Stories from Slate Stories from Slate Ten Things I Learned About Me <p>It was a brisk October day in a Greenwich Village caf&eacute; when New York University neuroscientist David Poeppel crushed my dream of writing the definitive book on the science of the self.</p> <p>I had naively thought I could take a light-hearted romp through genotyping, brain scans, and a few personality tests and explain how a fully conscious unique individual emerges from the genetic primordial ooze. Instead, I found myself scrambling to navigate bumpy empirical ground that was constantly shifting beneath my feet. How could a humble science writer possibly make sense of something so elusively complex when the world’s most brilliant thinkers are still grappling with this marvelous integration that makes us us?</p> <p>“You can’t. Why should you?” Poeppel asked bluntly when I poured out my woes. “We work for years and years on seemingly simple problems, so why should a very complicated problem yield an intuition? It’s not going to happen that way. You’re not going to find the answer.”</p> <p>Well, he was right. Darn it. But while I might not have found the Ultimate Answer to the source of the self, it proved to be an exciting journey and I <a href="">learned some fascinating things</a> along the way.</p> <p>1. Genes are deterministic but they are not destiny. Except for earwax consistency. My earwax is my destiny. We tend to think of our genome as following a “one gene for one trait” model, but the real story is far more complicated. True, there is one gene that codes for a protein that determines whether you will have wet or dry earwax, but most genes serve many more than one function and do not act alone. Height is a simple trait that is almost entirely hereditary, but there is no single gene helpfully labeled <em>height</em>. Rather, there are several genes interacting with one another that determine how tall we will be. Ditto for eye color. It’s even more complicated for personality traits, health risk factors, and behaviors, where traits are influenced, to varying degrees, by parenting, peer pressure, cultural influences, unique life experiences, and even the hormones churning around us as we develop in the womb.</p> <p>2. It’s nature <em>and</em> nurture, not one or the other, so I can’t entirely blame my genes for the fact that I love cilantro and <a href="">loathe broccoli and raw tomatoes</a>. There’s likely a genetic component that determines specific taste receptors. I am sensitive to bitterness, a recessive genetic trait that enables me to detect the presence of compounds called glucosinolates found in most cruciferous vegetables. But chances are, environment played a role, too.</p> <p>3. My brain scan—courtesy of neuroscientist David Eagleman’s lab—told me nothing about who I am, but it did confirm that I have very clear sinuses. Yes, an entire chapter is devoted to a null fMRI result—or rather, I participated in a group study that has not yet been completed. Science progresses at its own pace and doesn’t care about <a href="">my book deadlines</a>. Even so, it will reveal very little about me as an individual. The typical image published for an fMRI study is a color-coded visual representation of raw statistical data from many different brain scans, not a snapshot of one person’s brain in action. But I did get to see a very pretty X-ray image of my noggin on a computer monitor and take a fly-through virtual tour of key brain regions (and the sinus cavity).</p> <p>4. Being shy and being introverted are not the same thing. People are often surprised to learn I was painfully shy as a teenager. I once hid in the girls’ room during a junior-high-school dance, lest I found myself in the terrifying position of having to make casual conversation or <em>dance</em>. I overcame that shyness as an adult, but I am still an introvert. That doesn’t mean I’m antisocial; it just means I need to withdraw from social interactions to recharge my batteries once in awhile. Think of it this way: After a bad breakup, would you rather go out drinking with your friends, or stay home with a pile of DVDs and a pint of ice cream? If the former, you’re an extrovert; if the latter, you’re an introvert.</p> <p>5. Drunken fruit flies may hold the key to why I’m such a lightweight. Behavioral geneticist Ulrike Heberlein breeds batches of genetically altered fruit flies: Specifically, she knocks out certain genes and tests how this affects their tolerance for alcohol. The strains have names like “Hangover,” “Barfly,” “Tipsy,” and my personal favorite, “Cheap Date.” Those “Cheap Date” flies just can’t hold their liquor. Yet there is no such thing as one alcoholism gene; behaviors cannot be reduced to traits. When it comes to the central question—are alcoholics born or made?—science equivocates by answering truthfully, “Eh, it’s a bit of both, actually.” &nbsp;</p> <p>6. My avatar alter ego, <a href="">Jen-Luc Piquant</a>, might be more like me than I realize. Avatars are a <a href="">virtual extension of the self</a>. We bond psychologically with our avatars and those bonds are stronger the more similarities we share with our pixilated alter egos. We need to be able to look at our avatar and feel “This is me.” But our identities are always in flux. My avatar, which I use for <a href="">blogging</a> and <a href="">Twitter</a>, is part of me, but she is not the totality of me, and she may not even be who I am at the moment.</p> <p>7. I was an incorrigible tomboy growing up, so it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t born in the 17<sup>th</sup> century, where my dress and behavior would have been deemed “unnatural”—unless I had the good fortune to be born into French aristocracy, where such peccadilloes were tolerated, if not fully embraced. But deeply ingrained attitudes about gender still infuse every aspect of society today, and it remains socially unacceptable, for instance, for little boys to love princesses or Easy-Bake Ovens. That rigid binary thinking needs to change. Such stereotypes arise from lazy thinking, and while they might make it easier to deal with the complexity in the world, they also make it far too easy to lose sight of people as individuals—and they can cause very real psychological harm to those children who don’t fit the stereotypes.</p> <p>8. &nbsp;I become “that person” at the party if I take LSD. You know the one. Did you see that <a href="">episode of <em>Mad Men</em></a> where they all dropped acid and that one woman was crawling around on the carpet? Yeah, that was me. I bonded with an oriental rug on a deep, molecular level, and yet it never calls. Also? It’s really hard to take handwritten notes when you’re tripping on acid because your hand keeps melting into the paper.</p> <p>9. When I die, and my brain shuts down for good, my self will cease to exist, because consciousness is emergent. It is a real thing—<em>I</em> think, anyway, although some very smart people disagree—but it is still a product of that constant flow of neural information in the brain. “No matter, no mind,” as neuroscientist Christof Koch has phrased it. The world will go on without us after we die—a monstrously heartless thing for it to do. This terrifying thought is at the root of our primal fear of death: We just can’t imagine a world without “I.” &nbsp;We cope by finding our own way to create meaning out of our allotted time on this Earth.</p> <p>10. We are the stories we tell. We all construct personal narratives, and we spend our lives working and reworking them. Our memories might not be as accurate as we think—we fabricate and embellish even when we believe ourselves to be truthful—but this so-called autobiographical self is key to how we construct a unified whole out of the many components that contribute to our sense of self. You can sequence my DNA, scan my brain, subject me to a battery of personality tests, but you won’t find my essence in any one of them alone. Stories provide that unifying interpretive layer. If you really want to know who I am, let me tell you a story.</p> Thu, 30 Jan 2014 18:03:53 GMT Jennifer Ouellette 2014-01-30T18:03:53Z And maybe about you, too, while writing a book about the self. Health and Science Ten Things I Learned While Writing a Book About the Self 100140130007 neuroscience psychology Jennifer Ouellette Science false false false 10 things @JenLucPiquant learned while writing about the self. Ten Things I Learned While Writing a Book About the Self 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 3127476335001 Photo by Oliver Sved/Thinkstock For one, brain scans actually reveal very little about us as individuals. The Director of Evolution <p>Charles Darwin spent a lot of time with pigeon breeders and was fascinated by how they selectively bred individual birds to produce offspring with neck ruffles or other distinctive traits. It was one more piece of evidence for his theory of evolution through natural selection: the notion that nature preferentially selects those organisms best suited to a given environment and ensures that the fittest reproduce and survive.</p> <p>Frances Arnold designed a way to direct evolution—to take over the wheel from nature. <a href="">In her lab at Caltech</a>, she can essentially rewrite DNA then use it to change the way organisms behave, creating new proteins for renewable energy—“green” chemistry. Her methods revolutionized the field of protein engineering and are now used in hundreds of labs around the world.</p> <p>Arnold came up with her plan to override natural selection in the late 1980s, when she was a young, untenured chemical engineer at Caltech. Protein engineering was still in its infancy. Progress was slow, and she was impatient. Most of her colleagues were designing elegant, small-scale experiments to discover the rules underlying how DNA sequence and structure translate into proteins that carry out key functions—a noble endeavor but one that continues to elude the best scientific minds in the world. Arnold wanted to solve real-world problems, and she thought she could use nature’s own method—evolution—to speed things up.</p> <p>“I thought, ‘Why on earth would you try to design something you don’t understand?’ ” she recalls. “Evolution is the only molecular optimization method we know, so why not use it? Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.”</p> <p>Arnold grew up in Pittsburgh. Her father was a nuclear physicist who assured his daughter she could do anything, and she believed him. Fiercely independent, she lived on her own in high school, and worked as a cab driver and a cocktail waitress at a local jazz club to pay the rent, and protested the Vietnam War. Her grades suffered, and she wasn’t sure how easily she would get into a good college. But she did, perhaps benefiting because she was one of the only women to apply for a major in mechanical engineering.&nbsp;</p> <p>Since her chosen major had relatively few requirements, she spent much of her time studying economics, Russian, and Italian—not to mention dalliances with the occasional Italian post-doc. After her sophomore year, she spent a year working in a factory outside Milan that builds nuclear power-plant components. Arnold remembers the 1970s as “believe nothing, protest everything, try everything” times, and that’s what she was determined to do.</p> <p>Arnold never intended to go into science; she envisioned a bright future as a diplomat or the CEO of a multinational corporation, perhaps earning an advanced degree in international affairs. But the oil crisis of the 1970s and growing concerns over nuclear energy in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster piqued her interest in alternative energy. She realized how critical renewable energy would be to resolving the global energy crisis, and she threw herself into the cause.</p> <p>After graduating from Princeton, Arnold went to work for the Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), writing United Nations position papers and designing solar energy facilities for remote locations with few resources. But national priorities on energy shifted with the election of Ronald Reagan, and Arnold decided to go back to school. She earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California–Berkeley and initially intended to work on biofuels. But excitement about the burgeoning new field of biotechnology caused her to rethink her options. She ended up at Caltech as a biochemical engineer, and she’s been there ever since, manipulating evolutionary selection to her own ends.</p> <p>In one sense, her ability to direct evolution is nothing new: People have <a href="">engaged in artificial selection for centuries</a> by choosing to breed only those organisms that exhibit the most desirable traits, whether it be ruffles in pigeons, speed in horses, bright colors in orchids, or herding behavior in dogs. The only difference is that Arnold is using cutting-edge biotechnology to manipulate DNA and selectively breed molecules. To some extent, it’s easier to breed outrageous, surprising, or useful new things at the molecular level. It’s not possible to cross a cat with a fungus and produce a functioning organism, but you can cross fungal proteins and cat proteins successfully. And the progeny aren’t as strange as you might think.</p> <p>Cells replicate by dividing in two, but with each replication, small variations creep into the DNA sequence. Rather than waiting for natural mutations, Arnold causes small mistakes to be made when DNA is copied in the test tube. Then she inserts all the mutated copies into living microbes, which translate the genes into proteins. At that point, she combs through the different proteins to find the ones she likes.</p> <p>Arnold opted for this brute-force approach, running hundreds—even thousands—of experiments with random mutations in the proteins, selecting those with the characteristics she wanted to breed in the second generation and so on over multiple generations. And because microbes reproduce every 20 minutes, it didn’t take billions of years to see the results. “All you have to do is look at antibiotic resistance to understand how quickly biology can adapt,” she says.</p> <p>She published her first papers on evolutionary protein engineering in the early 1990s in the face of considerable skepticism. A bit of intellectual snobbery may have been in the mix. There is an unspoken hierarchy in academia. It’s a culture that favors curiosity-driven basic research over practical applications, and it draws a fine distinction between science and engineering. “Some people looked down their noses at it,” Arnold admits. “They might say ‘It’s not science’ or that ‘Gentlemen don’t do random muto-genesis.’ But I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a gentleman, so it didn’t bother me at all. I laughed all the way to the bank, because it works.”</p> <p>More than one senior colleague over the years has accused her of being arrogant, a charge she cops to readily and does not apologize for. It’s a quality that has helped her stay on top in a highly competitive research environment. “I’ve always been confident,” she says, describing herself as “honestly arrogant—I wasn’t pretending. I never had any doubt about the utility and importance of what I was doing.”</p> <p>Among the many intriguing results from her research were new proteins that don’t break down under high temperatures, making them ideal for everything from laundry detergents to developing new drugs. Merck drew on her techniques to develop a process for manufacturing the diabetes drug Januvia.</p> <p>She also developed new kinds of enzymes that help convert cellulose in plants into sugars and then into useful fuels and chemicals. That work, and a passion for building a green chemicals industry based on renewable resources, led to Arnold co-founding in 2005 a biofuels company called Gevo, which went public a few years later. But she didn’t become the CEO—the job she’d envisioned for herself as an undergraduate. By then she knew it wasn’t her forte. “I know how to do science. I know how to make things,” she says. “I don’t know how to run a company. Now that’s a really tough job.”</p> <p>Arnold’s scientific gamble back in the 1980s to jump into biotechnology and engineer the biological world has paid off in hundreds of publications, dozens of patents, and <a href="">countless professional accolades</a>. She is one of only a few people with membership in all three of America’s national academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering. In January, she went to the White House to <a href="">receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation</a>.</p> <p>Many academic researchers take a sabbatical break every seven years or so, but Arnold has taken just one in her 27 years at Caltech. She spent that time traveling with her family through Australia, Madagascar, Namibia, South Africa, and Egypt.</p> <p>She has faced plenty of challenges. Right after she returned from her sabbatical, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and spent two years battling it into remission. She lost her husband, Caltech physicist Andrew Lang, in 2010. Today she is cancer-free, focused on her work, and getting her three sons through high school. “I don’t sit around feeling sorry for myself,” she says. “There’s always somebody who’s a lot worse off than you. I love what I do, and I’m grateful for every day I can do it.”</p> <p>Arnold may have a pragmatic bent, but ultimately she’s just as eager as her colleagues to decipher nature’s code when it comes to how genetic sequence dictates function—she’s simply realistic about the unlikelihood of this happening in her lifetime. “We can do all this manipulation, but we don’t understand the rules of composition for DNA,” she says. “So the best we can do is cut and paste pieces from compositions that nature has already written.” If she can’t compose, she’ll go right on breeding. Maybe she hasn’t been doing this for 4 billion years, but Arnold just might give nature a run for its money yet.</p> Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:19:00 GMT Jennifer Ouellette 2013-03-08T16:19:00Z How Frances Arnold mutates DNA and breeds strange, new, and useful creatures. Health and Science Directed Evolution: How to Turn Mutations Into Green Fuel 100130308008 evolution big questions evolution big questions Jennifer Ouellette Alternative Energy false false false Directed Evolution: How to Turn Mutations Into Green Fuel Directed Evolution: How to Turn Mutations Into Green Fuel 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2210179768001 Courtesy of Frances Arnold. Frances Arnold in her laboratory Cracking Eggs 101 <p>Sometimes the most useful cooking tips can be found in classic movies. Consider Billy Wilder’s 1954 romantic comedy, <a href=";camp=0&amp;creative=0&amp;linkCode=as4&amp;creativeASIN=B00003CXCG&amp;adid=08N1AF412Y6B68QMYE7R&amp;"><em>Sabrina</em></a><em>.</em> Suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, young Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn), a chauffeur’s daughter, is sent to Paris to train as a chef at a Cordon Bleu-type academy. One day’s lesson concerns <a href="">the proper way to crack an egg</a>. “An egg is not a stone,” the instructor admonishes his charges. “It is a living thing. It has a heart. So when we crack it, we must not torment it. We must be merciful and execute it quickly, like with the guillotine.”</p> <p>It’s all in the wrist, the chef insists. He proceeds to demonstrate, holding an egg gently between thumb and forefinger before rapping it sharply against the edge of a bowl with one swift stroke: “One, two, three, CRACK! New egg!”</p> <p>This is the classic <a href="">one-handed egg-cracking technique</a> favored by chefs, if only for its virtue as a time-saver, given the large number of eggs the average Parisian chef must crack on a given day. (The French do love their souffl&eacute;s.) But opening an eggshell between the fingers and thumb of one hand requires precision and practice, and most neophytes, like Sabrina, end up with a hand full of crushed egg.</p> <p>Fortunately, there are alternative methods that get the job done perfectly well. My mother taught me to crack the egg on the rim of the mixing bowl before gently pulling the two halves apart with both hands, while my husband prefers to tap the eggshell gently with the dull edge of a knife. Others might favor striking the egg against the edge, or the surface, of a countertop. If a recipe calls for egg whites—a nice fluffy meringue, for example, or a vintage whiskey sour—extra precision is needed in whatever technique you choose: Ideally, you want two equal halves of the shell so you can pour the yolk back and forth from one half to the other, letting the egg white run off into the bowl.</p> <p>All these methods have one thing in common: They rely on <a href="">applying just enough force to the center of the egg</a>—the egg equator, if you will—to crack the shell without shattering it. And science has finally come up with an explanation for what comes naturally to most home cooks: Eggs crack best around their equators, says MIT mechanical engineer <a href="">Pedro Reis</a>, because of their geometry. He and a young colleague, Arnaud Lazarus, have just published a paper in <a href=""><em>Physical Review Letters</em></a> demonstrating a link between an eggshell’s geometry (it belongs to a class of shapes known as ovoids) and a mechanical property called <em>rigidity</em>—the quality that, along with strength, determines how much force an object can withstand before it cracks.</p> <p>Scientifically, strength and rigidity are distinct, though related, concepts: The shape of an eggshell can determine its rigidity without affecting its strength. Reis explains the distinction by pointing out the difference between two eggshells, one of which is unbroken, and the other of which has tiny cracks in the shell. The two eggshells have the same rigidity, but the latter has less strength, because it breaks under less applied force than the egg with no cracks.</p> <p>Reis’ and Lazarus’ model is a mathematical formula that predicts what will happen when you poke thin, shell-like structures at specific points. That is essentially what it takes to crack an egg: a sharp, targeted strike at the specific point where the egg’s structure is weakest. The shell has a threshold beyond which it can’t absorb any more force, and once that threshold is crossed, the shell will crack.</p> <p>Reis became interested in studying eggshells after successfully walking on a few cartons of eggs without breaking them, a <a href="">popular party trick among the geekerati</a>. “I didn’t believe it until the first time I did it, but you can actually stand on a carton of eggs,” he said. The key is to align the eggs so that the narrow pole is pointing upward, and step in such a way to distribute your weight over the entire surface area, to <a href="">avoid overloading any one eggshell</a>. (It helps to go barefoot, Reis says.) Usually, it takes a little more than 5&frac12; pounds of force to crack an eggshell—much less than the weight of a human being—but the precise amount of force needed depends on the direction in which that force is applied and how much the force is distributed (or not) over the surface of the shell.</p> <p>If you take an egg, hold it between your thumb and middle finger by either pole (the tip and bottom of the egg), and press down hard, it is unlikely to crack. Your thumb and middle finger can’t exert sufficient force to bring the shell to a breaking point. Even if you press against each pole with both hands, as hard as you can, chances are you won’t be able to crack the egg. It has very high rigidity, or stiffness, in that direction.</p> <p>That’s because the most crack-resistant part of the eggshell is its narrow tip. The more sharply the egg curves, the more rigid the shell becomes. However, if you turn the egg 90 degrees and press down right in the very center, it will be far easier to crack—and the MIT model accounts for that. “We can’t tell you precisely <em>when</em> the egg is going to break,” says Reis, “but we can tell you why it makes sense to break it along that direction.”</p> <p>Reis and Lazarus aren’t the only scientists who are intrigued by the unusual properties of eggshells. There is a <a href="">surprisingly long history of scientific studies of eggshells</a>, not only in the agricultural sciences but also in the aerospace industry during the 1950s and 1960s, when the focus was on failure analysis of the metal shells used to build airplanes. Failure analysis is the study of how things break, exactly how and why brittle fracturing occurs when one drops a glass, or crashes an airplane—and eggshells’ resistance to shattering made them interesting to airplane engineers.</p> <p>Eggshells aren’t quite as brittle as glass or the metal shell of an airplane, because they are laced with organic material. Any given material gets its properties, like resistance to cracking, from its crystalline structure. Eggshell is similar to tooth enamel or seashells; all of these materials are made up primarily of calcium carbonate (calcite) crystals embedded within a protein matrix. It’s the latter that gives the shell its remarkable toughness, which is bolstered by a thin inner membrane made of collagen. Rather than splitting an eggshell in one clean break, cracks in an eggshell spread bit by bit, millimeter by millimeter. “Cracks propagate with great difficulty and the eggshell doesn’t shatter,” says <a href="">Michelle Oyen</a>, a materials scientist at Cambridge University. “The damage is very localized.” In that respect, an eggshell is nature’s perfect packaging.</p> <p>But not infallible. Science supports conventional chef wisdom when it comes to the optimal way to crack an egg without shattering the shell completely. There may be individual variations from cook to cook: Oyen personally favors a firm tap on a flat countertop. But it will always involve a single sharp smack—as opposed to a series of gentle taps, which are more likely to shatter the shell—against a hard surface or edge, targeting the center of the egg. For the one-handed technique, some chefs advise practicing with a golf ball until you get just the right feel for exactly how much pressure is required. No matter which technique you use, you should heed the advice of Sabrina’s persnickety instructor: Be merciful. A fast, clean break is best.</p> Wed, 26 Sep 2012 14:30:03 GMT Jennifer Ouellette 2012-09-26T14:30:03Z How physics can help you when you’re making your next soufflé. Health and Science What Physics Has To Say About the Best Way To Crack an Egg 100120926004 eggs cooking Jennifer Ouellette Food false false false What Physics Has To Say About the Best Way To Crack an Egg What Physics Has To Say About the Best Way To Crack an Egg Photograph by Comstock Images/Thinkstock. How do you crack an egg?