"Like disposable people"

Last weekend I got the wrong paper. We usually get the Sunday New York Times, but our local metro paper came instead. One syndicated article struck me hard. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times decided last year to report on every homicide that occurred in LA county.

I wanted readers to see all the killings -- roughly 1,000 violent deaths each year, mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young black men. The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space.

So the Homicide Report, as it was called, began with the simplest of journalistic missions: exposing a painful, largely unseen problem. The first list of homicide victims, published slightly more than a year ago, contained the names of 17 people. Eight were Latino. Six were black. Two were of Cambodian descent -- killed in a double homicide. None was white. Most were in their 20s.

And so it went. The list is frighteningly long, and the number of the really young is startling. I'm ashamed to say that most of what I know about the world that many of these murders come from is gleaned and extrapolated from the HBO show The Wire, but that's enough to have made me cringe in horror and recognition when I saw the list and read one person's comment "Almost like they're disposable people."

Biofuels and global warming

A couple of papers got published online in Science last week that gave me pause, and that I think everyone should know about them. The basic message of both papers is that even though biofuels are theoretically carbon neutral (carbon taken in from the atmosphere when the plants are growing is then released when they're burned), converting land for the production of biofuels leads to such a huge release of stored CO₂ that the overall effect is to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The papers are here and here. An interview with one of the authors is the first bit of this podcast. A very nice set of interviews on NPR's Science Friday, including a discussion of alternative ways of producing biofuels, is here.

Worries about Obama

So, after the caucus in my state, a bunch of Obama stickers appeared on cars in the faculty parking lot. The students had been all over him for a long time, but we needed him to win the state by a huge margin to come out of the closet.

The other consequence is that there's been a lot in the press lately that brings up worries about an Obama presidency. Some of these have provoked thought. So, here are some thoughts.

Trouble from detractors. Paul Krugman wrote a column more than a week ago comparing the beginning of a potential Obama presidency to the beginning of the Clinton presidency in 1992, when, in Krugman's telling, attacks from Republicans over anything from the staffing of the White House travel office to the childcare arrangements of potential appointees seriously hampered the effectiveness of the new administration. Krugman's point is that Obama's apparent inablity to play hardball would make him vulnerable to similar attacks. Maybe. I feel like Obama done a pretty good job dealing with the Clintons' attacks during the campaign so far. His "aw shucks" appeal to the moral high ground has the effect of making his attackers look bad in a way that the hyper-defensive Clinton style didn't.

But Krugman's column brought up a different worry for me. My recollection of the early Clinton years is of a time when he had to struggle with not only attacking Republicans, but the Democratic leadership in Congress, which had been there a long time and which seemed to resent his "skipping over" of the party hierarchy. To my mind (and I'm not a historian or a political scientist), it was this infighting among the Democrats that opened the door for Newt Gingrich, the Republican congressional majority, and the attack machine Krugman warns of. This is the scenario that I worry might play out again in an Obama presidency, especially after the close primary contests. If he can't bring the Clinton supporters and the mainline Democratic establishment around to support him, then the broad coalition he hopes to form falls apart not becuse he can't reach across the aisle but because he's lost people who should be natural supporters. There's a lot of talk about the Democrats pulling together before the general election. I worry about them staying together afterwards.

Troble with supporters. David Brooks wrote a masterful column last Sunday about why Obama pulled in more educated, higher income people, while Clinton got lower income, more working class voters. It comes down to marketing. Obama hits the same "aspirational" place as Starbucks and Whole Foods, taking the mundane into big ideas, new ways of doing things. Clinton's supporters want the basics at an affordable price. They shop at Safeway.
I felt completely pegged by this analysis. Besides that, I felt a little worried about the depth of support. When I'm feeling poor, I make my own coffee. (Okay, so it's shade grown, fair-trade beans from the local independent version of Starbucks, but still...) What happens to Obama's support when times get rough for the majority?

Check out this (semi-serious?) piece about how he's "so last week".

Finally, there's the cult of personality thing. There's a lot that's been made of this. I'm quite sure that there's a there there. I've seen enough in his books, in his speeches before he was officially a presidential candidate, and in that old New Yorker piece to be convinced that he's a serious thinker who'd be able to take in enough information and advice to make good decisions (and who'd stay firmly rooted in the "reality-based" world). But there's something to the fretting about the rockstar like appearances, about the bizarre "Yes We Can" video, about the way that message can be misread as just "vote for me". There's part of me that worries it'll go to his head too much. I don't think so, but I'd love it if he'd just give me a little of that thoughtful, earnest, junior senator from Illinois act that I fell for in the first place every once in awhile.

Update: Here's a piece from Slate (and CNN) political analyst John Dickerson with similar concerns.

Academic Honesty

About two weeks ago, Freeman Hrabowski came to our campus to give a series of talks. Dr. Hrabowski (I don't usually call Ph.D.s Dr., but he mentioned several times that students call him "Doc" so...) is the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which is best known (at least in the crowd I run in) for the Meyerhoff Scholars program, which has achieved a fantastic success rate in producing minority, especially African-American, research scientists, not only among the scholars but throughout the university, and has provided a model that many in the country are trying to emulate. 

The main reason for Dr. Hrabowski's visit was to deliver a convocation address (audio and video available here) that marked the beginning of Black History Month. It was an fantastic talk, that left few dry eyes, but it wasn't the most important part of his visit, at least for me. The previous day he delivered a talk at our Learning and Teaching Center to a group of mostly faculty on "Diversity in the Sciences: Creating Climates of Success" and then later in the day had a conversation with mostly students (though I and a few other faculty were there) on more or less the same topic. Both of these conversations were, as a colleague puts it, "focused, blunt and intense" but also amazingly funny and comfortable. I had a feeling of being in the presence of someone who tells the truth - the truth that you already know in a fuzzy way, but either haven't had the guts to say or haven't been able to put together in a way that would convince anyone. 

The take-home lessons for me were all about honesty. 

• You can't solve a problem if you don't state the problem. The retention rate for African-American students at liberal arts colleges in general, and ours in particular, is worse than for majority students. Retention in science majors for under-represented minority students (African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, some Asians) is worse than for majority students. Hrabowski told the story of encouraging some prospective students who'd been admitted to Harvard that they should come to UMBC instead. When asked by someone at Harvard why he would do such a thing, he said "I want those students to become scientists. If they went to your place, they'd end up as lawyers." Talking in generalities about "climate" or about how the statistics of small numbers makes these patterns harder to follow avoids stating the problems, and can make them harder to solve.

• In general, people are more comfortable around others who share similar backgrounds, at least at first. Dr. Hrabowski said this again and again. His point, or at least the point I took, is that labeling as racism the frustrating slights that minority students commonly experience - being the last to find a partner when the professor says to break up into groups, the initial awkwardness that can turn into long term awkwardness in interacting with professors, the difficulty in joining study groups - isn't helpful. These are very real problems, but they come from carelessness and a mostly unconscious desire to stay in one's comfort zone, not from maliciousness. Solving them should involve creating awareness and situations in which students interact with each other in ways that force them out of that zone. 

It also means that pointing out the slights when they occur can be the most effective way to fight them. Dr. Hrabowski told a story of getting his first exam back in graduate school, where he studied math. The professor had written "You did surprisingly well." Hrabowski approached him afterwards and asked "Why the adverb?" That was all it took. The professor hadn't even thought about the impact when he wrote the comment, and never would have realized if Hrabowski hadn't pointed it out. Doing so took courage and confidence, but also trust - trust that the professor was a well-meaning, if slightly clueless (aren't we all!) educator, not an ogre.

• Preparation matters in the math and science. The example Dr. Hrabowski used was long division. It's just not possible to do long division if your multiplication and subtraction skills aren't well honed. That kind of cumulative accumulation of skills is taken for granted in college science and math courses. Students are expected to be comfortable with algebra and with basic skills in the sciences when they arrive. Upper level courses depend on concepts from lower level courses. This seems fairly obvious, but the consequences can be devastating for students who come into college science classes without a few crucial skills that their classmates got in high school. It makes it extremely difficult to continue in the major successfully without doing well in the intro courses. Hrabowski encourages students to retake intro courses if they didn't get an A or a B, something that's against the rules at our institution. He discourages students from taking multiple science courses simultaneously during their first year, so they can focus on getting the crucial material in one class at a time. He's fine with students taking more than four years to graduate, if that's what it takes to do well in the classes that they do take. 

Implementing these suggestions, though, takes honesty. It takes both students and advisors who will figure out where the gaps are in a students background, and do what needs to be done to fill them. It takes an understanding that these gaps have nothing to do with intelligence or ability. It takes changing or working around rules that were make when the college had a more homogeneous student population. All of those things are hard. 

• Students need to talk to each other about how they're doing. There was a marvelous moment when Hrabowski asked students who was excelling in their science classes. Embarrassed silence. Students at our place simply don't speak to each other about their grades. They'll say things like "that went pretty well" about a test, or "things are okay" but they won't go through an exam with a classmate or a group and figure out how to do the problems they missed. (I often worry that students won't even do this on their own.) This is a great way to put cement on the gaps in knowledge. Of course it's hard to show a classmate that a test that didn't go well. But hiding it away, saying that everything is "okay", or joining the "organic chem is kicking my butt" group on Facebook isn't a productive way forward. 

• Above all, it's important to treat students as individuals. To learn their strengths. Not to make assumptions. It's too easy to fall into the trap of talking about "these students", to make generalizations. To be too careful about what is said. That can be as problematic, as dishonest, as doing nothing at all.

Update on Kenya. Worse news every day.

Another friend of mine who is still in touch with friends in Kenya sent along a report today, this one from Eldoret, a town in the Rift Valley that's had a lot of violence. He writes:

As Wasike describes it, towns throughout significant swaths of Kenya are barely recognizable. Most shops have been looted and few businesses remain open (and those that are open barely have any wares to sell). Many businesses and homes have been set ablaze and are either now in ashes or smoldering. Crops have been razed, livestock slaughtered, and as the press has covered, people murdered (roughly 800, to date). Transportation is virtually at a stand-still. The latter has repercussions throughout East and Central Africa as Kenya is the main artery connecting the entire region to its ports in Mombasa.

Wasike talks about the politically organized gangs of machete-wielding young men looking for people from "opposing" tribes to intimidate, injure or kill. For better or worse, those targets are dwindling as most people living as a minority tribe have vacated back to their tribal strong-holds. I'm not sure what the international press is reporting, but my friend is hearing a statistic of about 1/2 million such internally displaced persons.

At the moment there are still basic utilities in the towns and cities. But there is concern that things could take a drastic turn for the worse if that situation changes. Most significantly, people are looking to the current talks in Ethiopia, mediated by the UN and African Union, as the last best chance to quickly end the chaos and restore order. However, people are simultaneously worried that more political assassinations (there have been 2 in the past 48 hours) would more-or-less permanently derail such progress and put a stop to any meaningful political dialog.

I asked Wasike what people imagine might happen if these talks fail. He said that the most-discussed solution is that the Kenyan army would come in to restore order and impose a timeline for another election, once things have calmed down. However, he acknowledged that it's not clear if the army is unified enough to withstand the pressure of soldiers to side with their ethnic brethren. (Soldiers would be under tremendous pressure from their tribal members not to point their rifles at them, for example.) To date I have not read anything about such a military solution in the international press.

In spite of all that has transpired and the highly uncertain future he and his fellow Kenyans are facing, Wasike manages to comport himself with a tremendous sense of hope and optimism, and amazingly, manages to inject levity into our conversations.

But maybe the current situation in Kenya can most simply be conveyed by this. Wasike, a 42 year-old father of three and self-acknowledged non-religious person, has begun saying prayers and has asked others to offer their prayers for him and his fellow Kenyans.

I'm praying.

Coming out for a candidate

A disclosure. I fell for Barack Obama pretty early. I first read about him in the New Yorker in May of 2004, when he was running for Senate. (For those who, like me, have received "The Complete New Yorker" on DVD - a much appreciated but sadly underused Christmas gift - it's the May 31st issue, page 32.) I'm the son of an immigrant father and an American mother. I'm someone who tends to buy into grandiose, if vaguely defined and sort of naive, ideas about how the greatest thing about the U.S. is the fact that we're a nation of immigrants. I'm a sucker for "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breath free". I'm also a sucker for the idea of being able to find a common humanity in everyone, regardless of background, something that struck the reporter, William Finnegan, who wrote the New Yorker piece, about Obama's Senate campaign then and strikes me about his presidential campaign now. (I'm looking over the New Yorker article now for a particular quote that will make my point, but there are too many. The article's a better advertisement for Obama than his campaign website is.)

So, I didn't have far to fall. Obama's father was even from a part of Kenya very close to where I served. Then came the speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, which made me cry. When podcasts came to iTunes, one of the first I subscribed to was his, which was great - sensible, hopeful, modest, direct. (It hasn't been updated since he declared for president.) His Iowa speech choked me up, as did the New Hampshire speech.

I don't know if making some chemistry professor cry for the possibility of what his country could do right (and out of sadness for what it's done wrong) is a sufficient qualification for the presidency, but it's enough for me for now.

Undergraduate research

Over the past week or so, I've been up and down about a major component of my job - having undergraduates participate in my research.

The project that I spend most of my research energy on involves understanding how a particular enzyme recognizes its macromolecular substrate, a transfer RNA, rather than any of the similar molecules present in the cell. The methods that I use to gain this understanding are fairly traditional for biochemists. I make guesses about which parts of the enzyme or parts of the tRNA are involved in specific interactions. I use the tools of recombinant DNA technology to mutate or remove those parts, and then I find out whether or not the enzyme can still recognize the tRNA. If it doesn't, my guess was right, if it does, the guess was wrong. In principle, these changes are simple to make and to test, but the process can be tedious and many of the reagents we use are expensive. The quantities of material we work with are also very small. A milligram of enzyme or tRNA is considered "tons". Like most biochemists, I've accumulated a freezer full of very small test tubes, each containing a couple of drops of water in which some precious DNA or RNA or protein is dissolved. These tubes are labeled with codes that are for the most part cryptic to anyone who hasn't worked in my lab.

Undergraduates who work in my lab are part of the big project. They make and test the mutant tRNAs or proteins, and in many cases design new mutants. This is the usual way it's done in chemistry labs at small colleges - students are a central part of the professor's major research project. Some of my colleagues in other departments, for example mathematicians or theoretical physicists, can design separate projects for students while maintaining their own primary projects. That model is far harder to implement with hands on projects that require expensive reagents and access to a relatively small number of instruments.

Okay, enough background. Here's how the last week has gone.

Stage 1: Undergraduate research stinks!

Much of my current sabbatical leave has been spent getting things to work in the lab that did not work for my research students over the course of the last couple of summers. For the most part (knock on wood!) that's now done. Two things have been frustrating about this process. One is that some of the major problems have been due to simple mislabeling - tubes that were labeled as containing one piece of DNA or RNA, in fact contained something that was similar enough, but not what I wanted. The lesson for the future is simple enough - Trust but verify.

The second frustration is more fundamental and troubling. I'm simply more able to troubleshoot technical problems in the lab when I'm doing the work with my own hands. Having a student tell me what she did or show me a picture of a gel or a set of results simply doesn't engage my ability to walk through the experiment and figure out what could have gone wrong as much as doing it myself does. While there are certainly ways to work on this, which would be good for both the students and for moving the research forward, it's hard not to think that everything would be easier if I just did all the experiments myself.

Stage 2: It's good for them, even if it stinks for you.

Sandra Laursen, a chemist who has become an expert on science education, visited our campus this week and gave a talk about work she's been involved in exploring the benefits to students of undergraduate research. The take home lessons for me were that what students gain most from doing research has nothing to do with whether or not the project moves forward. What they gain is an understanding of their temperament, their ability to deal with failure and frustration, and a sense of what it feels like to be a scientist. In other words, they gain confidence from being treated like colleagues, which is really what they are. All of this I knew, of course, but the reminder came at an appropriate time.

Stage 3: God, do I ever love to work with undergraduates on my research!

This week I've been talking to (You can call it interviewing if you'd like.) students who are applying for summer research positions. I've talked to at least 12 and will have at most 3 or 4 positions this summer. Choosing will be so difficult. Some of these kids have had research experience elsewhere already and would come up to speed in the lab very quickly. Others are just so wonderfully earnest. But mostly, it's just a thrill to talk about science with these students. And not just some vague, out there, Science with a capital S, but my science, the questions that I've been obsessed with for years, the cool little details that made me choose the project in the first place.

What I get out of the deal then, isn't at all a set of worker bees who turn my ideas into results. That part I could probably do better on my own. What I get out of the deal is a group of people who share my passion for the problem, who can remind me, mostly just by listening and asking questions and getting excited themselves, why doing science - not just studying science, but doing it - is so much fun.