Tag: Science

America Collection/General interest
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AIDS: Victories and Sorrows

by Fran Johns

A PERSONAL STORY OF LOVE, LOSS & DISMAY ABOUT TODAY’S LEADERSHIP

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

In the 1990s I led an HIV Support Group that was officially part of my church and comprised of an evershifting number of men I loved best of any motley crew I’ve ever known. They were of every known religion and degree of irreverence. Jim, the last surviving member of the clan, died of natural causes last year, having dodged AIDS along with his partner; partner Richard was lost to a freaky post-surgery accident more than a dozen years ago.

Every new disastrou healthcare headline reminds me of Jim.

Jim was the #1 source of my pandemic survival. Having lost my husband in 2019, not that long after Richard had died, the two of us found a spectacular anti-loneliness mechanism for negotiating those pandemic days . . . and eventually, years.

Mobility-challenged from a long-ago case of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Jim was pretty much confined to the third floor apartment he and Richard had shared for decades. As it happened, their place was on one of the steepest blocks of San Francisco’s Mason Street, making its front window almost level with the sidewalk a few yards uphill. I would stand precariously on the sidewalk while he leaned out his window; he always promised to call 911 if I lost my balance so they could dredge the Bay for my body after it rolled downhill and into the waters.

To be confessionally honest, toward the end of the pandemic I did sneak inside a couple of times for us to remember what indoor face-to-face encounters had been like in days gone by. 

In those olden days Jim and I had witnessed the worst of the AIDS pandemic and, finally, its slow but eventual end. We remembered one longtime member of the AIDS Group who said, at what would be our last formal gathering, “I’ve spent more than a decade focusing on death; now I just want to focus on living for a while.”

That shift from death to life was thanks to development of antiretroviral therapies that slowly transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable chronic illness. It was work that required public and private cooperation and the dedicated efforts of local, state and national agencies. It led, eventually, to San Francisco’s being at the forefront of a global challenge to “Get to Zero” — zero new HIV cases, zero deaths and zero stigma. In three decades there has been almost uninterrupted progress toward this lofty but attainable goal.

The current administration has thrown everything into reverse.

Some $8 million have been stripped just from local agencies doing this humanitarian work. If you can look up the chain to the destruction of science-based agencies and communities all the way to the formerly unequalled CDC without tears you must be without a heart.

Our old HIV Group had one confirmed curmudgeon who regularly proclaimed there was no hope for himself or the world. Everybody else would find something that made that one day worth living and would wear ourselves out saying “C’mon, Tom. One day there’s going to be a cure. A vaccine. A treatment.” Tom died early on, angry and cursing fate as with so many young men who had good reaason to curse.

When Jim and I talked about those olden days, as we invariably did, we often joked about how Tom had been proven wrong, because vaccines and treatments were indeed on the way to eradicating the scourge of HIV-AIDS; and how Tom would’ve scoffed and said, “Just wait. Something’s going to screw it all up.” I sorely need a chance to joke around with Jim today.

So where, in this column that regularly looks for good news, is the good news for the future of American health?

“Don’t quote me,” said another old friend recently — so of course I’m quoting him, “but there are sane scientists everywhere who are just waiting out the ignoramuses in charge of our national health today. We’re still moving forward. Despite the tragic losses of the last year, science is still science and those of us comnitted to it are not going to give up. We’ll get to zero.” He teaches at a prestigious California university. He’s tenured. He believes most who have lost their good jobs will come back once U.S. healthcare gets back on track.

RIP Jim and Richard and Tom and so many beloved others. We’re on a dark detour but we’ll still Get To Zero.

America Collection/General interest
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Flight 678 and the Physics Lesson

by Fran Johns

A NUCLEAR PHYSICIST AND A WRITER WITH AN ART DEGREE MEET ON A FOUR-HOUR FLIGHT . . . WHAT COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN?

Luke Jones on Unsplash

“Well two people are working on this flight,” he says. (He is in 22-B)

“Yeah,” she says. “Always.” She is in 22-C, grouchy because she really likes the window and after 10 years as a loyal customer could the travel agent not remember it’s window,not aisle?

As everyone else starts scrolling through movies or settling back with eye-shades on, 22-B and 22-C lower their tray tables and open their laptops.

“David,” he says, offering a hand. “Fran,” she says. “You’re editing something? Everybody needs a good editor. What’s it about?”

“Well . . . you see. . . I’m a physicist.” Much later in the flight he will explain: Ask a physicist a question, you’re going to get a very long answer. Even if the question is posed by a writer with an Art degree who is congenitally lacking in left-brain material.

Pretty soon they are joined by 22-A (the coveted window) who had started out behind the eyeshades. It turns out 22-A (I didn’t get his name over the engine noise) is a computer science student and recognizes a good thing when he finds himself seated next to it.

David is on the first leg of a trip from one top U.S. nuclear physics research and development lab to another. I’m just going to a family reunion; not sure about 22-A. What I do know for sure is that most casual airline conversations are about the weather, or legroom. Does this interest David the physicist? Hardly.

“Inertial confinement fusion. . .” he is saying. (Introduce yourself to a physicist, don’t expect to talk about legroom.) Something about shooting lasers at pellets’ exterior to turn stuff into plasma. Finally. A word I know: plasma. Part of the blood, right? Wrong. On row 22, A-C, we’re talking about a state of matter resulting from a gaseous state that’s been ionized. Or something like that.

Actually, at one point in our impromptu post-doctoral-level lecture there occurs a new concept I totally understand. David explains something about magnetized particles by performing a visual demo of grabbing one particle and stretching it to its limit. When you let go it may zap back past where it was and into space, and now you’ve got interesting stuff going on.

You can try this at home.

There’s one down-to-earth interruption when the mother-in-law sends a photo of the physicist’s lab (as in dog) whom she’s baby-sitting. But after a while, 22-C retreats into less esoteric endeavors on the aisle-side laptop, while B and A continue. There are ongoing snippets of “the algorithms just needed…” or “fun stuff…” or “nuclear fusion reactions…” or “you run the code…” and “once you get it…” But there is only so much brain elasticity available on the aisle at 34,000 feet.

Perhaps anticipating a time when all R&D labs get shut down and a podcast host is put in charge of science, David explains that “you need physicists for national security, for medicine, for the advancement of society. Even if we’re a little weird.”

Weird is good.

America Collection/General interest
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Are We Children of Mother Earth?

by Fran Johns

MAYBE WE ALL EVOLVED FROM THE SAME SPECKS OF DIRT

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Could you be descended from a rock? Rather than, say, an ape? Or, to put it another way: first the rock, then the ape. (No scissors/paper here.)

Personally, I’m drawn to rock molecules as forebears. 

Bear with me on this. It’s not my idea; it came from an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that came from a new book titled Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. Just the same way as perhaps we came from microbes in rocks before we came from apes — no offense to Mr. Darwin. Or to the Creator by whatever name.

For the record, I understand absolutely none of this. I began a less than stellar college career long ago with a D- in Human Biology, after which I switched my major to Art. A form of educational evolution, you could say. I will probably, as this story progresses, be typing a lot of questions into the search bar like, “What’s the difference between a microbe and a molecule?” Still trying to wrap my head around that one. 

But how can you not love the idea that Planet Earth — our Mother Earth which itself came from somewhere, but that’s another story — germinated her little bits of dirt into creatures that beccame you and me? 

Photo by Nikola Jovanovic on Unsplash

Further, if we all evolved from little specks of dirt in rocks, doesn’t that more easily make us all pretty close kin, give or take a minor detail or two?

Consider this: “At some point not long after our planet’s genesis,” writes the distinguished scientist/journalist Ferris Jabr, who inspired this essay and whose web photo looks like he’s about 18, “in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy . . . bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.” (Jabr rhymes with neighbor; you might want to remember the name.) 

Fast forward a few eons. “Species best able to cope with changes in their particular habitat leave behind the most descendants, whereas those that fail to adapt die out.” Voila. Early pre-humanoids are beginning to pop up.

Annother few billion years, Oxygen and the ozone layer ooze out and, Hello blue skies! 

“As I studied the interdependence of Earth and life,” Jabr writes, “I continually returned to an ancient and controversial idea: that Earth itself is alive.” This is, as many of us are dimly aware, the Gaia Hypothesis. Sort of a ‘We’re all in this Life together’ thing: dirt, creatures, skies, planet. (This article is not to be quoted for anything scientifically verifiable.)

Despite being clearly out of my depths, I cannot get over a compelling fascination with this idea: Mother Earth begets a clump of dirt which, after an eon or two or three or four begets you and me. Life is good, brothers and sisters.

Recently, walking up Webster Street in San Francisco I drew near a car that had just parked. The driver, a tall Black man with an air of distinction and broad smile, walked toward me a few steps ahead of a gray-haired Black woman I presumed to be his wife. We three paused in greeting, it being a sunshiny day with a jazz festival underway a block west on Fillmore Street.

“You remind me of my mother,” he said. No preamble, no irony, just a pleasant remark that might well have been, “Hello, how’s it going?”

“I think,” I replied as I quickly recovered, “that I’m the generic mother. I hope yours was a good one.”

“The best,” he said. “She was very beautiful.”

Well, if that won’t make your day I don’t know what will. We three kept walking in our different directions. Hopefully, their day was as festive as mine was from then on.

Which brings me back to Mr. Jabr’s book. Since it seems a little heavy for my right-brained self I am ordering the audio version (9 hours, 27 minutes.) This way I can listen in small snippets while walking in the sunshine, reflecting on the probability that my bypasser friend’s beautiful bronze skin is only a microbe or two away from my own wrinkly white.

Right, Mother Earth?