Xenopus laevis

I apologize to any readers out there who noticed that the Unlikely Science Heroes were on a bit of hiatus at the beginning of this Summer.  This was because my husband and I celebrated the birth of our first child, a sweet little daughter.  As a Parent In Training, I have been away from the blog for a few weeks, but in the meantime getting ideas for all kinds of heroes to write about as soon as I figured out how to both be a parent and use the internet at the same time (mission: accomplished.)  So in honor of this life-changing reproductive event in our lives, I have decided to in turn honor Xenopus laevis.

I was thinking at first that I would write about the scientist Lancelot Hogben  who is officially credited as a statistician, but was also a noted "experimental zoologist," a description from wikipedia which I kind of really love.  Hogben was a real nut in my opinion-  I'm sorry, but even if you are the one who developed a particular model organism for biological research, you are still kind of a nut if it occurs to you to inject said animal with human pee.  While my first gut reaction when learning about Hogben was less than complimentary, it was tempered when I learned more about him.  For instance, he was a pacifist during WWI, was adamantly and publicly critical of the heinous eugenics movement, and was super invested in democratizing and popularizing math and science, writing books like this and this.

Oh, and he invented a language. 

 

But I also had trepidation about writing about Mr. Hogben because I have very troubled feelings about any kind of animal testing or animal based science for human benefit.  I begrudgingly accept that many animal models are/have been enormously beneficial to humankind and were conducted as ethically and humanely as possible.  But on the other hand, we have committed some pretty egregious crimes against our fellow organisms, and even more disturbingly, conducted/are conducting research that was/is silly and pointless and does nothing for anyone but cause the needless suffering of innocent animals.  Which is why I decided to honor Xenopus instead of Hogben- it was Hogben's crazy idea that put Xenopus on the research map, but Xenopus really did the heavy lifting, and in the following years built a pretty impressive resume.

 

Xenopus is not very much unlike us (humans) evolutionarily speaking, which is why it became an important model organism for biological research.  Though not as popular a model now, it was most commonly used in studies of developmental biology.  Hogben injected human female urine in the dorsal lymph sac of the frog, which could be male or female.  If there was a presence of the hormone hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) in the urine, then the female frogs would ovulate and the male frogs would produce spermatozoa.  The "nice" thing about this test was that there was not a need to kill the frogs, the way that previous pregnancy tests required the deaths of mice  or rabbits.  Though, I don't think that Xenopus had the best time even if they didn't go under the axe.

Some other amazing accomplishments of Xenopus include:

-helped Roger Wolcott Sperry describe the development of the human visual system.

-an important model cell used for rapid expression of modified DNA or mRNA, or studies in DNA repair

-the first vertebrate to ever be cloned!

-took a ride on the space shuttle Endeavor!

Despite all the weird sh!t we have to them, in the end Xenopus got the last word

Dr. Jacqueline Perry

 

          Even though I have been living in New England for the past couple of years, I always log on to the Los Angeles Times for the West Coast news (as much as I think the LAT is not a great paper for such a great city, but that is a different post for a different blog.)  This morning when I logged in I was saddened, but also brightened, to see a prominent obituary for Dr. Jacqueline Perry, an innovator in the field of orthopedics, specifically for the disabled.  It's kind of a funny time to see this, because a lot has been happening for me personally which makes this loss especially poignant.  Without going into too much detail, I will say that my mother suffers from ongoing spinal degeneration caused by spina bifida, which has always figured largely in our home life and also figured prominently in my own interests and career goals.  Less personally, I also want to recommend the Sharon Lockhart exhibition "with" choreographer and biomechanic theorist Noa Eshkol at the Jewish Museum in New York.  Sharon is an artist I used to support closely in my work in the art world, and I always really loved the Noa Eshkol film as it was being conceptualized and produced.  

     Our own mobility, and the miracle of the mechanics of our bodies that make it possible for us to walk, sleep, run marathons and win sports championships is rarely appreciated until we no longer enjoy its full benefits.  Dr. Perry, sometimes referred to as the "Grand Dame of Orthopedics," dedicated her life's work to increasing mobility for people who had lost it or never enjoyed it's poetry.  In her LAT obit, she is quoted saying "most doctors go into medicine to save lives.  I am more interested in getting handicapped persons functioning again."

     Dr. Perry made all kinds of amazing contributions to orthopedics, while also teaching as a professor of surgery at USC through the 1990s.  (She was born in 1919, and was still working right up to her death, despite struggling with Parkinson's.)  She invented the immobilization halo with Dr. Vernon Nickel, and did ground-breaking work with patients suffering from post-polio syndrome, decades after she had operated on them during the Polio epidemic to help them regain ambulatory ability.  She co-wrote the definitive textbook on the human gait with Dr. Judith Burnfield in the 70s, and it remains a pillar of orthopedics even today.  

Some other cool facts about Dr. Perry include:

-she reported once that she was so sure she wanted to be a doctor, even at age ten, that she would spend hours in the LA Library reading medical books.

-she coined the term "scaption," short for scapular plane elevation, to help her friend and colleague keep a lecture short enough for a conference.

-Dr. Perry was first a certified physical therapist, and didn't finish medical school until she was 29 or 30.  

-Even after suffering a blockage in her brain making her unable to perform surgery, Dr. Perry continued to make huge contributions to her own field.  I find it especially poetic that she would not be deterred by her own handicap in treating the handicaps of others.

-After her brain injury, Dr. Perry did most of her work at the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, a pioneer center for seeking new independence for folks with spinal cord or other neurological disorders or injuries.  

-She was the first female orthopedic surgeon to graduation from UCSF and one of the first ten women to ever be certified by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery.

-She was LA Times Woman of the Year in Science in 1959

Rudolf Virchow

Okay, so you might be asking yourself why Rudolf Virchow is today's unlikely science hero.  He is after all, often referred to as "the father of modern pathology" and is credited with a slew of other accolades, like suggesting the cell is the basic unit of life, having a clutch of anatomical/pathological terms bearing his namesake, and helping to found what we today think of as social medicine.  Heck, the Society for Medical Anthropology even gives an award each year in his name to a distinguished article written "in his spirit."  (If you're wondering, the award in 2011 went to Sharon Abramowitz for her article about open mole syndrome in Liberia.  Open mole syndrome, if you're wondering, is a unique "culture-bound disorder," to use Abramowitz's language, that is likened to PTSD or other afflictions of traumatized populations.  But I digress...)  So if it seems like Virchow has done all kinds of amazing things and gotten proper credit for it, then what makes him so unlikely?

There are a few reasons I decided to write about Virchow.  For one, he is barely written about in comparison to other figures in science whose contributions were comparable to Virchow's.  This might have something to do with the fact that Virchow was really a polymath in disciplines that many folks wouldn't normally think of together, but in fact are closely interconnected.  Paul Farmer was quoted in his biography Mountains Beyond Mountains as being deeply influenced by Virchow's marriage of "pathology, social medicine, politics, [and] anthropology."  I love this, because even now bringing these factors together and trying to wrap our collective heads around what this means for health and human rights is very hard to do. Most of us specialize in one field and it's very hard for us to see how inextricable the fate of our field is from the consequences of others, and how we may not be able to solve our own specialized problems in say, public health, without looking at the consequences of a fascist regime that might be limiting access or worse.  

This is in fact the central tenet of what we call social medicine.  It's a very well known concept- to consider how socioeconomics make us healthier or sicker, and in theory seems like a cut and dry concept- make people's social and economic lives better, and they will be healthier.  What's great about Virchow is that he was a specialist in many fields, and so was able to make astute observations, that were both groundbreaking at the time, and also led to his own pragmatic solutions to improve health outcomes in unprecedented ways and weren't limited by a lack of knowledge in disparate areas. The best known story about this is when Virchow was sent to the Silesia region of Europe (that's now Poland, Czech Republic and a little Germany for the rest of us) to address an epidemic of relapsing fever.  To the dismay of the German government, Virchow did not have a scientific answer for them, but instead blamed the oppressive politics and poverty imposed on the region for the epidemic, which was revolutionary at the time.

Despite being extremely prolific himself- he penned likely more than two thousand papers in his lifetime- very little was written about him.  It seems like if you're interested in learning more about Virchow, this Ackerknecht book and this book by B.A. Boyd are the best options.  I also found what appears to be a book published just last year that I can't speak for but appears to be written in much the same spirit of this blog so might be more accessible than the other dusty old tomes (It could also be bad.  Who knows.) 

Since Virchow was such a renaissance man, he is credited with a slew of one-off terms and concepts.  But what is kind of interesting is that many of Virchow's most "famous" discoveries were made simultaneously with other researchers.  This could speak in part to the collaborative nature of science and discovery, but it could also speak to Virchow being kind of a ham and looking for credit.  For instance, you could reasonably argue that Theodor Schwann actually is the father of cell theory along with Schleiden, and Virchow just had better marketing with his Omnis cellula e cellula.  (In fact, Virchow didn't even really believe in cell division until he heard a really great argument from Robert Remak, and then he published Remak's work as his own!  Maybe this entry should be about Remak!  That's a really shady move, Rudolf.)  Or that Virchow's Node is really just Troisier's Sign?  Or Virchow-Robin Spaces should be Robin-Virchow?  Or Virchow-Seckel Syndrome should be Seckel-Virchow?  Though the Virchow Method of Autopsy is fully his own, and is in large part still in use today.  I am actually very amused by all of this, and I think I might plan to read Virchow's Eulogies before the end of this Winter to honor his spirit of collaboration :)

Some other fun Virchow facts:
-Bismarck once challenged Rudolf to a duel because he was so over being voiciferously criticized by the medical anthropologist.  Legend has it that as Virchow was to select the weapons, he selected two sausages, one of which was laced with Trichinella.  And the elder statesmen chickened out.
-Virchow published the "Virchow Archives" for much of his life, supporting groundbreaking research and writing that went against the the prevailing romantic speculation of German medicine at the time.
-Virchow had no qualms mixing politics and medicine and saw political action as a road to health equity.  He was a member of the Reichstag and co-founder of the German Progress Party. 

Jean Baptiste Lamarck

I'm no PhD, but in my short time as a post-bacc I've found that I'm especially interested in the progression of scientific history- how theories are proposed, heralded, discredited and discarded.  Much like pop culture interestingly, the scientific community will fixate on one figure. Despite the breadth of their contribution, or lack of, the mythology of their theories and work gets distorted over time as folks add and subtract to them. Certain people will not get the credit they deserve for their work, or alternately too much credit for work they maybe didn't do, but became central because of the discoveries of others.

I think it's also interesting how little time is spent in science classes looking at where these theories are coming from- historically, culturally, contextually.  I think it's most likely in the interest of time since you have only so many lectures to squeeze in all the practical knowledge that is required for the course- but I think it's helpful to think about where this information comes from, so we can be critical about it, and maybe make more informed decisions moving forward with our own work as fledgling contributors to the scientific community.

That being said, today's Unlikely Science Hero is Jean-Batiste Lamarck.  People seem to talk a lot of smack about Lamarck, with the exception of my brilliant genetics professor.  When I was recently studying for the MCAT last Summer, Lamarck was even listed in the official AMCAS study guide as the right answer to "wrong evolution."  After a quick check on Wikipedia, which I feel like is the most likely first source of information for people in general, and so in many ways reflects the greater knowledge of people about a subject, Lamarck's theory is said to "reflect folk wisdom of the time," which is both true and untrue.  While most people recognize that Lamarck was really the first one to propose a unified theory of evolution that linked changes in the demands of environment to changes in the phenotype of organisms, people also kind of write him off as a silly goose, that "use and disuse" is not a useful framework of evolution because you can't inherit a change in your parents unless it's genetically encoded.

But now we've discovered this super cool new phenomenon called epigenetics, where gene expression can be changed from generation to generation by mechanisms that AREN'T related to the underlying DNA sequence.  Epigenetics is so new (the term was coined in 1942, but it's only recently gaining momentum with research) that as I type this, Blogger doesn't even recognize the word!  It also means that maybe Lamarck wasn't as folksy as people thought he was, and his ideas were actually pretty revolutionary. 

In popular culture, there was recently a very nicely done Radiolab which among other interesting stories about environment and inheritance (including an excellently entertaining tale of a true charlatan that ends in tragedy) told the story of a recently released study between scientists at McGill and Columbia about epigenetics in action in the minds of mother rats.

Even just today, the New York Times printed this article about mutations in gene control regions  as opposed to genes themselves as an underlying cause for some cancers.  Gene control regions that have been directly mutated by UV light- the environment.

Was Lamarck right that the baby giraffe's neck would be longer because it's mother had reached higher and higher for leaves, stretching herself?  No.  But did he have some brilliant insight into the possible ways our environment has the potential to act directly on us?  Perhaps!

Some other cool things Lamarck has done include: 

Earning marks for bravery in the Pomeranian War (Pomeranian War!  That is a funny mental picture to me..)

Coined the term invertebrates and went on to have many species named in his honor, like the honey bee! (Apis mellifera lamarckii)

Wrote a seven volume work on invertebrates that is still useful today

So before you go throwing a party for Darwin, remember that Lamarck came first, and that much of what people consider Darwinian today is an amalgamation of Lamarckism, Darwinism, and a lot of new -isms that have accumulated onto Darwin as the decades have passed.

Rosalind Franklin

Before I even begin, I want to link to this thoughtful blog entry on the subject of Rosalind Franklin.  Since my blog is just a contribution from a novice and is meant for a more general audience, I think this blog entry, and subsequently the Maddox biography will give you a more nuanced idea of the situation than I can.  But, I have totally fallen in love with Rosalind Franklin.  It probably has a lot to do with the fact that my background is in photography, and it was Franklin's x-ray crystallography that made the discovery of the structure of DNA possible for Watson and Crick.

It wasn't until after encouragement from my really great organic chemistry professor to read Watson's memoir The Double Helix that I really got interested in Franklin's life, because regardless of whether or not you agree that Franklin should have been included in the Nobel Prize for the discovery (I say yes) she was really treated unfairly in the book by Watson.  Whether or not Franklin received the accolades she deserved based on her gender alone (I say no again, and agree with the prevailing historical view that her personal differences with Maurice Wilkins were a two way street) they did after all use her photographs without her permission, gave her the shaft in a bestselling memoir, and then only added the epilogue rescinding his awful portrayal of her after she died.  It's all fine and good that she, Watson and Crick all ended up to be close friends, but I don't think Franklin will ever be undeserving of any efforts folks make from here on out to point out what an incredible and brilliant scientist she was.

Some other amazing things Rosalind Franklin accomplished in her life include:

Received Second Class Honours at Cambridge before they were even awarding any B.A.s or M.A.s to women. (Cambridge eventually went back and awarded these fantastic women degrees after the fact)

Made important contributions studying coal while earning her PhD.

Was a prolific writer and researcher and published oodles of work, especially on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus.

 

Franklin has been awarded numerous accolades posthumously, so let's give her another one on this humble blog.  <3