Finding Jolo

<"It is somewhere in the middle of this stretch of land mass (pointing to Africa)" is what I could remember seeing when CNN recently asked ordinary Americans where Iraq was on the map. This must, at the very least, puzzle scientists – the kind who are known to deal with finding very small things, usually bigger than a country, every ticking minute of their working lives, and yet, are able to pinpoint with microscopic precision which part of nature in some creature is responsible for what function and where it is located. In an airport about seven years ago, I read this in the Scientific American about a molecular biologist named Seymour Benzer: "His crowning achievement of this period in his career was the fine mapping of the r11 gene of bacteriophage T4." I remember noting down that phrase in my little notebook because it made me envious, in a deviant sort of way, that scientists can really grab an instrument and with careful study and procedure, direct you to the exact location of something as one gene in a virus (that is what a bacteriophage is – a virus that infects bacteria). Imagine finding that when right now, I cannot even find the notebook I wrote my notes on.

Seymour Benzer, 84, was just awarded the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research last April 29. It is the largest award in the field in the US. He is a pioneer in behavioral genetics – a field that tries to find links between genes and behavior – after he figured that his crowning achievement in r11 could only fly him as far in his passions. I also remember reading a 20-plus page article about him in the New Yorker magazine at least 10 years ago and being really intrigued by his science and his character. I learned then that he found the gene responsible that would be the dream of any call center employee – a gene for circadian rhythm! He found this out by removing it and so the subject went on and on without sleeping. He also found the gene responsible for ever-ready powered male libido that left his subject with a long-standing erection that lasted a period that would bring Casanova to his knees. He also had his graduate students inject a female with a molecule that was sperm-like, making the female lose interest in males and significantly gaining football player appetites. How did you miss that, you say? Why did your glossy salon magazines not carry the news from those experiments? Well, it is because he did this with flies – fruit flies.

Seymour Benzer has worked on fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, 3-mm long insects, for a great period of his career, and his work there is the basis for his claims for which he is widely known – that there are certainly links between "genes" and "behavior." And since we humans are also made up of genes, this "link" gets even more interesting, especially now when indeed they have found specific genes that seem to predispose them to certain behaviors. For instance, last April 18, the NY Times carried an article that was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about one of the 10 genes that scientists suspect are responsible for schizophrenia. The gene called neuregulin seems to go awry in the sample schizophrenic brains the scientists led by Amanda J. Law of the University of Oxford in England and Daniel R. Weinberger of the National Institutes of Health, have examined. But they all cautioned that it is too early to be certain since all they have now are clues (which they did not have before). Benzer was among the trailblazers in this route in science and certainly for me, one of the most interesting and quirky. I remember the New Yorker article noting his appetite – specifically its all-inclusive fare as he popped really odd creatures to taste. Not too far from that French entomologist I used to watch on cable who scoured the ground around the world looking for bugs. I bet that French fellow is in a perpetual seesaw between his gourmand tendency to come up with a recipe that would include these bugs or his scientific one to study them.

But it seems that even the scientists who are famous for having started a revolution in the "less" precise sciences like psychology, have, at one time in their lives, obsessed with trying to find a particular "part" in nature’s creatures. Take Freud. Last Saturday, May 6, apparently marked 150 years of the birth of the famous psychologist. If there is any famous scientist whose theory sends me off really confused, it is Sigmund Freud. The New York Times article by Benedict Carey last April 25 was really very interesting since it revealed that Freud at 19, was obsessed with dissecting eels, trying to find male testicles, as he told his friend in a letter that will be featured in an exhibit by the New York Academy of Medicine starting May 11 that will feature Freud’s drawings. The New York Times article quoted Freud’s "excuse" for this obsession, saying: "Since eels do not keep diaries, the only way to determine gender was to cut and slice, but in vain, all the eels which I cut open are of the fairer sex." Hmm, we could only speculate how the elder psychoanalytical Freud would have interpreted that "obsession" of his younger self. Well, we all know now that he preferred to work the rest of his life with species who kept diaries, or at least those that could.

Another article in the New York Times by one of my favorite science writers, James Gorman, spoke of being thankful for being "visited" by the science writer’s equivalent of "ants in the pants." It is what makes science writers like me get really excited about our work. Gorman spoke of what he called an "epiphany" about something that I, for one, would not as much as sip the elixir of life if it had one floating in it – ants! And he says he has Dr. Walter R. Tschinkel, a distinguished biologist at Florida State University, to thank for it. Dr. Tschinkel’s wrote a new book, The Fire Ants, and from James Gorman’s account of it, it should be read not just by people curious about ants but by scientists who are serious about their research as much as they are communicating it. Scientists who do their own focused research and who can also write about it with pizzazz and without condescension and pedantry are rare indeed. I can only think of Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Steve Jones as the ones who excel in it. 

I particularly got a kick out of the story that Tschinkel shared to Gorman about one of his graduate students tasked to measure the width of the heads of ants. The poor researcher, after his 4,000th ant head, apparently quit because her own head became "unstable" as propped up by her neck, that she "bumped into the doorjamb on her way out." These are the stories that apparently line the chapter divisions in Tschinkel’s books. I can relate to how sumptuous a fare a book it is for a science writer. Books on science that are intended to be read by not just scientists I think should have such corridors strewn with anecdotes inside them that lay readers can feel at home in. That way, they could walk it with their minds affirming that science is a truly human endeavor, with a face and a sense of humor.

I think as important as it is to find the r11 gene in bacteriophage or those precious male testicles in eels, it is also as important for scientists to try to find ways to stir interest in the sciences, apart from that of their peers who need no convincing. I know of a 14-year-old friend named Jolo who befriended me on his own two years ago because he thought I could help him in his interest in spiders and other bugs that would send most mothers screaming at their sons. He would e-mail me with questions about spiders until we reached a point where I could no longer answer his very detailed questions. I was also worried for the spiders since he had been putting them in the freezer in an experiment to find out at what temperatures they could actually slow down. Timely enough, I was about to interview Dr. A H Zakri, the head of United Nations University-Institute for Advanced Studies who was visiting from their office in Yokohama. He turned out to be a biologist and when I asked him if he knew of an entomologist whom I could link Jolo with, he referred me to his good friend Dr. Kong Luen Heong, who happens to be the senior scientist at the Entomology and Plant Pathology at IRRI in Los Baños. I sent an e-mail to Dr. Heong telling him about Jolo and he was so gracious to grant my request and said from what I told him, Jolo reminded him of himself when he was a kid. They are friends now and Jolo was so grateful and ecstatic when Dr. Heong sent him his dream book – very thick illustrated book on insects!

Scientists really do not always need to be able to write well in order to connect with the public. There are other ways, even far deeper, as far as those they would affect are concerned. Like tour guides pointing to this and that to visitors saying "Look!" scientists can do the equivalent to others, especially to kids now, already imbued early on with a mistaken notion that science and math are reserved only for the likes of Freud, Benzer or Heong. If they can find the gene r11 and eel testicles, surely scientists can spot a promising science kid or two and point to an aspect of Nature and say "Look!"

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected]