I Read and Weep

Reading the web pages of the faculty of the Genome Center of Wisconsin brought back a story from my childhood.

Not very long after my family moved to the suburbs my father asked painters for an estimate for painting his library. In most homes, the room would have been called "the office" rather than "the library". But because My father and his father-in-law (my grandfather), built book shelves along the inner wall of one room. Because my father was a chemist and, the bookcase was packed with books and Chemical Abstracts, the room was called "the library". (It is with some trepidation that I say "was". You can take a chemist out of the lab, but you can't always take the lab out of a chemist. The Chem Abstracts are long gone. A few months ago I helped him tie up and put all his back issues of Clinical Chemist out on the curb. There are plenty of books still, but bare spots on book shelves seem wrong to me.)

(This was way back in the 50's when individuals could afford their own subscription to Chemical Abstracts. I still remember the pale blue lettering on white covers and bindings. As an undergraduate I could not understand why the grad students gave me odd looks when I said that my father read Chemical Abstracts. Now I know that nobody actually "read" Chemical Abstracts the way someone might read a magazine. Someone looked at the abstract, which comprised one or two tightly written paragraphs summarizing an article, to see if the whole article was worth reading. I'm sure patent lawyers trawled the abstracts for actionable references.)

One of the painters who came over to estimate the job, took one look at the library and broke down crying. He'd always wanted to be a chemist but the Great Depression thwarted those dreams. And there in my house he'd found someone who'd somehow lived his dream.

(At this point I should say that my father's family was not wealthy, probably not even well off, but never in need during the Depression. My father's father was a plumber who spent the Depression installing indoor plumbing in Brooklyn. My mother's family, on the other hand, lost everything in the Crash. One of my mother's indelible memories is overhearing her parents deciding whether her father should take the last quarter to get to a job and buy lunch or whether he should walk to work and leave the quarter buy milk for the children. Theirs was not the life depicted in the screwball comedies of the era.)

The story of the painter is paired in my mind with a comment by Aaron Broder. (Aaron Broder was a very famous and successful malpractice lawyer.) He was on the back lawn of his house in Kings Point, NY looking out at the Long Island sound. It was a glorious day and there on the bay, in all it's glory, was the Merchant Marine Academy's sailing ship, a three-master. Broder said it took all his will to resist going out to the ship and begging them to take him wherever it was that they were going.

So, in reading the faculty research interests at the Genome Center I saw the curve of molecular biology investigation and felt the pull on my heart for research. Not the lure of fame, but being intimately a part, even if only a tiny part, of a grand quest of Knowledge. (Yes, "Knowledge" with a capital "K".)

It was Aseem Z Ansari's description of using "designer transcription regulators" which got me all weepy for biochemistry. Imagine synthesizing a molecule which will trick a cancerous cell to use it's own mechanisms to produce proteins which will cause the cell to differentiate (change) from a cancerous cell back to something like normal. This is a far cry and so much more elegant and radiation and chemotherapy which by comparison is of the "kill them all and let God sort them out" approach.

Sigh.

Thief Catcher

I was reading a Computerworld Shark Bait entry, "What is this orange stuff on my fingers" about a computer operator back in the day who was caught looking at confidential salary information from the data center director's desk. The person narrating the story was not the person who found the key, but someone who worked on the same shift who found that his hands were turning color, first orange and then purple.

"Ah-ha" I thought, "gentian violet." (You can take a chemist out of the lab, but you can't take the lab out of the chemist.) I thought I'd post a comment, but, being the wussy type, I wanted to check my facts first.

I remember a memoir by a pharmacist who suggested to a newspaper seller that he could catch the person who was stealing newspapers by sprinkling gentian violet on the to paper, but to only handout papers from below the top. A few days later the pharmacist forgetting his suggestion, paid for a paper, took one from the top, and, because his hands became stained, was accused of being the thief.

In the story the pharmacist referred to gentian violet (hexamethyl pararosaniline chloride) as "thief catcher". Searching on the web was an adventure. I couldn't find a good reference for "thief catcher", but eventually found several links to "Thief Detection Powder". From the descriptions, it appears that some of the powders are gentian violet. (There were others which did not produce a visible skin stain, but are related to a dye I used many years ago: fluorescein. The dye became visible under UV light.)

But, the web is a marvelous thing: in searching for "thief catcher" I stumbled across a description of the notorious housebreaker Jack Sheppard, whose jail breaking exploits could have served as inspiration for Mission Impossible or MacGyver exploits, and Jonathan Wild the King of Thieves or the First Criminal Underworld Boss.

It was in one of the links concerning "thief catcher" that I came across "Chartism", as in "Chartism came to permeate English political and cultural discourse during this period", the period being the 1830-1850, and knew that "chartism" would eventually be a term I'd be using to confuse a debate and add to the general impression that I know "all kinds of weird stuff".

It's what happens when wanders the web. Gotta love the web.