Five kinds of tea

I walked down the street in downtown Atlanta with some colleagues today for lunch.  We went to a thriving salad-and-sandwich kind of place for a marvelous lunch.  They had five jugs of tea AND lemonaide.  You gotta love being in the south. 

Home again, jiggety jig.

I'm tired, I'm home, I'm covered in cat hair all over my black skirt.  I'm here tonight and tomorrow and then it's another airport.  Is my talk done?  No.  Do I remember what I promised to talk about?  No.  I can look it up on the airplane, can't I?  So I have laundry, two more fruit trees to thin, and the rest of the garden to dig up.  I'll actually have a week and a half at home to do the latter before I take off AGAIN.  Sigh.  Makes me tired to think of it. 

How to tell when traveling in the south

I was driving to Richmond VA to attend my aunt's memorial service and stopped in a drug store to pick up a drink.  Lipton plain tea in a bottle?  Not a chance.   Sweet tea and Extra Sweet tea?  Two rows of each.  

The service was lovely.  There were tears in her memory, but we are a restrained bunch.  Two daughters, two granddaughters, two grandsons, along with friends to respect her memory.  Uncle Jim looked old, frail, but surprisingly strong after his recent stroke.  There is a military cemetery outside Richmond, green rolling lawns - a peaceful place.  We all needed closure after a rather bad ending to her life, which in any event, does go on for the rest of us.

We needed to sit in the room for hours together, chatting of this and that and recent events.  And so we did.  Blood is indeed thicker than water.  Uncle Jim was so pleased to see each of us, as we were glad to have him with us.

Stand-in Sugar Daddy Duty

My management team bankrolled a locally-produced documentary about insuring the safety of the food supply, and I am here on campus for the reception and viewing the film.  It was lovely.  I got quite shiny suit-sleeves rubbing elbows with the deans and directors who came around to thank my company for the funding.  I met the producers, and sat with my professors and A's charming and well-behaved young daughters.  I was asked to speak briefly, and I told our story about how we transitioned from making test-and-measurement boxes to creating a food team to apply those solutions for assuring the security of the food produced by local agriculture.  While hiring his team, P's father contracted food poisoning and died within a few days, so food safety is not only a company pursuit, but an up-close-and-personal priority for our team. 

fast forward a year later

Last spring one of the terrible cluster of tornadoes that hit Missouri hit STL, the airport a few miles from my childhood home (where a parking garage now resides)    I watched the big glass arches of the terminal go up as a kid in early elementary school. Last time I was here There was still a LOT of plywood. Now it is light and airy again with new glass. Even better are the new corridors to the gates. Gone are the low, dark suspended ceilings that were oppressively close to my head. The support struts are opened up and they and the corrugated metal roof are painted cream. A false ceiling of big pans of glowing lights give a sense of openness. What an improvement!

P.s. A clue to the nature of this blue collar city is in the news shop. One rack of paperback books, 4 racks of magazines, and tens of racks of merchandise. One suspects the literacy rate, scientific or otherwise, is less than 29 percent.

Alphabet soup and the Pathogen Genome Project

Six months ago there was a meeting of 25 scientists in Brussels. This week there has been a meeting of 100 scientists to discuss accumulation of the various sequencing outputs into various centers. Most of these data repositories are known by a collection of initials and are part of some agency of some government somewhere.

From left:  Paul, Food Team Manager, Agilent Technologies; Eric Brown, Branch Chief Manager, Microbiology, US FDA; Steve Musser, Director, Office of Regulatory Science, US FDA; Marc Allard, Microbiologist, US FDA; Bart Weimer, Professor and Director, Pathogen Genome Center; Steve Royce, Manager, Americas Food team, Suf Al-Khaldi, the postdoc, US FDA, and me.

PZ stood before the first break and announced U CA Davis is starting an initiative to collect 100,000 cultures AND genomes of pathogens over the next few years, and that these would be publicly available.  There was silence followed by a smattering of applause. Later we figured out this was the length of time for a collective "Oh #*!!  That means my 10,000 cultures I was going to build the rest of my career on have gone the way of the buggywhip" realization.

This is Big, my friends, BIG. This changes the game in place since the days of Louie Pasteur. More in another post. 

Scientific Literacy and the teaching of science

I have been indulging in my favorite airplane activity: catching up with recent issues of the journal Science. Last year the journal started a series of essays on inquiry based instruction. I learned lab science the old fashioned way - the way it is still taught - the lab book instructed you what to do and how to do it. You did it until getting the prescribed answer and then wrote the lab report. That IS what science is about, right?  The 'right' answer?

So in the first of this year's essays, a group of 5-year-olds were given a box containing a varied mix of seeds, nuts, pebbles and shells and spent weeks investigating "what is a seed"?  Open ended. No right answer. Fun.

The article opened with the assertion that 28 percent of US adults are scientifically illiterate. Ya think?  And that includes some presidential candidates. Huh.