It’s a familiar story about Svante Pääbo being awarded the Nobel prize for his work on sequencing ancient DNA. It’s all very interesting, but I’ve heard it many times before…and then it gets upstaged by a tale from his personal life which I did not know about.

Behind the scientific success story is also one of considerable personal challenge. “My father had two families and we were the undisclosed one, the other was the official one. My father would show up on Saturdays, have coffee or lunch with me and my mum and then disappear again.”

WAIT, WHAAAT? Your father kept you as his ‘secret’ family?

His mother, Karin, who died in 2013, would have been “proud and thrilled” about his prize, he says. She came to Sweden from Estonia in 1944, escaping the Soviet invasion, and overcame linguistic and financial barriers to become a chemist.

The fact that his father, Sune Bergström, a biochemist, was himself awarded the Nobel prize (also for physiology or medicine) in 1982 for his work on prostaglandins, had little influence on Pääbo’s own scientific path he says. “Only to the extent that my mother met him through her work. It was rather her great fascination with science that was transmitted to me. She hugely encouraged my curiosity and supported me when I changed from medicine to natural sciences. She was by far the greater influence.”

When his father received the award in Stockholm, he was a graduate student in Uppsala and followed the ceremony on television.

“I had a different surname to him and only very few people even knew we were related,” he says. It wasn’t so much having to keep his famous father secret from his colleagues that was painful to him, “rather that his other, ‘official’ son knew nothing about us. We had several intense rows about it. I even threatened to seek out his family and explain it to them. So my father said he would tell them, but it never came to that,” he recalls.

In 2014 he told the Observer his father’s other family found out when Bergström died in 2005. “It was only then my half-brother learned about me. Fortunately he adjusted and we get on all right,” Pääbo said.

That is so fucked up, and Bergström sounds like a terrible father. That had to have left a few scars.

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We’re winding down to the last week of our winter break, and Mary and I took off to the Big City for a few days. We had no grand plans, just a break from the routine, where we’d hang out in a hotel and do some exploring. Unfortunately, we got there immediately after a major storm dumped a dense layer of wet snow on the city. We arrived as the snow plows were clearing out places where we could park — and they weren’t done by the time we would leave. That cramped our style, since walking around the city was slogging through nearly impassable piles of thick soggy stuff. Our grand adventure was reduced to short walks to nice restaurants.

We also met up with Marcus Ranum, who was in Minneapolis to help a friend move. He drove a truck from Pennsylvania to Minnesota during a snowstorm! I want a friend like that, who’d drop what he was doing to drive 800 miles to help me move. We got a pleasant eveing out of it, at least.

Yesterday was spent driving back and taking naps. Now I have no excuse, I have to start assembling a syllabus and getting organized for genetics.

Yesterday, we traveled to Minneapolis. It was the day after a big snowstorm, and the only thing worse would be if we arrived a day earlier. Sidewalks haven’t been cleared, roads are covered with slush, and we tried walking around town. It wasn’t fun. Two foot tall piles of snow on the path made it more of a mountain climbing adventure.

One positive, though: I’m still suffering with this nasty deep-seated cold, erupting occasionally into hoarse coughing and snotty horrible sneezes. I found a cure! It’s only temporary, though, but it is good for a few hours relief. We went to an Indian restaurant and I ordered a vindaloo with a couple of volcanoes worth of hotness. It worked! My sinuses were thoroughly cleared out, I could breath unimpeded, and my throat was quivering in terror — if it coughed one more time, I was going to order another raund.

I am sorry to report, though, that around 2am the slime had oozed back and repopulated every cranial cavity. I may have to do it again.

The disease afflicting our house has now descended into the quiet hush phase. Our throats are sore, it hurts to talk; my wife waved good morning to me, we haven’t said a single word yet. It’s a bit eerie.

Don’t bother to visit, it’s like popping into a monastery where all the monks have taken vows of silence. You will get only gestures, and you will be turned away.

It’s a Masque of the Red Death scenario. I’ve been happily free of infectious disease for the last few years, thanks to social distancing/masking and excessive caution. No colds! No sniffles! No lying abed with the blinds closed all day! It’s been nice. All that has changed.

Earlier this week, my daughter and granddaughter came to visit and brought back memories of when our kids would bring home all kinds of crud from school every day. Mary has been hit hardest with snot and phlegm and goo and sore throat and muscle aches, and has been laid flat for a few days. I got a sniffle. This is an unusual situation — usually I’m the one lying in bed crying and weeping, and she has to take care of me.

She’s starting to feel better now, she says, and of course we’d be happy to have the cheerful little plague rat come back again. Even if she was beating me at checkers all the time. She didn’t even know how to play the game until I taught it to her!

She was probably oozing brain-eating viruses the whole visit, and that’s the only reason she could win.

Hey! What are you talking about, “Bring back personal blogging”? We never went away. But OK, I agree with the general sentiment.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs.

I want to go back there.

You’re all still here! You didn’t go away, neither did we.

People were way more connected to each other. There wasn’t a whole lot of anonymity because anyone could look up your WHOIS information and see who a blog actually belonged to. Trolls were simply banned from your comment section, never to be heard from again.

When Twitter came along, it started as a “microblogging” platform where people would go to put out short, frequent missives as opposed to the longer, personal pieces we put on our blogs. It, too, evolved, as these things do, and now it is the hellscape we at once loathe but can’t leave alone.

There’s some fancy rose-colored glasses there. People may have been way more connected, but there were far fewer people involved. Just the fact that the author is taking it for granted that users would know about WHOIS is revealing — there’s an assumption that everyone knew how to use a command-line tool.

Twitter was an improvement for the majority. You didn’t need to know anything, you were required to keep everything short and pithy, so you didn’t even need to really know how to write. You just had to blurt. Blogs require a bit more engagement and a longer attention span.

The best blogs gave us a glimpse into the life of someone we “knew” online. Good storytelling, coupled with a lively discussion afterward, kept us coming back for more day after day.

Twitter threads just don’t do the trick — and neither will Elon’s alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block).

Personal stories on personal blogs are historical documents when you think about it. They are primary sources in the annals of history, and when people look back to see what happened during this time in our lives, do you want The New York Times or Washington Post telling your story, or do you want the story told in your own words?

The optimistic perspective might be that as Twitter fades, all those people who had grown accustomed to communicating online will shift back, to some degree, to blogs. Which are still here and have been here all along.

My daughter and granddaughter went back home the day before yesterday, my wife caught the kiddie crud from them (I’m a little sniffly myself), and today I have to start prepping to teach genetics again. How’s your year starting out?

She’s wearing us out. Yesterday we tried feeding the granddaughter to the triceratops in the science building.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account that the triceratops is a plant-eater, so she easily escaped. We don’t have a T. rex in the building.

Also, it’s a fossil cast lacking in digestive fluids or masticating muscles.

I am supposed to be allowed to spoil my grandchild. It is a time-honored privilege that I have been denied.

I went on a walk with the granddaughter and ended up at the coffeeshop, where I had promised to buy her a cookie. She picked one out — chocolate chip, of course — and we sat down, and she said, “I have to athk my mom if I can have a treat.” And she didn’t eat it! We had to bag it up and bring it home, where her mom did say she could have it.

It’s the Marshmallow Test on steroids! I am totally foiled in my cunning plan to totally spoil the child before she goes home.

Also, what a weird kid. I’m beginning to question my grandpaternity.