Genevieve Wanucha

Q & A from the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing

2011-12-07T16:17:00.008-05:00

In December, the Graduate Program in Science Writing interviewed me...

GPSW: Where do you live and do you like it there?

Genevieve: I currently live in the Boston area. It’s a very special place. Home to the psychology department at Northeastern University, the world class neurological researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the brain imaging collaborations of MIT and Harvard, this city provides near limitless science writing material.

GPSW: What’s your current project?

Genevieve: I’m working full-time on a book in which I document how neurodegenerative disease has inspired researchers to rethink the very nature of human emotion and self-consciousness. Writing it has been an interesting creative experience because I’ve watched my idea completely morph, contract, and expand since I started in the spring of 2010. It’s almost like putting together a puzzle whose pieces keep changing shape under my fingers mid-game–it’s exciting and daunting. The best part of working on the book is the challenge of getting as close to my subject matter as possible. I’ve visited labs to interview affective scientists and behavioral neurologists, met and observed patients in the clinic, and have really tried to understand emotion and its disorders as subjective phenomena that need to be studied as such. My ethnography skills from my undergraduate cultural anthropology degree are really paying off. I traveled to the California Institute of Technology to help dissect a brain, and I’ve been hooked up to a machine that monitored my physiology as I underwent emotional visual stimuli. I’ve met some very interesting, generous women and men along the way who will be my links to the inner world of brain science for my whole career. But, writing is not easy. It takes self discipline, and there’s a lot of stress involved in the creative process.

GPSW: When can we get a copy?

Genevieve: As of now, the plan is 2013. I will personally deliver to the MIT Science Writing department as many free copies as are desired.

GPSW: Do you work on other freelance projects at the same time?

Genevieve: I do freelance grant editing and the occasional biographical profile. I am temporarily avoiding more involved articles, as I conserve every last drop of research and writing energy for the book.

GPSW: What do you do for fun?

Genevieve: My social life basically exists in New York City, so I take the bus there frequently. With a job that is so mentally demanding, relaxing is important. I read as much non-fiction as I can and watch suspenseful films, documentaries about parallel universes and black holes, and a lot of cooking competitions. If I could afford it, I would have a lot more culinary adventures. I am developing an interest in yoga.

GPSW: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Genevieve: My dream is to be the go-to writer for magazine editors looking for features on brain and emotion science issues–for example, the ethical minefield of using brain scans in criminal trials or the psychiatric consequences of social stress during childhood. I’d like to have written several books and articles, one on women in the neurosciences across time, and PBS’s Charlie Rose would have asked me to come put it all in perspective.

GPSW: Favorite genre of music?

Genevieve: I enjoy a variety of alternative or folk rock music, especially the vocally intense songs of Florence And The Machine or the acoustic guitar solos of Iron & Wine. For everyday background music, I listen to classical violin, mostly Vivaldi.

GPSW: Anything else you’d like to say about being a science writer?

Genevieve: Science writing does not exactly destine you for riches, but it’s the only career that I would find so uniquely fulfilling in its dual requirements of intense sociality and isolation. It’s what I make with the help of the scientists and people who let me in. For me, over the past year, it’s been about hovering very close to day-to-day scientific process while living as a storyteller who makes researchers’ work come alive in the context of our times. A neuroanatomist who I’m writing about in my book recently told me, “You’re becoming kind of our Boswell!,” referring to the writer James Boswell who wrote an in-the-moment biography of the literary figure Samuel Johnson in the 1770s by following him through the islands of Scotland with a pen and diary. That about sums it up, except to say that I hope I someday stop getting nervous before every interview.

Data Deluge: Martin Wainwright

2011-10-03T12:30:00.003-04:00

From "Likes" on Facebook to five-star movie ratings on Netflix and uploaded images in Google Photos, our world is virtually leaking raw data. Increasingly sophisticated technologies are exponentially increasing the amounts of it we can collect. This data deluge poses certain problems for science and engineering, namely that we are producing more data than we can store and analyze. For LIDS alum Martin Wainwright, the real challenge is making all that data useful. "Data, on its own, is not really interesting," he says. "Data contains information. Information is interesting." It's not the details on Facebook that advertisers need, but large patterns in user behavior. It's not the individual cases of HIV, but the vectors of transmission that hold value for epidemiologists.

Martin spends his time thinking about how to convert raw data to meaningful information. He designs algorithms to extract structure from massive strings of zeros and ones. The needs for this kind of work are many. For example, image processing requires ways to compress pixels; Netflix uses algorithms that can quickly assess people's eclectic movie choices and come up with tailored recommendations. But Martin works on the fundamentals of culling information from data. While these potential applications of his work drive the research, they don't determine the conceptual questions he asks.

Martin works as a professor with a joint appointment between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. These days, he's spending his sabbatical here at LIDS. It's not far from home, actually, as Martin earned his PhD here in 2002. The institution has left an indelible mark on his career, and naturally, it's pulled him back. "Once you've been here, it's always in your blood," he says. During this extended visit, he is working on a book about high dimensional data, teaching a special graduate topics class, and continuing his research with a group of his Berkeley students who followed him to MIT.

One of Martin's favorite algorithms to emerge from his group is one that extracts all the voting records of US senators from a large database publically available at Senate.gov. When Martin demonstrates it, the complexity of the math seems to disappear. At a click of a button on his laptop, the installed algorithm spits out the image of a big circle. Tiny red and blue lines span the circle's diameter, like strings stretching across a dream catcher. Martin explains that the lines, red for Republican, Blue for Democrat, and yellow for Independent, show actual relationships between the senators.

This algorithm, without knowing the political affiliations of the senators, has "learned" about them. It turns out that there are many more connections between Democrats than Republicans. There is one highly connected node, reflecting many shared votes—it's Lieberman in 2006, right before he switched from Democrat to Independent. Martin says that this kind of algorithm reveals changes in data over time, which would be useful in extracting other interesting information from any kind of social network.

Martin's research could also apply to something called error control coding. When a satellite sends transmissions back to Earth, the data travels in a string of zeros and ones. During their journey, some of the data points will inevitably become corrupted; some zeros will become ones, for instance, and some digits will be erased. Engineers need to combat these errors of transmission by introducing redundancy, basically extra code. Back on Earth, the coding measure can help the corrupted code self-correct. This idea doesn't just apply to sending information to and from the far-flung reaches of space, though. Supermarket barcodes also contain an error control code. If a package is scanned off-center and records a number wrong, the extra checks figure out the mistake.

Martin has a multidisciplinary background, and jokes about being a dilettante. After receiving his undergraduate degree in mathematics, he earned a Masters in neuroscience from Harvard. The human brain may at first seem a big jump from theoretical algorithms, but Martin explains that the statistical analysis inherent in neuroscience modeling drew him into Information and Decision Systems. He is still fascinated by the brain, "the most sophisticated object on Earth," he calls it. "Computer vision systems come no where near what a simple visual system can do in our brain…It's interesting from an engineering standpoint because here is a system and we are not capable of engineering anything remotely close to it. At least not yet." In the future, it's a challenge he wants to tackle.

Martin says it might be possible to apply his current methods of high dimensional data analysis to neuroscience. As it becomes possible to record the action of different neurons simultaneously, something like the voting records algorithm could detect interesting patterns in the ways cells electrically interact. Similar to amassing senate votes from consecutive years, Martin explains, recordings from neurons would provide spikes of data over time. Theoretically, the right algorithm could infer neural connections and patterns, the kind of information that would revolutionize our understanding of the brain.

If you sit right outside Martin's office, located centrally in the midst of other offices and cubicals in LIDS, you will hear streams of voices and the sounds of collaboration emerge from all directions. Martin likes this unique feature of LIDS. "People [here] like to study fundamental principles, but the applications they work on are really diverse—biological, social networks, aircraft control systems" he says. So, there's common ground, and everyone has a shared way of thinking about things, but there's enough diversity as well that it makes for interesting interaction."

Being able to just walk around the lab and have productive conversations with other researchers is a huge benefit, as Martin's work is not always fun. Detecting order in the chaos of a data deluge is a "non-linear" experience. "You are struggling for a long time to formulate the right model, or to understand what key ingredients in problems are," Martin says. "But what keeps you addicted to it is that moment when you are working very hard, feeling like you are on treadmill making no progress, but then suddenly there is a flash of insight. That's what keeps me coming back."

Suprised by Success: Dave Forney

2011-10-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

It happens in the blink of an eye. A press of the 'Enter' key returns Google search results almost instantaneously. Video chats easily collapse the distance between conversing friends. For those born before the early nineties, the memory of those scratchy beep-beep-boop-boop sounds of a dial-up Internet connection now seem rather quaint. Almost no one has participated in more of these advances in data communications than LIDS's Dave Forney. From his graduate school days at MIT to his career in industry and parallel career in academia, he has been a key player in many of these dramatic advancements.

Dave acknowledges that few imagined the current speeds of communication technology. "When Google first came out, it seemed like a miracle even to technically sophisticated people. Ten years earlier, who would have predicted it?" For that to happen, Dave says, people would have had to imagine what would become possible if everything could be done a million times faster. The difficulty of predicting the power of an idea has been illustrated time and again throughout his career.

Dave recalls that one such example occurred right under his nose. Back in 1960, Dave's future professor and advisor, MIT's Bob Gallager, had introduced "low-density parity-check" (LDPC) codes in his PhD thesis. Gallager was aiming for the Holy Grail of coding theorists: to find error-correcting codes that could approach the Shannon limit, with feasible complexity. In other words, he wanted to send messages over a given noisy channel efficiently, reliably, and as fast as possible. Gallager's work was appreciated as a theoretical contribution, and was published in an MIT Press monograph, but it didn't make any practical impact at the time. Indeed, Codex Corporation (for which Bob consulted, and Dave later worked) turned down the opportunity to exploit LDPC codes; they were simply too complicated for the available technology.

Thirty years later, in 1993, the coding world was rocked by the invention of "turbo codes," which approached the Shannon limit closely with very reasonable complexity. Turbo codes use an iterative decoding method that successively refines a set of estimates of the likelihoods of the encoded bits. This looked a lot like Gallager's iterative decoding methods for LDPC codes. Soon it was realized that turbo codes and LDPC codes were closely related, and in practice it turned out that LDPC codes worked even better. "And I kicked myself," Dave says. "I should have thought of this, and so should many of my colleagues, but somehow Bob's codes had been tagged as impractical." Maybe this was true in the Sixties and Seventies, but we never re-examined them when technology had advanced in the Eighties and Nineties." Today, Gallager's codes achieve the closest approaches to Shannon limit, and are used in most new data communications standards.

Dave experienced a surprise like this in his own career, as well. As an MIT doctoral student studying under Gallager and Jack Wozencraft, his aim also was to design coding systems with good performance and reasonable complexity. He invented a scheme called "concatenated codes," for which error probability decreases exponentially while complexity increases only as a small power of the code length for all rates less than the Shannon limit. His 1965 thesis too was published as an MIT Press monograph. However, these codes were also viewed as impractical. Dave recalls an employment interview at Bell Labs in which he presented some of these long and complicated codes; he had the clear impression that he was perceived as "not a very practical guy." But within a decade, concatenated codes became the standard in space communications. "I had no idea they would have such a big practical impact," he says. In 1998, they were awarded an IEEE Information Theory (IT) Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation.

Another instance of a surprise success came after Dave wrote a system theory paper while a visiting scientist at Stanford, published in the SIAM Journal on Control in 1975. After it was accepted and Dave had become VP-R&D at Codex, he says that he virtually forgot about its existence: "I shot an arrow into the air; it fell to earth, I knew not where." Ten years later, he received a phone call from a system theorist wanting to ask him a question about his "famous paper," and Dave discovered that his paper had become a "citation classic."

Dave's primary career was in industry, first at Codex (1965-77), and then with Motorola (1977-99), after Motorola acquired Codex. Bob Gallager was one of the founding consultants for Codex, and suggested that Dave interview there after his graduation in 1965. At Codex, Bob and Dave became close colleagues. Codex's business success in the 1970s was based on a series of high-speed modems that Dave designed, building on Bob's basic work on quadrature amplitude modulation. These modems became international standards, and are still deeply imbedded in all personal computers, in a tiny corner of the Intel chip that allows you to connect to the Internet through a phone line.

In those days, Dave remembers that professors were encouraged to consult with outside companies one day a week, and most of them did. Dave says that practice is rare now, perhaps because professors have gotten busier: "I'm sorry to see that's changed." Dave says that his own experience has been that some of the most interesting research problems come out of trying to understand practically successful systems at a deep level.

Dave has been an Adjunct Professor in LIDS since 1996. He has received many awards and honors, including the IT Society Shannon Award, the IEEE Edison Medal, and membership in the NAE and NAS. He recently served as President of the IT Society, for the second time, and won the IEEE Donald Fink Prize Paper Award, for the second time. He continues to write research papers, and taught his graduate course on coding in Fall 2010. However, he says that his objective now is to be "more retired." He remarried five years ago, and now works mainly from his home office, although he still maintains an office at MIT. He says that his current research is a purely intellectual investigation of the theory of codes on graphs and its connections to system theory, with no pretensions to practicality. But, if the past is any guide, could Dave be surprised once again by an unexpected payoff?

A Laboratory Sleuth Follows the Trail From Gene Mutant To Search for a Cure

2011-08-08T13:06:00.003-04:00

From The Jewish Daily Forward by Genevieve Wanucha

Two empty champagne bottles sit like trophies on the shelf. Their wrinkled foil labels catch the sun, scattering light onto hanging plants and genetics textbooks.

These bottles lost their corks more than 10 years ago, after Susan Slaugenhaupt and her colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital discovered the disease-causing mutations responsible for two genetic disorders carried with increased frequency among people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

One bottle celebrated the 1999 finding of the mutation for mucolipidosis type IV (ML4), a neurological disorder that was first described a quarter century earlier. The other reminds Slaugenhaupt of the summer of 2000, when her lab confirmed the identity of the unique genetic defect responsible for familial dysautonomia (FD), another disease of the nervous system, first reported more than 50 years earlier.

“It was a crazy time in the lab that August,” Slaugenhaupt recalled with a smile.

Slaugenhaupt is a busy woman — a wife, a mother and a 24/7 scientist. She speaks swiftly, but not too quickly, paced by a distinctive diction that puts emphasis on final syllables. When queried, she can sum up the nature of her scientific career in seconds:

“So, I went to go see a leading gene therapy researcher after finding these genes, and I told him I wanted to fix these genes. ‘You geneticists,’ he said. I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Why can’t you just do your genetics? You’ve done your job, now you need to let other people who do cell biology take over. You guys are geneticists.’”

The remark spoke volumes — but not about Slaugenhaupt. For her, genetics has never been about just finding genes.

In graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, Slaugenhaupt used computers and other scientists’ data to study the genetic cause of Down’s syndrome. The work was rewarding. But there was a divide between the people who generated data and those who analyzed it. Squabbles over credit were common — and far from her style.

After earning a Ph.D. in 1991, Slaugenhaupt decided she wanted to get her hands wet in the laboratory and produce her own DNA data. She had no molecular biology training, so she came to Boston to work with James Gusella, director of Mass General’s Center for Human Genetic Research, who had pioneered the use of DNA markers for mapping unknown human diseases.

“It was a fairly brave thing to do,” Gusella said of Slaugenhaupt’s decision to join his group. “She went from not knowing how to work in the lab to becoming an expert in molecular biology and genetics over a very short period of time. She was really both tremendously adept and intelligent and driven to learn, and she also had this natural leadership.”

Gusella handed her one of his most tantalizing research projects: to locate the mutation responsible for FD. Little did he and Slaugenhaupt know that this research problem would take them the next 10 years to solve.

By 1999, Slaugenhaupt had narrowed down the gene’s location to a short stretch of chromosome 9. She then took samples from people with FD and characterized five different genes in this region, but FD-affected individuals only had mutations in one gene, called IKBKAP.

Peculiarly, people with the disease still produced a normal protein in most of their cells. But by looking at brain tissue taken from someone who died from the disease, Slaugenhaupt realized that the mutations only led to dysfunctional proteins in the body’s nervous system.

Slaugenhaupt and Gusella reported their findings in January 2001 in The American Journal of Human Genetics. At the same time, in the same journal, Berish Rubin and his colleagues at Fordham University published their own, similar results. The two groups are now in the midst of a drawn out legal battle over whose discovery came first and, thus, whose patent for the gene takes precedent. On April 28, the Boston team won a summary judgment; the other side immediately filed another suit.

There’s no disputing, however, that Slaugenhaupt and her colleagues were the first to find the ML4 gene. For that project, she teamed up Ehud Goldin, a geneticist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., who had been petitioned by Randy Yudenfriend-Glaser, a co-founder of the Jewish Genetics Disease Consortium, and her husband to locate the gene responsible for the disease afflicting two of their children.

Slaugenhaupt “was really excellent to work with,” Goldin said. “I quickly realized she knew exactly what she was talking about.” They published their discovery of the ML4-causing gene in October 2000 in the journal Human Molecular Genetics.

Since those publications over a decade ago, Slaugenhaupt has devoted her career to finding cures for both diseases. To that end, she has developed mouse models for both diseases and even started testing new drugs.

“She’s definitely been successful in bringing her expertise in genetics to translational medicine,” said Math Cuajungco, an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton, who worked with Slaugenhaupt as a post-doctoral fellow.

For instance, in 2004, Slaugenhaupt discovered in cell culture that a plant hormone called kinetin somehow corrects the IKBKAP mutation responsible for FD. Three years later, she showed that the hormone also worked in her mouse models of FD. Then, in 2009, Slaugenhaupt gave kinetin to 29 people with one copy of the defective FD gene who are not ill with the disease and showed that the drug raised expression levels of the functional gene to normal levels within two hours.

Now, 11 FD-affected adults are participating in an ongoing clinical trial of kinetin at New York University’s Dysautonomia Center. In June, Slaugenhaupt presented some of this research to families at the annual FD Day conference, held at the NYU Langone Medical Center.

“I completely believe the drug will work in the cells to increase the protein,” she said with her fingers crossed. “The big unanswered question is: Will that help the symptoms?”

Goldin finds inspiration in Slaugenhaupt’s passion. “She is not just looking for genes but for the important workings of them,” he said. “You just don’t often find this kind of geneticist.”

Jewish Daily Forward: http://forward.com/articles/140899/#ixzz1USS5knxw

'Shadows Bright As Glass': A Brain Injury, Then Art

2011-04-15T10:37:00.001-04:00

From npr.org by Genevieve Wanucha

For most of civilization, the brain was a lump of phlegm with "no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet," philosopher Henry More wrote in 1652. Our updated hunch about the origins of consciousness is now bound up in hypotheses of large-scale electrical brain networks constantly interacting within uniquely humanoid cerebral anatomy. Technology will surely continue to push neuroscience forward without historical precedent. But the brain is still so frustratingly opaque to any tool of science that the biggest insights often arrive courtesy of chance neurological disaster.

Such is the case of Jon Sarkin's brain anomaly, which Amy Ellis Nutt recounts in her mind-bending new book Shadows Bright as Glass. One morning in 1988, Sarkin, a family-loving, good-humored chiropractor, left the golf course feeling strange, a terrible chatter filling his ears. That was only the beginning. A massive post-brain surgery stroke strangled off oxygen to his cerebellum, and as soon as he opened his eyes in the hospital bed his wife knew her husband was gone. Sarkin, surprisingly alive and functional, had suffered a brain trauma that would transform him into an eccentric and acclaimed artist—all because a tiny nerve in his skull had snapped out of place.

As Sarkin's healing brain began to re-organize, he became, Nutt writes, "...like a man watching a parade, unable to make out the music of the band passing by because it was already mingling with the tune of the one approaching." He was a living lesson in right brain–left brain function. His right hemisphere excelled at creating novel, artistic patterns out of randomness, but struggled to fill in a new autobiographical storyline without the analytics and categorization supplied by the left hemisphere—rich material for Nutt's stated quest to explore mind, brain, and self through the aftermath of neurological injury.

The strength of Shadows Bright as Glass is in its deliberate, alternating structure. Nutt shuttles back and forth between real-time scenes of Sarkin's life and chapters devoted to the neuroscience of perception and creativity, and music and memory; extraordinary cases of savants and split-brain patients, and her own philosophical reflections on these phenomena. The challenging material is never far from hitting home. At one point, she reminds us that we are all one whack to the left temple away from being savants ourselves.

A skilled science writer, Nutt renders complex subject matter accessible to any interested reader through a seamless integration of explanation and storytelling. She doles out the science in good measure, never burying, and always enriching the poignant human story.

We are only as real as our brains are intact. And yet, as Nutt reminds us, the mind is more than the brain, created at the dynamic interface between self and other, invented through extended interactions with people and objects. But can science effectively illuminate something so nuanced? The question of how to measure subjective phenomena is arguably the biggest one facing social cognitive neuroscience today. Nutt's medical narrative offers a tantalizing solution to this challenge—that the self-shattering results of brain damage can divulge clues to the ancient mysteries of human experience.

Genevieve Wanucha is a freelance writer living in Boston. She is currently at work on a book about the science of social interaction for Free Press of Simon & Schuster.

A Mind of Her Own

2011-02-28T16:29:00.000-05:00

In Technology Review, March/April 2011

As an early crusader for social change, Katharine Dexter McCormick, Class of 1904, opened new opportunities for women at MIT and beyond.

In 1896, Katharine Dexter passed MIT's entrance exams. She wanted to become a surgeon. But like most women who had applied to study a laboratory science before her, she faced additional barriers to entry and had to take three years of prerequisite courses as a "special student" before enrolling for real. Another woman might have walked away, but the 21-year-old Katharine never doubted that she would be one of the first women to earn a biology degree from MIT. She didn't mind a few years of preparation.

Three years later, in 1899, Katharine Dexter walked through the cool marble halls as a full-fledged student—and soon proved her willingness to challenge authority. Women at MIT were required to wear hats at all times, and fashion favored ones adorned with long, dangling feathers. But that style proved a dangerous combination with the fire and fumes of chemistry labs. To the ire of the department, she not only defied her professors by coming to class hatless but upped the ante, saying that no woman should be required to wear a hat in any class. The chemistry department finally repealed the rule on the grounds of safety.

For Katharine's first assignment in English composition, she was to write about how she had prepared for MIT. "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology!" she began, in a flourish of playful sarcasm. "How much I had heard about it! How admirable it was said to be ... !" She wrote three pages about how she had traveled to Europe to study chemistry, French, and German and then finished three years of prerequisite study at MIT. "[In Europe] I thoroughly studied the German language, at the same time pursuing courses in the ancient languages, such as Greek, Hebrew, and [Sanskrit], in order to be the better prepared for the study of English at the Institute ... My previous work seems to be in vain, and I, myself, can only despair," she wrote. The professor handed her assignment back with the comments "Correct in form; margins admirable; punctuation careful. You quite misunderstood the subject."

Though her English professor would not have drawn it out of her, Katharine's determination to attend MIT was born of tragedy. In 1894, her brother, Sam, had succumbed to meningitis while attending Harvard Law School. Four years before that, her father, the esteemed Chicago lawyer Wirt Dexter, had suffered a heart attack and died before her eyes. Devastated by the fatal illnesses of these two beloved men, Katharine vowed to pursue a career in medicine, and she chose what she saw as the best institution to prepare for it.

She was her father's daughter. Wirt Dexter was an outgoing, idealistic man with a reputation for winning high-profile criminal cases and helping the poor. To him, even the bleakest problems had solutions. After the great Chicago fire of 1871, he became a leader of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, winning praise for his efficiency as the "almoner" in charge of distributing millions of dollars of donations and allocating coal, mattresses, food, lumber, and blankets to tens of thousands of victims of the fire. He spent more than 10 years in the organization, which lives on today as the Chicago charity Metropolitan Family Services. "One of the most remarkable men of his time," he was called in the newspapers. But he died at 57, when his daughter was just 14. It's probably no coincidence that she developed an interest in heart disease, writing an MIT thesis titled "Fatigue of Cardiac Muscles in Reptiles."

Katharine kept copious notes in colorful marbled notebooks from the MIT Coop, now powdering at the edges. They are the notes of a curious scientist. Her theoretical-biology notebook grapples with the new concepts of evolution, sexual selection, and variation. Her anthropology notes record teachings that natives of the Philippines were "dwarfish abject savages," evolutionarily closer to monkeys than to white people. She filled page after page with topics in human medicine: the electrical patterns behind dreams, the bony labyrinth of the inner ear, the powers of the thyroid gland.

Right before her final year at MIT, Katharine ran into the handsome, smart, and slightly erratic Stanley McCormick, an old acquaintance from her Chicago youth and—having helped merge his family's agricultural business with other manufacturers to form International Harvester—the possessor of a hefty fortune. He disarmed her, showering her with flowers and dinners, impressing her with his conversational stamina. "Stanley, please," Katharine told him when he proposed. "I need to devote all my attention to school. This is just not the time." But after she earned her bachelor's degree in biology, they married, and Katharine found herself in a tumultuous relationship instead of medical school.

Always moody, Stanley began suffering from violent, paranoid delusions, and within two years of their wedding, he entered McLean Hospital. Katharine watched in frustration as psychiatric treatment failed to cure him. Convinced his problem was malfunctioning adrenal glands, she fought to get doctors to investigate a link. In 1927, she would establish the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation at Harvard Medical School. But even though Stanley would remain under psychiatric care for the rest of his life, Katharine had no interest in divorce. Remaining his wife protected her from further "male-induced personal disasters," as she put it. And her life after MIT would be one with no room for such distractions.

Katharine plunged into social issues, beginning with women's suffrage. She spoke at a Massachusetts rally for that cause in 1909, and by the time the 19th amendment was ratified, in 1920, she had been both treasurer and vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1917, at a Boston trial for a young man charged with distributing pamphlets on female contraception, Katharine met Margaret Sanger, the feminist leader who had been jailed for opening America's first birth control clinic. When she heard Sanger speak, she knew they had to join forces.

To be free, she believed, women needed some measure of control over their reproductive lives. So she got creative, devising a plan that was elegantly deceptive and grand in scope. In Europe, diaphragms were legal. So Katharine, fluent in French and German, traveled to Europe and posed as a scientist to meet with diaphragm manufacturers. She purchased hundreds of the devices and hired local seamstresses to sew them into dresses, evening gowns, and coats. Then she had the garments wrapped and packed neatly into trunks for shipment. When French customs agents commented on the sheer quantity of clothing, Katherine gushed about how much American women adored French fashion. And if the New York customs service ever rifled through the trunks, agents would have found nothing but slightly puffy dresses in the possession of a bossy socialite, a woman oozing such self-importance and tipping her porters so grandly that no one suspected a thing. Home in the States, she ultimately distributed more than 1,000 diaphragms to Sanger's clinics.

On January 19, 1947, Stanley died of pneumonia, leaving a $35 million estate. Not long after, Margaret Sanger began hearing rumors that scientists were investigating the possibility of an oral contraceptive. Hoping Katharine would fund the research, Sanger introduced her to the Boston biologist Gregory Pincus, who was studying reproductive hormones. Katharine, who was then 76, wasted no time. At Pincus's Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, she monitored his research, poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars year after year, and helped launch the first human trials. The FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, seven years before her death.

But Katharine Dexter McCormick's most direct beneficiaries are women at MIT. One of the Institute's most generous donors, she funded its first female dormitory—McCormick Hall, named after Stanley. When it opened, in 1963, it provided rooms for 200 women, four times the number MIT had been able to house before. Women now make up nearly half the undergraduate student body—a legacy of Katharine's lifelong quest to dismantle the barriers that had threatened to keep her from her dreams.

________

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MIT Museum

More Photos at Technology Review

'Only More So': Mark Vonnegut's Battle With Bipolar

2010-10-19T11:13:00.001-04:00

From npr.org, by Genevieve Wanucha

Recovering from a psychotic break is far from a guarantee. The famed novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, metaphorically, of the challenges of mental illness: "Some people survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Others didn't. The turbulence is really something." But it's his son, Mark Vonnegut, who has written most vividly and personally about surviving bipolar disorder, about returning to a reality that's been snapped. In a phrase, life takes on a new imperative: to be "normal with a vengeance."

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So — Mark Vonnegut's exactingly titled second memoir — is an honest, witty and vivid depiction of "normal" life in between interruptions of mental illness. It's about how much one can accomplish, while a history of insanity follows close behind. "Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible," he writes. Instead, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was just trying to pass for normal, as if forgetting to tiptoe around the mental eggshells would let the voices return.

More than anything, Mark's bipolar illness gave him the desire to be useful, to make up for the time he spent feeling so utterly useless while hospitalized in his 20s. And useful he became — after 19 rejections, young Vonnegut earned admission to Harvard Medical School and pursued a long and dedicated Boston-based pediatrics career. To the benefit of his readers, this endows him with a rare prerogative to lament the American medical system, or more accurately, the insurance regulations and cost-efficiency guidelines that make trying to practice medicine today like "long jumping with weights on your ankles."Whereas Vonnegut's first memoir, The Eden Express, is a young man's artistic account of spiraling into psychosis amid the social tumult of the 1960s, Just like Someone Without Mental Illness is a vastly more readable, down-to-earth narrative. Wisdom tempers a zeal for political rebellion, and a sense of humor allows brazen self-reflection. He subsumes within these chapters a remarkable amount of his midlife experience, ranging from his around-the clock pediatric residency, alcohol dependence, returning bipolar illness that nearly launched him out a window, remarriage, and a life in the shadow of his father.

The late Kurt Vonnegut is an eccentric background character, and Mark's childhood memories of his not-yet-famous father are worth chasing through the pages for. Far from remembering him as the author of Cat's Cradle, Mark knows Kurt as the man throwing the chessboard across the room upon losing, dancing with his wife and a mop to the tango music in the aisles of Walmart, and adopting four children. It's always amusing to learn that one of the 20th century's most influential writers was once a terrible car salesman who couldn't get hired to teach English at Cape Cod Community College.

Coming from a man who was named Boston Magazine's "No. 1 Pediatrician" just as he was experiencing a fourth psychotic episode, Vonnegut's memoir is ultimately about how bipolar disorder can shape, but not define, a life. Just don't expect it to be normal.

From Beakers to Beaches: NPR's Summer Science Books

2010-07-14T10:45:00.010-04:00

From NPR.org, by Genevieve Wanucha

Supermarkets are full of genetically modified foods ... Internet databases hold all our private information ... and someday, we'll all have to fight our own clones! Luckily, there are plenty of great new reads tackling these present and future dramas, along with the mysteries of the male brain, the myth of innate talent, and the prospect of multicentury life spans.

You don't need a background in science to enjoy these books, but you may require guidance in picking the right ones to read. To that end, I've assembled five engrossing summer releases that will satisfy anyone from a curious nonscientist to a biochemist eager to refresh her mind with new ideas in neuroscience.

Long For This World: The Strange Science Of Immortality

By Jonathan Weiner, hardcover, 320 pages, Ecco, list price: $27.99
Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon couldn't accept death. He yearned for immortality. He published recipes for life-extending elixirs: Finely powder pearls or emeralds, and then stir briskly with the juice of four lemons. Obviously it wasn't alchemy that blessed humans with an elongated life span, but rather the triumphs of public health. Now, our life expectancies are increasing an average of five hours each day. Yet, we are still plagued with Bacon's hangup: Why do we age? Why must we land on the swords of dementia and macular degeneration?

Gerontology, the science of aging, is far from resigned to human mortality. Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner has documented every twist and turn of the field that shoulders the onus of curing Huntington's and cancer. His writing glides smoothly from the debates over the evolution of aging to Paleolithic dentistry. And from immortal unicellular creatures to the labs in which grape skins and soil microbes are showing potential as life extenders. He has woven easy explanations of complex cell biology into a narrative, character-driven tale that never loses steam.

If you're like me and have assumed that aging and death exist to push out the feeble to make room for the next generation, this book should be the first you read this summer. Weiner, who has spent hours drinking beer with the man who believes humans can live 1,000 years, doesn't take long to rewrite the way you think about what Shakespeare called "the second childishness and mere oblivion."

Emotion's Alchemy

2010-03-30T09:57:00.004-04:00

in Seed Magazine, by Genevieve Wanucha

NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE SCIENCE OF EMOTION UNRAVEL THE SEEMING NEUROLOGICAL MAGIC THAT TURNS EMOTIONS INTO SOCIAL EXPRESSIONS.

You’re at breakfast enjoying a mouthful of milk when it happens: the zygomatic muscles, anchored at each cheekbone, tug the corners of your mouth backwards and up. Orbicular muscles encircling your eyeballs slowly squeeze tight beneath wrinkling skin. A 310-millisecond-long noise explodes from your throat, extending to a frequency of 10,000 Hertz. Five shorter pulses of the “h” sound follow, five times per second, hovering around 6 Hertz, each lasting a fifteenth of a second. Your heart reaches 115 beats per minute. Blood vessels relax. Muscle tone softens. Abdominal muscles clench. The soft tissue lining your upper larynx vibrates 120 times per second as air blasts past. The milk spews forth. You are laughing.

Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

For centuries, philosophers and physiologists have puzzled over the phenomenon of emotion. Where are joy, sadness, fear located in the “gelatinous substance” of the brain? wondered nineteenth century phrenologist Franz Gall. How is emotion’s expression related to subjective feeling? In the 1890s, psychologists William James and Carl Lange suggested we don’t cry because we are sad, rather, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” but other theories reigned. And though the James-Lange theory has had a resurgence in recent decades, not until fMRI technology revealed images of the emotional brain could we begin to empirically explore Shakespeare’s musing in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head?”

A way of coming to a more integrated understanding of emotion is to surrender to the boundless accessibility of laughing and crying. I spent the last year occupied with such a task. The search for answers led me to areas as new to science as the mirror-neuron system, as painful as neurological disorders, and as artistic as method acting. There emerged a uniquely human science of emotion that begins to sew closed the doggedly dualistic notions of mind and body, heart and head.

Spicy rattlesnakes, done two ways

2010-03-14T17:45:00.013-04:00

Last night I met Chef Brian Poe of the Rattlesnake Bar and Grill in Boston, and thus began a weird coincidence of rattlesnake food knowledge. I've never given much significant thought to the slinky, venomous creature, but a conversation with a chef who cooks it and scientific study published today in Nature woke me up to this animal in recent hours.

First, during some intrepid and completely happenstance food reporting, I asked chef Poe about his "Serrano-infused Arizona rattlesnake with jalapeno-mango-hazelnut puree." (the photo is not of his dish). He told me that cooking rattlesnake is a slimy business. First, he has to import the snakes from Arizona, a place that has deeply influenced his cooking. Then the snake must be handled in a way that completely kills all the venom and anything else living inside the reptile. So, after it is peeled and gutted, the ropes of meat are washed thoroughly and must be frozen in salt water. When it’s time for the actual cooking, Poe has to pull the meat out. He says that the snake meat actually unfurls itself and never fails to send incredible shivers up and down his neck. He soaks it in buttermilk and herbs to soften it up with some tang. It tastes, he says, like a cross between chicken and crab.

The rattlesnake also shares something else with the human food world. Biologists at the University of San Francisco have found that a receptor analogous to the one humans use to taste wasabi and other mustards is employed by the diamondback rattlesnake to see the thermal image of their prey in the dark.

Venomous pit vipers use an exquisitely fine tuned infrared sensing system to detect images of their warm-blooded prey from distances of up to 1 meter away. The diamondback rattlesnake, a highly evolved pit viper, has an infrared system above and beyond other snakes. The nerve cells inside pits, or hollow chambers, located between their eyes and nostrils, act like heat sensing antennas.

Through genetic analysis, the researchers found that the TRPA1 gene is 4oo times more active in the snake pit nerve membranes than in other areas of the body. TRPA1 is nicknamed the 'wasabi receptor' because it makes a protein that activates the pit cells when it detects heat over 29 degrees C emanating from an object.

The analogous gene in the human and other vertebrate bodies uses this gene not as a visual heat sensor, but as an irritant and inflammatory agent detector. It seems human don't have the connection between the TRPA1 channels and the visual brain that rattlesnakes do. Instead, our eyes simply pop and water when we eat a glob of wasabi by mistake.

Researchers will use this new genetic clue to trace evolutionary relationships between vertebrates and invertebrates.

Photos courtesy of Julius Lab at UCSF, its an image resembling what the snakes "thermal camera" can do.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08943

Justice for Tomato Villain

2010-02-21T14:12:00.011-05:00

All due respect has finally been restored to the California tomato. Prosecution is wrapping up on SK Foods' ten-year bribery scheme to sell tomatoes of questionable safety at inflated prices to distributors, according to reporting from the LA Times and Food Safety News.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury indicted Frederick Scott Salyer of racketeering and six other counts of food adulteration and other corruptions. Prosecutors allege that the 52-year-old former owner and CEO and other SK officials fooled customers into buying lesser quality tomato paste that they mislabeled as high quality.

The indictment states that Salyer directed some employees of SK's customers to be bribed into taking the tomato orders and look the other way. In the end, Salyer apparently used $330,000 of bribes to thwart competition and get major buyers selling his products, companies including Kraft Foods Inc., Safeway Inc., Frito-Lay North America Inc. and Gerber Products Co.

When the investigation began in 2007, SK foods controlled up to 20% of the California tomato market. Prosecutors are claiming that Salyer's actions led super market customers (you and me) to unknowingly pay higher prices for tomato products--ketchup, salsa, baby food--prices that rippled across the entire country.

But it wasn't just higher prices--The tomato villain allegedly bought "high mold" tomatoes and sold them labeled as "low mold" tomatoes. (ending up in baby food). The indictment states that Salyer was "selling and shipping processed tomato product that did not meet contractual specification, contained mold levels in excess of thresholds established by FDA and was thus unsalable domestically."

Before his arrest earlier this month Salyer had been hiding out in Europe planning to flee as his employees accepted guilty pleas in exchange for reduced sentences. He claims that he is being wrongfully blamed by employees seeking lenient punishment. Sure. If convicted on all counts, he could get 20 years in prison.

The grounds for bribing are unclear, as far as I can figure out, but there was wire-tapping and tough-talk. It is also still uncertain what the punishments will be for the SK customers who took the bribes.

International food fraud is becoming an increasing problem. Counterfeit food (a $49 billion dollar a year industry) and fraudulent foods are not always unsafe to eat, but food safety is hardly a top priority during these crimes, as illustrated by our tomato villain. The FDA is quickly trying to improve U.S. food safety, something that has become harder as globalization increases. John Spink, a food-fraud expert at Michigan State University told Newsweek: "Products are moving around the world so fast now that there is just ample opportunity. And the demand for inexpensive food virtually guarantees that the problem will persist and grow." Food safety is not guaranteed, even though we often think little about it while shopping.

To submit a written comment, see: Federal Register Notice. The FDA is accepting possible food safety improvement ideas.

The FDA Food Safety Activities Page has some safety measure information

Recent food recalls

Sources:
Flynn, Dan. Ten Years of Bribery and Bad Tomatoes, Food Safety News. Feb. 20.
Huffstutter, P.J. Ex Owner of SK Foods Indicted in Tomato Scandal. LA Times, Feb. 19.
Print of woodcut, by Samuel Loag, 1869
Moldy tomatoes, photo by Adel Kader

Raw Art: Mia Brownell and the American Dyspepsia

2010-02-19T20:16:00.004-05:00

If we are what we eat, what are we ingesting daily? We have no choice but to feast, and our relationship to food is a complex one, especially in this age of biotechnology and consumerism. We can scour through food ingredient labels and follow the constantly morphing science as to whether GM food is safe, questionable, or even poised to improve our food supply, but sometimes one look at the artwork of Mia Brownell is all it takes to really confront our twisted relationship with food: obsessive, loyal, trusting, ambivalent and sometimes blissfully ignorant.

One of my favorite artists, she uses food "still-lifes" as her primary mode of artistic creation. Except--they are the exact opposite of "still". Her paintings vibrate with constant movement, undulating like a hanging stomach sac, or twirling upwards on the back of a meaty DNA helix.

To me, her proliferative fruits suggest both human form and genetic models, and their collapse then calls out the connections between them. Now that we have finally begun to gain mastery over the genetic code of our foods and even have the ability to tweak those genes for color and flavor, it is a very natural urge to wonder how these foods will change us. Her work is not a condemnation of biotechnology and consumerism so much as a statement on our times--A recognition of the closely involved and yet so distanced relationship we have with the food we buy, sometimes not knowing where the apple came from, or how the tomato grew, or what hand technology had in its being.

Her style plays on the famous still lifes of 17th century Old Dutch Masters who painted silver platters loaded with oysters and apples, sometimes tempting mountains of bright grapes, and sometimes blackened apricots writhing with mold and insects. Brownell has this exacting, hauntingly beautiful style, but paints with 21st century concerns.

Still Life with First Fruit, 2010, Oil on Canvas. 60x48 inches.

Still Life with Cock (Currin)
2007, Oil on Canvas
16x20 inches

Still Life with Pear, Apricot and Grape III
2005, Oil on Canvas
30x36 inches
Private Collection, New York, NY

Still Life with Pear, Plum and Grape IX, 2005. Oil on canvas, 98x78 inches.

Private collection, Carteret, NJ; courtesy of Metaphor Contemporary Art, New York.

Still Life with Double Double
2006, Oil on Canvas
72x54 inches

Still Life with Burgundy
2007, Oil on Canvas
60x54 inches
Private collection, New York, NY

Still Life with Grapes, 2001. Oil on Canvas, 42x36 inches.

Collection Lisa and Daniel Dubin, New York, NY.

Still Life with Thoughts of Jelly
2006, Oil on Canvas
54x64 inches
Private collection, New York, NY

"My paintings embrace a fusion of traditional still life techniques and scientific models of proteins, sublimated by notions of American dyspepsia," she writes of her work.

For further information: http://www.miabrownell.com/

Superb Unearthed Newspaper Headline

2010-02-01T13:11:00.001-05:00

--from my early twentieth century collection (newspaper name, yet to be found)

For Anyone Considering the Trade

2010-01-31T22:22:00.009-05:00

***

All eyes are trained on the long-necked bottle nestled like a baby in your arm. You smile, receive the nod to begin, flick open the corkscrew with one thumbnail, and, holding its blade in place, slice away the foil to uncover the circle of cork. You breathe. Only once. While snapping the blade back into place, you force the curly metal screw upright, and plunge into the cork at a twenty-degree angle. Twist, twist, twist, until the curls of the instrument have burrowed into the cork. You position the hooked tab over the rim of the bottle to construct a mini-pulley system. And with cheeks reddening, you pull and force the cork out of its tight, warm home of a decade. They watch, expectant. It is not an old Italian wine, so the cork does slowly cooperate. The final removal sounds like a tender kiss, not the pop of an over-eager amateur. And there you stand, the model of composure, relief and pounding heart veiled, ready to pour, and feeling for one short moment like the Roman gods of wine should be kneeling before you.

Waiting tables at high-end restaurants is an art. An art in the sense that it requires skill, along with a natural talent to entertain, calm, and ameliorate. It is a dramatic performance, a miniature one-time show of charm, patience and unwavering cheer. Only a few can achieve the perfect balance of charisma and subtle salesmanship. Luckily, the restaurant atmosphere caters to the art of persuasion. Most diners do not sit and scowl, ears perked for a deceptive deal. People want to be sold on the food. Timed just right, an exercise of mild psychological manipulation easily coaxes forth the patron’s cooperation with your imperceptibly strategized suggestion for the rare ostrich steak or the year’s finest pinot noir. Done right, it is a psychological, dramatic, and strategic accomplishment in the business of making people happy.

You will not start out sharply honed, with the ability to pull off a perfect night. You are charming though, and people quickly buy into your mention of the paella, a garlicky Spanish stew of mussels, scallops, calms, and spicy chorizo sausage, over creamy yellow saffron rice, served in the steaming cast iron pan. And of course, they must drink a cold, crisp Sauvignon Blanc, to temper and sweeten the spice. Again, people want to be convinced. But some customers are more difficult. They will find something to complain about because there always is something to complain about if they’ve decided against the prospect of enjoying themselves far before even sitting down. It will all be too salty, too tough, too crunchy. On a rare occasion, you will encounter this man: “Um, Miss, I just don’t think this wine is at the right temperature.” You explain to him that the white wine coolers are climate controlled. “But dear, let me tell you a little bit about Burgundy wine. They must be served at 45˚ for maximum flavor,” and as if he was born with a thermometer under his tongue, proclaims, “and this wine couldn’t be under 48˚.” You feel an artery leak blood into your brain and you take it away to make the ice it’s sitting in colder.

But the drama and talent of serving is only part of the circulatory system of the restaurant, only one slice of the intoxicating, nerve-fraying, chaotic living system of the fine dining establishment. Serving happens in a certain atmosphere shaped by sounds, smells, and tastes. The dining room is an un-conducted symphony of knives and forks friendly chatter, and mouths of laughter and salad. It is electric with your own urgency and quickly recycled short-term memory.

The smells are transient; chocolate as you pass a table as they finish, tomato and meat as you pass others. But the kitchen maintains a constant sound and smell, every single night. The air is thicker, men yell, and flames burst under the pans. The chef, angry and fat, grumbles by you, mad about onions, smelling of onions. The walk-in fridge blasts you with welcome cold air, as you enter to grab butter and mustard. The refrigerated air is stale, yet fresh with the tang of Roquefort cheese, the salty oyster bin, bundles of cilantro, a trace of floor cleaner.

Time disappears in the dizzying clamor and bustle of the dining room, between the stress of botched orders and the intoxicating rush of adrenaline, which allows you to ignore the jangling of your skin’s nociceptors as a 200 degree plate of salmon burns off your fingerprints before you make it across the floor. (Some places of employment outlaw trays. They too closely resemble the removed air of classic French service; they aim to emulate many aspects of white cloth haute cuisine of Europe, but trayless delivery exudes rustic charm as it removes the barrier between the patron and server, and exhibits the trick of balancing three plates on one arm.)

You are all at once a spy, an unintended observer. By the end of the night, you’ve zipped through a maze of relationships. There are the tables of tired married couples, sitting in uncomfortable silence, for whom food is a substitute for intimacy. There are the groups of corporate executives discussing the injustices of the world in stiff, starched suits and strong cologne. Food at this table is a reward and a symbol of exclusive belonging. Beaming newly-weds with sparkling eyes eat as if they are devouring their own sensuality, savoring the sweet taste of the future. Nervous first dates discuss the menu. Food will be a welcomed reprieve from sweaty palms. Boisterous families eat with the appetites worked up in school and office.

It is a kind of human terrarium, the American social strata played out in a fifty-square-foot area. Within a matter of minutes, people of comfortable wealth consume a dish prepared by illegal immigrants who chattered and yelped about big-breasted women and soccer as they pressed the sirloin to the grill. The diners imagine that trained chefs have scattered the garnish of pea shoots and edged the plate in Balsamic reduction. And you are the only one who can maintain the illusion, keep up that game of make believe.

High-end restaurants do not use the term ‘waitress’ anymore. It conjures the image of the red-checkered tablecloths of truck stop diners and women with plastic nametags. In this gender-neutral era, we are all servers. But the behind-the-scenes restaurant world is the wrong place to start looking beyond gender. The line between the sexes is never more stark than here. The kitchen is hot, loud, and flooded with testosterone. A mostly female wait staff buzzes, anxious for a finished plate. The Brazilian men at the garde manger station pump out charcuterie and Caesar salads, along with frequent bouts of culturally excused sexual harassment. Their words are so thick with Portuguese that the rancorous provocations blend into the background, so easy to ignore, so easy to get used to.

On the other side of the kitchen, the line cook shoots you a warm glance as if to save you from the taunts. He puts up a bowl of French fries in the corner of the food shelf, extra crispy with black pepper and garlic mayonnaise. Sometimes you make up questions about the food to talk to him or watch him chop the basil.

The heavy kitchen air hangs in balance as you cross out onto the dining room floor, like an immovable cloud, from chaos to civilization. And here, slightly inebriated male patrons, dragging their eyes across your body, say, “Honey, I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic” and return to their fiscally conservative conversation.

After the guests have left, after you have cleaned and rearranged every tablecloth and glass, the afterlife of the restaurant begins. Alcohol flows through the veins of those who have just lived the fast-paced, hectic night. Older women servers discuss their divorces and joke about sex. The younger bartender turns up the volume on the football game on the large television that hangs from the ceiling.

Smells shift. The sharp, sweet, noxious odor of sweat and the deep fried fish has sewn its thick stench into the threads of your black cotton. Cigarette smoke floats from people’s clothes. The green smell of cash is on your hands. The bar counter is crowded with lumps of twenty-dollar bills and wet glasses of rum and Coke.

People stay here all night not because they are alcoholics, not because they don’t have anywhere else to be, or because their logic is obscured by money and drink, or because a romance has sprouted in the hot, close quarters of the kitchen. It’s probably all of those. There is something to be said for the escape into a world where only split-second decisions are required, where something starts and finishes, fast, without consequence. You’ve taken haven in the gastronomy, sampling wines, learning the good way to tell a Cabernet Franc from a Cabernet Sauvignon, tasting the latest oyster or the darkest chocolate. But one can get wrapped up in the life. You are living in a world addicted to the rich, delicious food, the fast money, the free wine, endless gossip and instant romance. Your only choice is to leave, once and for all, this shrine to the fat calorie, to transitory entertainment, to the dollars and dollars and dollars spent on an indulgent illusion.

Photo credit: Persian woman pouring wine. 17th Century. Persia. From a wall painting inside the Chehel Sotoun palace, Isfahan, Iran Photo by Zereshk. Source: Wikimedia.