Get Back

     Certain things about our personalities and minds continue to amaze me.  From doctors to engineers, to mathematicians and the everyday person, I find it fascinating how a random group of cells can create our thoughts and ideas and dreams and memories.  Just one example is this "basic" phrase for medical students: She looks too, too pretty to catch her.  It's a shortcut for remembering the muscles of the wrist (scaphoid, lunatum, triquetrum, trapezium, pisiforme, trapezoid, capitate, and hamate), wrote Dr. Suzanne Koven in her book, Letter to a Young Female Physician (she's now in her 30th year of practice); the publisher described her writings as a book which: ...sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.  So when my wife and I had both a retired ER nurse and a retired lung specialist over for dinner, the conversation between these two friends who hadn't seen each other in many years, turned to operations and neurology and pediatrics and a host of other subjects that were dazzling for the rest of us to hear, even if we couldn't grasp any of it.  Which is when I happened to bring up that mnemonic of the wrist muscles, to which the former surgeon rattled it off with ease, adding that I should also try the facial nerves ditty (which author Koven also mentioned).  What followed, of course, was him naming all of those nerves...

    My astonishment that all of this detail was still so clear and so vivid in their memories not only enforced my admiration for such people who make it through med school, but also why such a pursuit could prove so daunting to others (such as me) since just trying to remember the simple shortcut, much less the actual muscles or nerves, seemed a somewhat harsh preview of what was to come.  A piece in Discover by neurologist Tony Dajer had a resident trying to figure out a patient's vertigo symptoms, postulating that it could be a partial stroke or Wallenberg syndrome to which Dajer said to the resident: You just need to figure out whether the cause is central or peripheral, brain versus inner ear, stroke versus positional vertigo. One of the toughest calls in neurology.  What??  Such professions have to make decisions confidently or both you and the patient could be at risk...imagine not remembering that a tiny nerve runs alongside that vein, something you both wouldn't discover until the patient had awakened (our guests also mentioned that neurology requires an additional 10 years of schooling).

     Perhaps I should jump back and mention where much of this line of thinking came from, starting with the book, it being only the second such book authorized by the famous group.  After glancing through it and being tempted, I soon realized that as fun as it appeared, one can only look back so much before recognizing that life is about moving forward (my friend recently sent me photos of his childhood home from 50 years ago, something easily done by typing in your old address at Zillow or Redfin); I opted to buy another book instead (at 1/3 the price), The Human Body, a reprint of a glossy but equally hefty simplified version of Gray's Anatomy (although the book is still extremely detailed).  Just reading through the book made me wonder how in the world could a publishing house do the research, pay the writer and artist and printer and distributor, and still get the book on the shelf for $13?  Throw that onto my ever-growing list of other things which I simply cannot understand such as how do they get those tiny liquid vitamin gels filled, or make ball bearings?

X-Ray of moray eel: Karly Cohen, New Scientist

    Okay the human body.  We've all grown up with how many bones are in our body but take a guess at how many of those bones are in just your head (not counting your teeth).  Twenty-eight!  Yes, 28 bones, tectonic plates that are tightly collapsed when you are born (to get you through the birth canal) and which gradually fuse together as you age (yes, reading about our bodies proves educating).  Part of this began because several of my friends are having a few medical issues but mostly because I have little idea of what most of my own insides do, other than they all seem to (so far) function; but what the heck does a pancreas look like, or a spleen, or our eyes (yes, organ donation came up at our dinner as our medical guests unemotionally explained the process of having to go back behind the ear to "harvest" an eye...okay gross but corneal donations have been around since the 1800s).  I also couldn't help but notice that regardless of what we or any other animal may look like on the outside, our bones have the same calcified white appearance once we're gone...so much for prejudice based on the color of our skin.

     But hey, since we're talking about skin, what about this from Dr. Monty Lyman (mentioned in an earlier post) on the microorganism, archaea: These microbes are known for being the hardiest life forms on the planet.  Among them, Pyrolobus fumarii thrive in deep-sea hydrothermal vents at temperatures of around 130ºC, and one strain even emerged unscathed from a ten-hour stint at 121ºC.  These so-called extremophiles are so robust that space agencies actively make sure that they are not contaminants for space exploration: certain strains could almost certainly thrive on Mars.  But despite their indestructible reputation, archaea are unfailingly sweet-natured when it comes to other organisms and there are no known cases of archaea causing disease in the animal world...Some archaea, called thaumarchaeota, could be playing important roles in the nitrogen turnover on our skin's surface by oxidizing the ammonia produced by our sweat.  They may also help keep our skin acidic, making it a more hostile environment to pathogenic bacteria.  Strangely, these extreme-loving organisms are found in abundance on skin at the extremes of age -- in those aged younger than twelve and older than sixty...

    And to get even smaller, we need to jump to a discovery by the late Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro whose Principle (as it became known) measured the weight of atoms.  He found that the number of molecules in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas was enormous. Author Bill Bryson tried to have us grasp it in this manner: I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to cover the United States to a depth of nine miles, or cupfuls of water in the Pacific Ocean, or soft drink cans that would, evenly stacked, cover the Earth to a depth of 200 miles.  An equivalent number of American pennies would be enough to make every person on Earth a dollar trillionaire.  It is a big number.  He also noted that hydrogen is the most abundant element in our universe (bonus points if you can guess what is the 2nd most-abundant element).  

    I had read this particular Bryson book nearly 20 years ago when it first was published; but listening to it now it almost seemed that I may not have read it at all (so much for my med school aspirations).  But here's something else, my wife discovering that she is now quite allergic to diatomaceous earth (what??).  She had been using the flour-like powder to repel ants and such from the winter shelters she had set up for a few of the feral cat colonies.  But now, even a brief wind gust stirring up the powder causes her eyes and face to swell (for others, the fine powder can cause respiratory problems if inhaled).  And she's also discovering that a number of her favorite cosmetics also contain diatomaceous earth (as a reminder, cosmetic companies are not required to list what ingredients or chemicals they use in their products).  So what the heck is diatomaceous earth?  It's the bony remains of diatoms, algae described by Wikipedia in this manner:  Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on the planet each year, take in over 6.7 billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live, and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans.  The shells of dead diatoms can reach as much as a half-mile (800 m) deep on the ocean floor, and the entire Amazon basin is fertilized annually by 27 million tons of diatom shell dust transported by transatlantic winds from the African Sahara, much of it from the Bodélé Depression, which was once made up of a system of fresh-water lakes.  

    We, as a species and as a lifeform filled with memories, are all so transitory.  Wrote Discover: Early fifth-century philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo famously wrote that he knew was time was unless someone asked him...When St. Augustine confessed his inability to define time, he evoked one of time's most salient qualities: Time becomes meaningful only in a defined context.  We, in the scheme of things are tiny.  As if to add to the fact, the Iowa-born author Bryson noted: Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else.  Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars or planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe so usefully material.  Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn't actually exist at all.  There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other physical properties of which our existence hinges.  There needn't actually be a universe at all.  For the longest time there wasn't.  There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about it.  There was nothing -- nothing at all anywhere.

    Scott Raab, in his collection of writings on rebuilding the World Trade Center, summed up life in a bit more reduced timescale: We'll be dead someday -- I was already forty-seven years old when I became a father, and I'm a catastrophist, so this truth is never far from my consciousness -- somebody else will live where we now live, and our names will be engraved elsewhere.  Meanwhile, little by little and day by day --with all due respect to the inevitability of doom-- we build the best life we can and mainly trust the future to itself.  And meanwhile, at ground zero, where the towers fell and nearly three thousand people died, it's the same story: They bicker and build, and build and bicker, and bluster and blame and battle -- men with various degrees of vision, integrity and heft, carrying on not like men inscribing history upon Earth's face --little by little, day by day-- but like baggy-pants clowns.  Someday they, too, will all be dead and, by and large, forgotten, which may help to explain why they're so busy squirting seltzer on one another: It helps 'em pass the time of day in death's bright waiting room; it makes them feel alive.  Power and money don't negate life's cheap slapstick -- they only add richness and depth.  Hell, history is comedy --in all places, at all times-- strutting, preening humankind, heading toward oblivion.  You want tragedy and catharsis?  Read Aristotle.  You want truth?  Stare naked in the mirror at the brute who dreams up gods and bickers over grapes, driven to create and to destroy as he is created and destroyed --pitilessly-- who ponders the big bang and laughs when someone else slips and falls down.  Meanwhile, chances are that what gets built because of or despite of the Ground Zero Clown Troupe --venal or grand, timeless or transitory, ugly or beautiful; likely, always, all of the above-- will stand at least a little longer here than any of us.

    When the Beatles wrote Get Back ("to where you once belonged"), I'm not sure if they were picturing a time before atoms.  And even while my memory of things (such as reading Bryson's book) comes and goes, puzzles and entices me, I look forward to it all.  There's that word again...forward.  Even the simple reminders of fall's dazzling colors, colors I seemingly can't remember as being so beautiful last year, renews my faith that time --whatever our concept of what it is-- waits for no one, but that life does keep moving on.  Best to not look back, but like life, to keep moving forward.