Field Trip to Louis Pasteur’s House

By: | December 10, 2019
The washbasin in Louis Pasteur’s Paris apartment.

A few months ago, I visited the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The trip included a tour of the apartment and crypt of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and microbiologist who developed vaccines against rabies and anthrax.

My favorite part of the tour was Pasteur’s bathroom. I thoroughly enjoyed imagining Pasteur splashing about in his porcelain basin, or soaking in the bathtub supplied with hot water from impressively modern plumbing (for the 1800s). It must have been nice to take a hot bath after a long day harvesting spinal cords from rabid rabbits.

From the rabbit spinal cords, Pasteur extracted a weakened version of the rabies virus which he used to develop a rabies vaccine. In his crypt, where he is buried with his wife, gilt mosaics depict the rabbits and dogs Pasteur used in his experiments, as well as a 9 year-old boy who received the first human dose of the vaccine, after being mauled by a rabid dog.

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Energetic Oak Trees

By: | December 9, 2019

The campus of the National Institutes of Health is in Bethesda, Md. In the 1930s, the kernel of today’s NIH was part of “Tree Tops,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Luke I. Wilson. It has lots of lovely old brick buildings and squeezed-in bits of lawn. Lots of nice big trees, too.

One day in late October, I was on the NIH campus, spending the day at a meeting where my job was to sit at the end of the long table and take notes. (The life of a science writer is not always full of glamour.) At lunchtime, I guided several of the meeting’s attendees to the nearest cafeteria.

In front of NIH’s Building 1, I stopped for this: A carpet of acorns along the edge of the sidewalk. Oaks and some other tree species do something called “masting”–they make few or no seeds some years, and throw all of their babies on the ground at once in other years. This is thought to help them avoid predators; the squirrels that run around the NIH campus can eat a lot of acorns, but not this many acorns.

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Dog Days

By: | December 6, 2019
374px-Close-up_of_Sirius

I first wrote about our old, scared dog five years ago in the summer. He’d had a hard life before he got to us, and as he got older, he seemed to get more and more anxious. Last month while we were traveling, we got a call from our dear vet that it was time. Here’s to Hamish–may he have nothing to fear anymore.

These are the dog days. Hot as a dog, lazy as a dog, wanting to curl up and take naps like a dog. Please, let us lie, sleeping like them, on these summer afternoons.

But the phrase didn’t originate from the habits of our earthly canine companions. Instead, it came from Sirius, the dog star. In July and early August, Sirius rises and sets with the sun. People once thought that the combined power of our daytime star and the brightest one in our night sky brought the full heat of summer.

Here below, our own dog star’s light has started to dim. We got him from a rescue group nearly six years ago. He’s a strange brew of Labrador and possibly Great Dane—100 pounds with an enormous head—and somewhere between eight and ten years old. We might be seeing the shine from Sirius, 8.7 light years away, from around the time he was born.

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The revolution will not be fertilized

By: | December 5, 2019

The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway.

How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance.

He took off his sunglasses. Well, I’ve been better. Then he handed me the Notice to Vacate.

It was, truthfully, a well-earned eviction. When Elise and I had moved into our rental, a two-bedroom with a capacious back yard, a year earlier, we’d been given just one inviolable command: keep the grass looking sharp. Let the plumbing rust, the shutters slough off, the paint peel, you name it — but the lawn, our landlord instructed, was to remain sacrosanct, as verdant and groomed as the greens at Augusta.

Aesthetically, the request was reasonable: It was only natural our landlord would want his property to match the others on our leafy street. Climatically, though, it was absurd. Spokane gets around 16 inches of precipitation per year, less than half the national average. A lawn, in our semi-arid corner of the Northwest, is an extravagance. Each evening, as I watched the sprinklers vomit water over our pointless, decorative crop, I burned with environmental shame — whatever you call the hydrologic equivalent of flygskam.

And, fine, it also just came to feel like a hell of a lot of work: Who’d voluntarily spend even twenty minutes on a Saturday afternoon shoving around a deafening John Deere?

After a few months, we began to let the lawn slide. Skilled self-justifiers, we recast our laziness as civil disobedience. Burn your hoses! Scrap your mowers! We would, we vowed, create an urban jungle through benign neglect.

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A kind of ghost story

By: | December 4, 2019

Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France.

A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the area at the time of the crime. Trouble was, there was no actual evidence linking him to her murder. 

But the police wanted him for the crime anyway, so they hit on a bold new approach. They took advantage of a hot new technology called “cinema”. Specifically, they decided to try the world’s first filmed reconstruction of a crime. They found an actress to play the victim and somehow convinced their suspect to play the part of the murderer, complete with a knife, pretending to stab her with it in front of the camera; then they showed the flickering silent film to a jury. The hapless man was convicted. “Because the jury had seen it happen,” says Burkhardt Schafer, professor of computational legal theory at the University of Edinburgh. “It was just the power of the visual.”

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Tears of the Warrior

By: | December 2, 2019

Back before I was an official LWONer, I was a Guest LWONer, and this is one of the pieces I wrote in that capacity. Because yoga is indeed a forever practice, it seems just as relevant now as back in 2014. Although, full disclosure, I do more Zumba these days than yoga–because getting older means one needs to jump around more to stay awake. But anyway, yoga is still my go-to when I need to wring out some rag water. Namaste.

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The Things We Hope To Leave Behind

By: | November 29, 2019

Yesterday the People of LWON discussed our hopes for 2020. Today, we reflect on what we hope to leave behind.

Ann:  Serious answer is, that’s a little complicated.  After a certain point in life, you’ve got more behind you than in front and surely it would be blind-stupid graceless to not weigh carefully what you want left behind. Given that, some things I’m just glad are over with — cataract surgery, a medically-uninteresting fainting spell, the argument with my neighbor over parking, the old friend I gave up on being friends with, the office next to the guy without an indoor voice.  All small stuff. Anything big to leave behind? Not that I can think of. Isn’t that nice?

Jenny: I’m with Ann…as time passes the “leave behind” and “look ahead” questions loom large. But it’s not hard to find things to brush away: For me, a painful choice for my dear old dad, a long stretch of angry gut, a favorite aunt’s memory reaching its end. Also, a really ugly screen door (replaced by a beautiful mahogany one–I can share a photo if anyone cares) and self doubt about just about everything. Not that that last one will ever be gone gone, but I hope to continue to chip away at it. Perhaps that’s one good thing about getting older: We learn to care less about what we can’t control.

Emily: Most of the things I’d like to leave behind from 2019 are not going anywhere in 2020, or if there’s a chance they might go, I don’t want to jinx it. Like Ann and Jenny, there are a lot of things I’m hoping will stick around a little longer, like my 1999 Honda Civic hatchback, which just cruised past 200,000 miles. We had a washing machine that wouldn’t spin properly, leaving all our clothes sopping wet — so I’m glad that’s gone. But aside from the political dumpster fires we’re all sick of, there aren’t many things from 2019 I’m desperate to say goodbye to. I must have had a pretty good year. 

Ben: I’m looking forward to leaving behind the disorientation that comes with living in a new place — in our case, Spokane, where we moved in July 2018. Yes, the process of discovery is exciting, but it’s also discombobulating to go through life without a go-to bar, hiking trail, or fishing hole, and it’s frustrating to know little of the environmental history of the place you live. Now that we’ve had a year and a half to explore, study up, and get settled, I feel less like an interloper in someone else’s town, and more like a local in mine. 

Cassandra: All of the physical discomforts of pregnancy: Skin stretched so tight it burns and itches. The near-constant ache that comes with the brutal and unwelcome expansion of my ribcage. Back pain. A huge appetite accompanied by a stomach no bigger than a teacup. Forced abstinence. I could go on (and on and on and on), but I’ll leave it there.

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Image courtesy of Sherman W. via Flickr