I've been blessed with a few, exceptional, mentors in my career. Academia is full of bogus mentors, more bent on building their own careers than developing the next generation of scholars (I'd say they know who they are, but in fact they generally don't). Real mentors love the dialogue between mentor and protege, rather than loving their own monologue.
I need to work backward on this post, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, and I don't intend to cover the whole set of mentors here. I've mentioned Liz, of course. Others deserve attention, and I plan to honor them all. But Ray White, who died in October, deserves his own memorial. Official obits can be found here and here, so I will not recount the details of his life and achievements, though they are many and impressive.
Liz and I moved to Utah largely because Ray was there. Ray had given a talk at Northwestern in 1985 explaining his vision for the soon-to-be Human Genome project, drawing in part from the development of molecular genetic technology and in part from the genealogical resources available in Utah. Liz found a post-doc in Human Genetics--Ray was Chair of that department. I was just hanging around at the time.
When we arrived, in the Fall of 1986, the atmosphere at Utah was amazing. The emerging promise of genetics was happening on the ground, and everything else seemed small in comparison. There were battling teams, strategies, approaches, and the stakes felt (and were) high. Ray White was the high point, and both positive and negative energy flowed around him.
Any chat with Ray was stimulus for deep thought, some of which I have not yet progressed all the way through. He was enormously confident in the progress of genetic technology and in his (and his team's) ability to surf that technology to great achievement, very very soon. I was not a member of that team until very late in Ray's stint at Utah, at a point when many of the original members of his team had either gone on to great jobs at other places, or found themselves suddenly interested in extricating themselves from a fraught political battle that Ray was losing at the University of Utah. I knew of the battle, and how it would likely go, but found the prospect of working on the projects that we were trying to hatch so stimulating that I never really considered alternatives. I had a lot of confidence of my own--probably a little too much, in retrospect.
He was tall, handsome, charismatic, overweight. There was no doubt you had to bring your A game to any conversation with him. I'd had a little time to develop some ideas and found him willing to listen, from which developed a relationship that was much more about sharing ideas than about successful projects. The ideas were good, but a few years ahead of the technology, and seriously derailed by the post-9/11 internet collapse. We were basically talking 23andMe, but the underlying tech wasn't there yet, and no one wanted a biotech IPO right after 9/11 when the (first) tech bubble burst.
So it all fell apart. We collected a lot of DNA samples from families at high risk for cancers of several kinds, mostly prostate, breast, and colon cancers. The biotech company that was funding the work (DNA Sciences) folded suddenly in February 2002 before any useful amount of genotyping was done (using what is in any case ancient technology by current standards). At the same time, new technologies made family studies look uninteresting and NIH didn't want to fund us. We got some money from the Komen Foundation to do detailed genotypes for the breast cancer families, and have struggled even to get that work published (but you can read it here). Nowadays you would sequence them all, and have a more definitive story to tell. It can still be done, but the take home message is the Anna Karenina principle--that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way--and the otherwise praiseworthy mania for replication of biomedical studies is a complication: if each high-risk family has a different mutation of a different gene (or non-gene), it's exceedingly hard to find another example of the same thing with the same effect. Or a similar-enough thing with a similar-enough effect.
None of that is Ray's fault, of course. He understood a great deal more about how this would all play out than I did at the time. I'm still catching up, but likely won't ever get there. I'm grateful that I was able to spend so much time in his company.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Friday, January 18, 2019
Winter
Thanksgiving, 2018 was spent in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, in the company of Liz, Rosie, Lee, Fay (Lee's mom), Will (Fay's brother), and Felix (Rosie's hound/pit bull mix). It was cold, snowy, and sweet. We dodged flying into a winter storm by an hour or so, and the weather deterioriated for the next few days, from snow to sub-zero temperatures.
We had a nice, slightly Gothic, AirBnB in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Felix and I, who have not lived together since 2014, have a relationship that might be considered co-dependent if we spent that much time together: at dawn, he makes some whiny noises just in case a human will respond. I will, needing to get out of bed around 7 AM under any circumstances. That leads to a bowl of food and a walk. We both like this very much, although I don't know how disruptive it is to his normal routine. On Thanksgiving, the 7 AM temp was just about 0. I'd looked at the forecast before packing, and was prepared, with a down jacket, heavy gloves, a hat, and insulated boots. The dog gave up before I did-- a small, rare, victory.
A shout-out to Will Baird: your songs (and guitar accompaniment) are sounding great.
After the turkey, and the turkey tikka masala, we headed to Vermont, to visit my cousin Barbara and her husband Michael. I love every trip to Vermont, and wonder why we don't seriously consider moving there (mud season, possibly?). Michael was putting up his Christmas lights, and I pretended to help. Truthfully, I probably attached more lights in 20 minutes or so with Michael than I had ever previously set up. He's got it all worked out in advance--without my "help," he would probably have finished in 10 minutes, and gone on to something else. We watched old silent family movies, transcribed to modern digital formats--many more to come, and sampled some excellent local beer and non-local whiskey.
The next stop was Frederick, MD, home to the last of the Kerber-Bogar clan. We had some fun, a couple of nice meals, and serious appreciation of Mom's watercolor paintings. A fancy dinner (with martini) might have been a bridge too far, especially when we got a call from Mom at 12:30 AM--'I've got a nose bleed and I can't stop it'. For context, Mom was the only one of the four of us who didn't have nosebleeds. She says that she was squeamish about blood, but that can't be right--Karen and I both squirted blood out of our noses as if we were in some kind of contest, and Dad (also prone to nosebleeds) was at work for most of that time. I guess Mom just couldn't imagine blood coming out of her own nose. Fair enough, but the oxygen apparatus, and the transition to Winter, are most likely enough to change the equation. We spent 5 hours at the ER. There was nothing really wrong.
Then we got a dog. We call her Sunny, because sunny is something we need around here this time of year. She is a smallish (30 lbs) hound mix--almost certainly Treeing Walker Coonhound, mixed with beagle or something small, but hound like. She is sweet, energetic, and definitely a hound. She was also not entirely house-trained at the time we adopted her. She has a great howl, which she should learn to use more sparingly.
In any case, the adoption of Sunny has derailed any number of projects (including this blog). Here I am in mid-January talking about Thanksgiving. A major motivation for me in getting a dog was to walk. I got more than I bargained for: we have been averaging 5-6 miles of walking every day. I have had to upgrade shoes and insoles more than once this month.
Felix looks like a larger, stronger version of Sunny, but he is not as insistent about getting his way, nor quite as athletic or ingenious about getting it. She likes a car trip, but would prefer to sit in the driver's lap. Seat belts will not contain her--in three consecutive days, she found three different ways to escape seat belt restraints: 1) press the button; 2) back out of the harness; 3) very slowly push forward so that the inertia lock doesn't kick in and you can just squeeze between the front seats and sit in dad's lap. So I got a wire grid to contain her in the back of the SUV. That has worked thus far, but today she removed the cap on one of the screws that holds the grid against the head restraints. I think she still won't be able to unscrew the bolt, but we'll have to see.
We had a nice, slightly Gothic, AirBnB in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Felix and I, who have not lived together since 2014, have a relationship that might be considered co-dependent if we spent that much time together: at dawn, he makes some whiny noises just in case a human will respond. I will, needing to get out of bed around 7 AM under any circumstances. That leads to a bowl of food and a walk. We both like this very much, although I don't know how disruptive it is to his normal routine. On Thanksgiving, the 7 AM temp was just about 0. I'd looked at the forecast before packing, and was prepared, with a down jacket, heavy gloves, a hat, and insulated boots. The dog gave up before I did-- a small, rare, victory.
A shout-out to Will Baird: your songs (and guitar accompaniment) are sounding great.
After the turkey, and the turkey tikka masala, we headed to Vermont, to visit my cousin Barbara and her husband Michael. I love every trip to Vermont, and wonder why we don't seriously consider moving there (mud season, possibly?). Michael was putting up his Christmas lights, and I pretended to help. Truthfully, I probably attached more lights in 20 minutes or so with Michael than I had ever previously set up. He's got it all worked out in advance--without my "help," he would probably have finished in 10 minutes, and gone on to something else. We watched old silent family movies, transcribed to modern digital formats--many more to come, and sampled some excellent local beer and non-local whiskey.
The next stop was Frederick, MD, home to the last of the Kerber-Bogar clan. We had some fun, a couple of nice meals, and serious appreciation of Mom's watercolor paintings. A fancy dinner (with martini) might have been a bridge too far, especially when we got a call from Mom at 12:30 AM--'I've got a nose bleed and I can't stop it'. For context, Mom was the only one of the four of us who didn't have nosebleeds. She says that she was squeamish about blood, but that can't be right--Karen and I both squirted blood out of our noses as if we were in some kind of contest, and Dad (also prone to nosebleeds) was at work for most of that time. I guess Mom just couldn't imagine blood coming out of her own nose. Fair enough, but the oxygen apparatus, and the transition to Winter, are most likely enough to change the equation. We spent 5 hours at the ER. There was nothing really wrong.
Then we got a dog. We call her Sunny, because sunny is something we need around here this time of year. She is a smallish (30 lbs) hound mix--almost certainly Treeing Walker Coonhound, mixed with beagle or something small, but hound like. She is sweet, energetic, and definitely a hound. She was also not entirely house-trained at the time we adopted her. She has a great howl, which she should learn to use more sparingly.
In any case, the adoption of Sunny has derailed any number of projects (including this blog). Here I am in mid-January talking about Thanksgiving. A major motivation for me in getting a dog was to walk. I got more than I bargained for: we have been averaging 5-6 miles of walking every day. I have had to upgrade shoes and insoles more than once this month.
Felix looks like a larger, stronger version of Sunny, but he is not as insistent about getting his way, nor quite as athletic or ingenious about getting it. She likes a car trip, but would prefer to sit in the driver's lap. Seat belts will not contain her--in three consecutive days, she found three different ways to escape seat belt restraints: 1) press the button; 2) back out of the harness; 3) very slowly push forward so that the inertia lock doesn't kick in and you can just squeeze between the front seats and sit in dad's lap. So I got a wire grid to contain her in the back of the SUV. That has worked thus far, but today she removed the cap on one of the screws that holds the grid against the head restraints. I think she still won't be able to unscrew the bolt, but we'll have to see.
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