A first time for everything

Proctoring exams may be the most boring thing academic scientists do.  I mean, there are really boring things we do in the lab, like waiting hours while reactions incubate, pouring agar plates, and counting bacteria with a counting pen that beeps and add one to the digital display every time it touches down on a colony, but that is a little exhilarating because data come from those tasks and every step successfully completed feels like a miniature hero's quest....venturing out into the unknown, using a special skill set acquired through lengthy training, and attempting to return with something new to better humanity (okay, that may be an optimistic view of science, but we all need something to keep us going).

Proctoring exams is nowhere nearly so stimulating.  You sit like a lump and answer questions asked by students who are trying to pry information out of you (Like that's going to work).  There are too many distractions to make productive use of the time, but there is a lot of down time.  So while I am proctoring right now, I am counting.  Lots of professors do this.  At some colleges, you count the blond students because there are so few, and at some schools you count the black students.  At UC Merced, I count the white students.  There are fewer black students than white students, but counting to one or two isn't very exciting.  So let's see...6 white males and 6 white females....out of 90 students.  Hmmm.  About 40% Hispanic and about 50% Asian (but not wealthy Asian..... Hmong, Mien, Cambodian, Vietnamese, a few Chinese).  I don't know this from looking at the students, but from statistics and helping them, I know that about 90% are first generation college attendees.

I can't claim first generation status since my dad is an engineer and he helped me (and still helps me) with math.  However, I feel like I understand what their experience is like since I am the first to get a Ph.D. in my entire extended family. I was also the second oldest of seven and my older sister and I had no clue what we were doing in high school.  I mean we knew to study and get help with math homework, but we missed lots of opportunities that could have led to scholarships.  It wasn't that we were lazy.  We just didn't know how to tell good opportunities from not so good ones.  Our younger siblings did better.  We kind of paved the way.  (The nieces and nephews are set.  They are pursuing great opportunities before they turn eight.)

I look out at a room full of students, beating themselves up because they didn't study harder, or doubting what they absolutely know, and I feel such fondness for them. I see myself in them except they are trying harder than I ever had to.   It is so hard for most of them to be here. So many of them are trying their hardest, but making mistakes as they go.  I think most of them will be okay.  It's the American dream right?  You come to America and work hard and learn as much as you can and escape poverty.  Most of my students probably won't get rich, but I think most of them will live in better conditions than their parents.  I think that most of them will be able to be comfortable.

As I think of each of them on their own little hero's quests, conquering the perils of a university one exam at a time, the proctoring becomes a little more interesting.  Even though it isn't my own quest, it seems okay to sit on the sidelines and simply watch.

Whirlwind days

Mostly, I just want to be left alone these days.  It doesn't seem to be in the cards for me though.  It probably shouldn't be stressful to get unending emails from students, staff members, etc. who have very reasonable requests.  It shouldn't be stressful that someone wants to stop by my office and talk to me for an hour or two.  These are all small and reasonable things, but they break me away from the things that I need to do for myself.  They are distracting and on so many days, I find myself at 4:30, finally able to begin the things that I had planned out for the day.  I still get the things done that I need to do and honestly, I care about each person and each request (maybe that is the real source of the stress...wondering if I understood a request, wondering if my response was what was wanted, wondering if I overreacted, wondering if I put someone off too long...I don't waste much time on these worries, but they are there...sometimes they wake me up at night) it's just that I care more right now about other things that I need to focus on. There are papers to write, experiments to do, interesting guys to meet (though since my mom gave me a toaster oven, I figure I don't need to get married anymore), and friends and family members who also make requests of me.  I haven't even had the time to watch old Jim Henson Hour episodes which were recently posted on Youtube (hooray!).  The one fast rule I have made for dealing with all of this is that I don't let anyone touch my workout schedule.  Any day where I burn 600+ calories in an hour is a pretty good day.

Back together again

When I used to work in the Orr Lab, Corbin Jones would tell me to take the needle out of my vein and go home.  Which is what I have done.  It was hard.  There is so much I need to do.  There are revisions of two papers that have been accepted upon the condition of minor revisions. While they are minor, there are a lot of them.   Besides that, my collaboration with PARC is gaining momentum.  Also, I am now working with some M.D.s to develop some better approaches for treating MRSA.  Finally, Ben Kerr emailed me to ask if I'd be interested in developing a project with him.  All of these things need attention and they are all wonderful opportunities, and they all have to wait a few days more.  

Michael (my youngest brother) is home after two years.  He also had to take the needle out of his vein and come home.  For him, it was a lot harder than me.  He has been serving as a missionary for the last two years in the LDS mission in Peoria, Illinois.  Between 6:25 AM and 10:00 PM he has been busy every single day.  Studying, teaching, helping people with random chores, knocking on doors, sandbagging when it flooded. Before he left, he worked for a year at Target to save the money he needed to cover the cost of his mission.  Now he done.  He looks a bit overwhelmed and I think that tomorrow he will feel that he has a lot of energy but no direct course to put it to use.  He has a lot of stories to tell and we'll put him to work telling those. I am trying to persuade him to start working on some college admissions essays.

When I came, the driving conditions were bad.  Fog at Tehachapi. Rain from Death Valley to St. George.  Snow from Cedar City to Scipio. Fog again at Scipio. Then clear driving the remaining 20 miles.  I knew it would be bad weather when I left, but the options were either driving in horrible weather or not being here to see Michael.  Missing today didn't seem like a viable option.

I was 11 when Michael was born, and he was 11 when I moved across the country to go to graduate school.  We had jumped together on the trampoline nearly every day for six years.  He woke me up when he had bad dreams and whenever he needed a big person, it was me.  I taught him how to cook so that he could survive a poultry allergy.  He chattered endlessly to me, and I was privileged to know what he thought and felt about everything that was important to him.

When I told him I was going to graduate school, he started picketing for me to go on a mission and he wrote protest songs about me wasting water that he would sing when I bathed, drank water, or brushed my teeth.  I went anyway.

When I came home from graduate school.  He would pull a sleeping bag into my room and sleep on the floor next to my bed.  He would try to chatter endlessly to me, but sometimes I was so tired that I couldn't think of anything to say back to him.  I have no shortage of things to discuss with him now and there was no way I was going to be anywhere but home when he returned.  I love that brother of mine.

Calm quantum

I read Albert Goldbarth's Pieces of Payne. It is all about bifurcations including those that occur in the human psyche. He draws parallels between string theory and the different states that humans go into to accomplish various things. It was quite by chance that I read it near the end of a year in which I decided to become honest about who I am and what I think and feel. While doing that, I came across a few bifurcations in myself that had to be resolved. I was surprised to find some of them, but was able to deal with all of them. For the time at least, my life feels unified and whole.

There is however, a bifurcation that I am often accused of, that doesn't really exist and never really has. I have sometimes tried to conjure it into existence, but it has never really been able to take shape. That bifurcation is some supposed clash between evolution and God. I just don't understand what all of the fuss is about. I have tried hard and I just don't get it. Supposedly a belief in God is incompatible with a simultaneous belief in evolution are incompatible. Despite my best efforts, I have not been able to make them clash. Practicing religion (I'm a Mormon) and studying evolution (I am an evolutionary biologist) are sort of like cooking food and playing tennis. They are more complementary as activities than competitive, (though there is some competition between them for time). Preparing good food helps a tennis player to achieve top performance, and playing tennis makes a person hungry. In the same way, practicing religion helps me as a scientist to be honest, hard-working, receptive to criticism, and a responsible collaborator. Studying evolutionary biology is exhilarating and keeps my mind actively working on all sorts of strange and difficult problems. Sometimes, days upon days in the lab make me hungry for the social and spiritual situations. I get accused of either entering different states of belief to be a Mormon and an evolutionary biologist with the only alternative being that I am either trying to undermine religion or evolution by involving myself in both. However, there is no conflict from my perspective.

But then THE question: "What about the origins of life?"

I respond: "I have no idea. I think that if God had intended the Bible as a scientific textbook, He would have done a better job making it that. But then there aren't any scientist either who have any convincing evidence to support their ideas about how life began. Any specific beliefs in how life began require a lot of faith."

And the THE OTHER question: "What about the evolution of man?"

My response: "I have no idea, there are a lot of differences between humans and other creatures that we don't understand yet (Opposable digit, bipedalism, precise occlusion, musculature of the tongue, petite sinuses that allow language and prevent barking, relatively hairless bodies, unusually high brain to body mass ratio, the desire for privacy during sex, having sex face to face, and religion as far as we can tell.) I think it is good to study those differences and to learn as much as we can. However, I don't think that anything we ever learn about the similarities between animals and humans will justify us in lowering ourselves to behave like animals." (Though I sometimes think that rolling around in wet grass seems like a fun idea.)

Once, I started trying to worry myself about all of this, but then it hit me that I actually just study bacteria (not even mentioned in the Biblical account of the Creation) and that I don't have to make myself responsible for answering everyone's questions about how life and humans came into existence. I mean really, we (scientists and scholars and everybody else too) don't even understand what causes gravity yet, but we believe in it. Most people who believe in God also believe in gravity and get along fine without any mental angst (except for those who study gravity and they have all kinds of mental angst that spills out onto their chalkboards and confuses everyone with mathematical notation, although I have never seen God written into those angsty equations). I don't see why evolution should be any different.

Comedy Central and Soft Places

I have almost survived the first week of classes. I had forgotten how tiring teaching is. It's kind of fun though. For the first time in my five years of being a professor, I am teaching in jeans and a t-shirt. I like it better than dressing in skirts. My teaching style is pretty relaxed and the jeans and t-shirts match it. Besides which, I am now in the second largest auditorium for class and I have to use a microphone to be heard when I am facing the board and it is all feeling so formal that I need to rebel just a bit.

My lectures are mini comedy routines. The students laugh quite a bit at them (I teach really nice kids). So far, I have taught them how to argue better with their parents using degrees of freedom (I assume they are too old for it to be much use, but young enough to still remember the need for it) and I have taught them about independent probabilities using an analogy of 200 five year olds. I desperately wanted to throw in some dating humor with random probabilities, but in a college class where sex is openly discussed (albeit from a chromosomal perspective), one has to draw the line somewhere to keep discussions from degenerating. There is a lot of nerd humor too. Dungeons and Dragons jokes and Jurassic Park jokes and stuff like that. It makes me feel a little bit younger when the students get my jokes. I told them that. A student came up afterwards and told me that the class really is too young to get my jokes. He said they only thought they got them because they had watched Jurassic Park 2 and 3. (I got a call from my sister yesterday. She needed help getting revenge on a student. Perhaps I will get her to return the favor.)

I am in the lab these days too. I have been doing endless T-tests and there aren't enough data to get significant differences, so I am in the lab generating more data. I love data, but I am so tired that I keep thinking that the lab floor looks like a warm and cozy place to curl up for a nap. I remind myself about the pathogens in the lab and avoid the temptation.

I am also working out every day. I love it. I started a cycling class and I am still doing step aerobics and walking with Jenny Vezzanni in the morning and I am sore. I am going to have some double workout days next week. Ofelia (my workout instructor) has some Platonic vision about the potential for my body and she has been trying to get me to do double workouts for a long time to get me a step closer to that Platonic version of my body. She says I am ready for it and that I have been ready for a long time and so I am going to give it a try. This will mean that I am working out 3 hours a day 3 times a week and 2 hours a day twice a week. Ofelia is trying to get me to run everyday too. There is a hot guy in his 30s that she wants me to run with. I told her he would have to be really, really hot to motivate me to run after him. He'll also have to be really nice to slow down enough for me to be able to do that.

I am tired just thinking about next week.

Leveled

The DMV is the great equalizer. More so even than death, where most believe that it matters whether you were good or bad. If an axe murderer were to go into the DMV s/he would be handed a number and politely told to wait until the number was called, just the same as anybody else. In fact there were a few cagey looking people there today who might have been axe murderers, but who didn't want to advertise their status and left their axes at home.

I found myself next next to a Hmong woman for a couple of hours. We were in the same queue, but my number was about 20 ahead of hers. I expressed sympathy after about an hour of waiting during which only three numbers in our queue had been called. We started making jokes about the DMV and then we started talking about our families. She told me about her kids and her neices and nephews and about how they have scare your pants off nights where everyone tells the scariest story they can until they get so scared they just want to go to bed. Their scary stories are about the Vietnam war, and spirits and ghosts.

I told her about how my family used to show Arachnophobia in the summer from a giant projector that weighed something like 80 lbs and had to be focused by moving the whole hulking thing forward and back. With all of the spiders under the deck and walking along the sidewalk and in the trees, everyone would get especially freaked out and those of us who weren't scared of spiders would quietly get a great deal of amusement out of this. She wasn't impressed by the level of scariness evoked by spiders. Her stories are probably scarier than any I have.

We talked about being aunts and daughters who our moms rely on and how we end up cooking a lot for the family gatherings. We were very alike. It was fun to find a kindred soul in that place. She joked about her husband and her language. I supported her humor with the gentlest additions and she was fine with that. We had a great time.

At last my number was called and I had to take the written test to renew my license since it was more than 60 days away from my birthday, when my license (had it not been stolen) was going to expire. I found myself quite nervous about the exam, wished that I had done a little more than cramming in my first hour at the DMV, and even contemplated cheating on the test once as a manual was right next to me. I resisted as there were only three choices for each question and only four questions I didn't know and I could miss three. I figured the odds were in my favor of getting at least one right.

I nervously waited for my grade and laughed a little about how I give so many genetics tests and show absolutely no sympathy or mercy towards the students. As I found myself in their situation, I perhaps had a little more sympathy, but a complete lack of willingness to change my levels of tolerance and mercy for students taking tests. The one resolve I did make is to be especially careful to write good test questions always! The DMV questions are horribly written. In some cases, it was entirely unclear what was being asked. I was standing next to a woman who often scans my groceries and we nervously discussed the test.

In the end, I passed. Hooray! And I cheered and shared my passing grade with the friends I had made while waiting there. They applauded me and I told them I hoped they did okay and we each went our separate ways.

Aligned with evil

I think about science from the perspective of a bacterium. It usually works out better that way because I understand their problems and solutions. Sometimes it doesn't work out better though...

Right now, I am working with Chris Fradkin who views everything from the human perspective. I have tried to keep that in mind and to refrain from making value judgments about bacterial adaptations. I keep slipping up though and saying stuff like "Woah, that mutation is a lot better." and he keeps thinking I don't understand the data. I told him that I understand. The bacteria are getting more resistant to an antibiotic. He asked "And that's better?"

I replied "Well, yah...for the bacteria."

His response "So you have basically aligned yourself with the forces of evil."

My reply "Really no, but in the lab, yes?"

Back to him " .... okay then."

The sad truth is that I am in the lab more than I am in clinical situation and so I am aligned with the forces of evil >99% of the time. This is why scientists should probably not become politicians.