now I’m wondering what treasures we could find if we had access.

They’re full of spiders, I bet!

Home from Wisconsin

We were out playing in the snow with Iliana. I asked her if it was OK if we took some selfies.

“Yeth,” she said.

So we did.

On the way home, we passed a person who said, “Oh, what a cutie pie!”

I wasn’t sure which of us the person was talking about, so a little further on, I asked Iliana, “Are you really a cutie pie?”

“Yeth,” she said.

Terrible news

I’m visiting my granddaughter in Wisconsin today, and I got some heartbreaking news from family out West just yesterday, which I’m not going to share. Sorry. Personal family tragedy.

I noticed, though, that my grandnephew Alex (who is fine!) made a birthday request last week on Facebook for donations to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline ‘1-800-273-TALK (8255)’. What a peculiar and good thing for a teenager to do…but sadly appropriate right now.

I’ll just mention that, and let it go. I’m in a strangely helpless place right now.

Weird but nice

Werner Herzog has a strange reputation, because of his formal and very German way of speaking, but deep down, I think he’s just a sweet old man. Here’s Herzog reacting to a skateboarding video.

Slightly skewed, but charming, and he has a nice smile.

Tangentially, when I was a teenager, if you’d asked me who my favorite actor was, I would have said Oskar Werner, because I’d seen him in a handful of films and like his manner and that faint accent. It might have been in reaction to my peers who would have said someone like John Wayne, and I despised John Wayne from an early age. There’s some of that same quality to Werner and Herzog…

Giving vegetarian food a bad name

Do not want.

We’re going to be doing a bit of traveling today, so I thought I’d start us off with a traditional hearty breakfast. Bacon and eggs, that’s the ticket! We’re ovo-lacto pescatarians, vegetarian easy mode, so the eggs are fine, but bacon is forbidden. Fortunately, we had picked up some Morning Star Farms Veggie Bacon Strips, so I thought I’d try those.

Big mistake.

These are perfectly rectangular, thin, flat sheets of something marbled with pink and white. A serving is 4.5 grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of carbohydrate. You cook them in a frying pan, as if it were real bacon, and they sit there and get crispier, flatly. There’s none of the shrinking you get with real bacon, so after they’re heated through, you’ve still got an array of pink and white flawless rectangles.

Then you bite into one. They’re flavorless! They have a uniform texture which is nothing like bacon, lacking any fat. It’s exactly like thin strips of cardboard.

It’s my own damn fault for buying something that pretends to be meat-like. There’s nothing wrong with vegetarian food, and in fact it’s really tasty and flavorful and textured and complex, except when someone tries to make a pale imitation of something that relies on the complexity of animal tissue, and fails.

Even these Beyond/Impossible burgers have set themselves a low bar of emulating a meat that has a lot of the complexity ground out of it, and they’re not bad, but you can still tell the difference, and who knows how much effort has been put into the chemistry to get an approximation to ground meat flavor.

I should have just made a plateful of beans.

Don’t send a puppy to do an old dog’s work

I am surprised that Philadelphia, a city that has medical schools and hospitals, turned to a small group of enthusiastic college kids to help with their rollout of the COVID vaccine. Enthusiastic volunteers are great, but these young people were in charge of the management of the vaccinations, and that wasn’t a very good idea.

Philadelphia is home to some of the most venerated medical institutions in the country. Yet when it came time to set up the city’s first and largest coronavirus mass vaccination site, officials turned to the start-up Philly Fighting COVID, a self-described “group of college kids” with minimal health-care experience.

Chaos ensued.

Seniors were left in tears after finding that appointments they’d made through a bungled sign-up form wouldn’t be honored. The group switched to a for-profit model without publicizing the change and added a privacy policy that would allow it to sell users’ personal data. One volunteer alleged that the 22-year-old CEO had pocketed vaccine doses. Another described a “free-for-all” where unsupervised 18- and 19-year-olds vaccinated one another and posed for photos.

Again, tapping into youthful energy is a great idea, expecting youthful energy to manage a serious enterprise responsibly is not wise. I’ve known some 22 year olds who’d definitely have taken the job very seriously, but the guy who ran this show comes off as a glad-handing entrepreneur-type, which Drexel has in spades, and sounds like someone who is eager to self-promote himself into a CEO position for anything.

Just a few weeks ago, Philly Fighting COVID was receiving glowing coverage from the likes of NBC’s “Today.” The group had a compelling story: Doroshin, a graduate student at Drexel University, helped orchestrate an effort to use 3-D printers to make free face shields for hospital workers at the start of the pandemic. By summer, he and his friends were running their own pop-up testing sites citywide.

But as Philadelphia magazine reported, the group’s “executive team” lacked anyone with a medical degree or advanced degree in public health. Doroshin himself listed a résumé that included stints teaching a high school film class, producing videos of people longboarding and practicing parkour, and founding a nonprofit that, according to Philadelphia magazine, “mostly consisted of a meme-heavy Twitter account, some minor community lobbying, and a fundraiser with a $50,000 goal that netted $684.”

After all, who needs expertise?

Speaking to “Today,” Doroshin said that his lack of a traditional public health background allowed him to “think a little differently” and speed up the vaccination process. In another interview, he expressed hopes of setting up a McDonald’s-like franchise and suggested that best practices for administering vaccine doses “can go out the window.”

It may also be that the group was superfluous, leaving open the question why they were given this job.

When asked why the city didn’t initially partner with Penn, Temple, or another medical powerhouse for the vaccine rollout, Farley [Philadelphia Health Commissioner] said he wasn’t sure whether the organizations would have agreed to help when they were already tasked with vaccinating their own staff.

“In retrospect, I wish we hadn’t worked with Philly Fighting COVID,” he said. However, Farley said the fractured partnership “will not overall slow down our vaccination process,” adding that the city is limited by the number of vaccine doses it has, not by the number of people who can administer it.

Identifying the mission-critical bottlenecks seems like a job for an experienced manager, and Doroshin wasn’t it. My own experience here in Minnesota is that we don’t have a surplus of vaccine at all, and our queries about getting it have been met with recommendations that we just sit and wait patiently for everyone with higher priority to get theirs, and while I’m sure we’ve got plenty of college students who’d be willing to help, there just isn’t any vaccine for them to help with.