Click the link and read about Condensates. Since middle school, when I first learned about cells, and then later learned about nucleic acids and “self-assembly”, it has always puzzled me how everything gets to where it needs to go, at the speed that life happens.
In the context of SARS-CoV2 (the virus causing Covid-19), how does the mRNA that is injected into the cell by the virus find the ribosomes that encode the Spike protein and assemble daughter viruses? How does the ribosome find all the amino acids among the millions of molecules to assemble the right proteins? How do the assembled proteins move to the right spots on the cell membrane?
I can imagine a lonely ribosome with an attached mRNA just WAITING for the right amino acid to come along to assemble the next link in the protein chain. How does it happen so fast?
If movement in a cell is dependent on just Brownian motion (random vibrations), it seems like it ought to take a LONG time (minutes? hours? days?) but it takes seconds.
Now it seems like Condensates are how this works.
CMIO’s take? Every time we think we know something about microbiology and that we know how deep the rabbit hole goes, the rabbit hole always goes deeper, my friends. What are YOU reading to expand your horizons?
So, based on an off-hand comment from a colleague about “just got that Chicken Attack song out of my head”, I went on a side journey and found THIS. How did I not hear of this before? How did you?
Be sure to keep the Closed Captions on. You won’t regret it.
CMIO’s take? We should all aspire to this level of joy (and yodeling).
Kevin Kelly: co-author of the defunct but world-changing Whole World Catalog, publisher of Cool Tools, author of What Technology Wants, and generally smart guy, is 68 (or was when he posted this). Brilliant observations. This is me Plus-one-ing his post. Some teasers:
Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
CMIO’s take? Happy new year. Go read it, link above.
My favorite getaway: renting a place, bringing a bunch of books (or better yet, discovering new books in the rental home), cooking in the Instant Pot, hiking, and playing the ukulele. I have apparently infected at least one offspring with similar interest in reading.
This week’s book? A story about a man living in England in the 1800’s, who ultimately is credited with what is modern day geology.
What’s cool, is the book cover actually unfolds into a large reproduction of the original map.
William Smith’s life is entirely relatable. He learns math and measurement, and has a keen eye for observation. As a young man, he helps develop a coal mine, and notices that the layers of earth, hundreds and thousands of feet down, seem to have a recurring pattern. Furthermore, as he gains experience digging canals, he sees the same patterns laid out across the region of Bath, where he is employed. Over a number of years, he is employed to dig canals, drain swamps, marshes, farms, all the while collecting rocks, fossils and developing his theory of Stratification (a term he coins).
I note that I am entirely a geologic novice, and Permian and Cenozoic terms come and go without lodging in my brain. However, Smith catalogues and builds ideas, and eventually a map of Bath. He links various strata with geologic eras, with aspirations of mapping all of England.
The trouble is, he’s a working man, traveling and helping companies and individuals. Furthermore, he (imprudently) maintains two offices and a home, that he cannot afford. His marriage to a mentally ill woman does not help, and his ideas lay dormant and unpublished for far too long. He DOES publish a fabulous map, sells 400 copies at “7 guineas each”, a disappointing non-recognition of his thousands of miles of travel and careful analysis.
This map is a massive work: it lays out across England, the layers of rock, coal, sandstone, chalk, etc, and the sequence of layers hidden below. In future years, it will end up launching the coal industry, farming, minerology, and influencing Charles Darwin.
In his adult years, he is fraudulently scooped, with others publishing his work as their own. He is denied admittance to the Royal Geological Society, snubbed because he is an orphan, and not born to high society.
With accumulating debt from his properties and failed business, he ends up going to debtor’s prison, losing everything, and then starting over, nearly penniless, living in rentals and traveling to do survey work.
Based on some chance meetings, he ends up getting recognition for his original solo research and work, FIFTY years later, and is finally recognized and rewarded, in his old age, as the Father of Modern Geology.
I can’t help but think that, so much of our lives are happenstance:
Whom you meet and connect with
How random chance connects you with a job you flourish in, or fail miserably at
What the local culture (class-based snobbery, or open-minded scientific inquiry) encourages or prohibits
How you develop useful skills, and work hard
How you see that others may not; what do you do with that knowledge
How you personally persist past obstacles, or succumb to pressures
CMIO’s take? This could have been a story of any scientist, any informaticist, any CMIO. This could have been MY story. And that’s what the best books are about.
My high-school aged son is avidly devouring classic literature, and the echoes of those epic struggles from my own education, float back to me. On our winter break one evening, he had left the Norton Anthology of Western Literature out on the coffee table. Soon I was in the midst of battle at Troy, at Carthage, in Rome.
Aeneas of Troy, in the classic by Virgil, faces a long journey with many trials. Even in 20 BC, storytellers mastered Story. Sometimes the smallest moments are the best parts of a story:
Laocoön runs out from the city to warn his fellow citizens of Troy, that the large wooden horse left behind by hastily departed Greeks, was a trick: ‘beware of Greeks, even bearing gifts.’ To punish him, the gods send a pair of serpents to devour his sons and then kill him. The image above of Laocoön dying defending his sons is such a moment. The city elders, seeing him killed by the gods, are then convinced that he is wrong, and bring the Trojan Horse inside the gates. Of course, you know the rest: the city of Troy falls that night as hidden Greek solders pour out, open the gates and ransack the city.
Aeneas initially resolves to stay and defend his city to the death. His touching moment with his father and their resolve to stay together and flee is a pivotal moment of change for both of them.
Aeneas meets Dido, queen of Carthage, in his storm-tossed journey, and falls madly in love. Soon after, the gods send him a message that he and his lineage are to become the founders of Rome. He leaves immediately. Dido kills herself in despair.
With supernatural help, Aeneas journeys to the underworld to see the future: that his descendants establish Rome and create the Roman Empire.
These moments, to which I’ve summarized so prosaically, are told in verse and with rich detail and sensory imagery.
Interestingly, the Norton Anthology also included the ancient translation of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest recorded epic story. Being a science fiction geek, perhaps I should not have been surprised that my first exposure to this classic, written in antiquity, circa 1700 BC, first reached my ears via Captain Picard, on the all-time most popular episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation TV show called Darmok (no, not the new, apparently amazing show, that is behind the CBS paywall). Careful, don’t read the links unless you have time; you won’t come out for awhile.
CMIO’s take? Great storytelling captivating, and timeless. Smart people lived thousands of years ago. Sometimes Captain Picard teaches you ancient literature.
I’m part of WellDOM, the Wellness initiative within the Department of Medicine at University of Colorado. As such, I continue to support the idea of Sprints, the way we boost physician and team efficiency and effectiveness using the Electronic Health Record. However, we know that a large part of physician burnout and wellness have to do with other components: a Culture of Wellness and Personal Resilience, in addition to Practice Efficiency.
In thinking more about these broader components, I’m reminded of the work of Robert Putnam’ Bowling Alone, a towering work, documenting the decline of civic virtue and engagement in this country, illustrated most profoundly by the fact that membership in bowling leagues has declined 40% from 1980 to 1993, while individual bowlers rose by 10%. There has been a dramatic drop in face-to-face social gatherings outside of work in the past few decades, and the thought is that this decline in the social fabric has led to isolation, loneliness, and a general decline in civility and personal resilience. See the recent Atlantic article “Kicking in Groups” on this, also.
We’re looking for objective measures that might allow us to survey for and detect burnout and resilience, that might get past ‘soft’ measures like “do you feel burned out” and perhaps measure “Do you have social groups that you meet with regularly at work” or “Do you have social groups that you meet with regularly outside of work”, and also “Do you meet regularly with a mentor or mentee?” We believe that measuring such behaviors MIGHT be a more objective way to determine who is more protected, and who is vulnerable, to burnout.
CMIO’s take? Physician/provider burnout is a real thing; difficult to address; and may be embedded in a larger change in the social fabric. Are you having success thinking about and intervening in this fraught area? Let me know.
I think it is crucial to read outside of one’s vocation.
Winn-Dixie is a supermarket chain where I grew up, in Tallahassee, Florida. Furthermore, Kate DiCamillo is a magical writer, whom my children and I discovered as they were growing up. I recently found audio books at our local library (Libby app, anyone?) and have been listening to a wide range of books on my commute to work.
Not only is the storytelling just brief, and perfect, but the audio narrator is entirely charming and transports me to my secondary school years and the heavy southern accents all around me at the time. The immediacy of the memory is almost as dramatic as those times when a particular aroma (?pecan pie?) ‘clicks’ in your mind’s eye back to a specific time and place…
In contrast to what I heard from day-to-day in town, I preferred to think that MY English was derived, on the other hand, NOT from my parent’s immigrant tongues, nor from my southern-drawling friends, but from Sesame Street, Electric Company and, of course, neutral-midwestern-toned Walter Cronkite:
“And, THAT’S the WAY it is, JAN-u-ary FIF-teen, NINE-teen-SIX-ty-EIGHT.”
Walter Cronkite, CBS evening news
CMIO’s take? Well, give this a listen, or indeed, read ANYTHING by Kate DiCamillo: The Miraculous Story of Edward Tulane, Tiger Rising, any of them. The sweet, optimistic years of childhood, the purity of mystery, the tentativeness of friendship and connection…Young Adult Fiction is where its at. And, Happy holidays, y’all!
This is a fun read. My father never understood my passion for fantasy (The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings) in middle school or sci-fi in high school (Ender’s Game, entire libraries of Asimov, Heinlein, PK Dick, and countless others). I’d try to explain, (not nearly as cogently as this journalist) that science fiction was imagining about our future, and that so many predictions from sci-fi authors have come true.
I’m currently reading Life 3.0 and SuperIntelligence for an upcoming book club, and also stumbled across The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, from 1959! Vonnegut is prescient; he predicts future concerns of machine intelligence, indeed artificial general intelligence, the concept (and worry) that, once created, a superintelligent being will be difficult or impossible to control and may find its human creators tiresome and unnecessary.
Hmm. The same theory is proposed, 60 years later by the authors of Life 3.0 and Superintelligence, but with more evidence and detail.
CMIO’s take? Where is the sci-fi about the future of Electronic Health Records? Ready to write one?
