The Fallen Buddha

Marilyn Monroe, Caroline Kennedy and Richard Nixon's daughter were on my dream TV last night, discussing the powerful men their lives had touched.  The show ended with an unusual take on the history of world religions.

I was flipping through an album of startling black and white stills.  I paused on an image of Marilyn, Caroline and Richard Nixon's daughter on the couch of a TV set.  "That show was censored; the public never got to see it", says the historian who has shown me this recently declassified album from the Library of Congress archives.

Marilyn, in a long brocade and satin sheath of shiny white gold sits with her feet up on a chaise lounge; Caroline Kennedy is resting on her back, head against the other side of the lounge, her pelvis on Marilyn's lap, her legs at an angle, framing Marilyn on either side.  They are in mid-sentence, smiling at each other.   Nixon's daughter  seated ramrod straight, acts as a cushion to Caroline's head; she is looking directly into the camera, expressionless.

Behind this tableau begins to play black and white film of three scenes juxtaposed: Kennedy's funeral after the assassination, a protest against the Vietnam war, and a line of cars driving Nixon to the courthouse; each procession of cars/people is headed by a slowly undulating American flag.  The joint caption at the bottom in white script: "A shameful day in history."  The historical montage is replaced by a color film showing a parade of white face-painted clown monsters and women in suit dresses with pastel wigs; the new caption, in black script: "Maitross, the oldest religion."

The camera pans to the front of a large throne room, focusing on a dais.  There are nine shelves in a pyramid, the lower tiers occupied by recognizable deities from China, Thailand, India, South America and Scandinavia.  Four remain unclaimed, including the single spot at the very top.  Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed run in together, late and out of breath.  Jesus and Mohammed begin jostling for position.  An argument ensues over who should get which of the remaining ledges and a few of the established gods join in.  "We leave that one open for Her, you know that," this from the god from Peru, as a flurry of arms jockey for a handhold to pull themselves to the top of the pyramid.

In the scuffle, Buddha is knocked onto the floor, which opens beneath him.  He plummets through a long dark hatch out of sight, re-emerging alone on the blistering surface of a red sand and black rock desert.  His wanders for some time, his luminous skin becoming charred and burnt; he is disoriented and in pain.  Somehow he finds the opening to the hatch and strongarms himself into it.  An eternity later, he pulls himself, exhausted and disfigured, back onto the floor of the godroom.  It is deserted, dusty, the lights shut.

I woke to typical Seattle mist, my cats scratching at my bedroom door for their breakfast. 

First World Problems

I woke from a dream in which I was the eldest son of a wealthy family.  Our life was incredibly priveleged, full of material and social advantages.  My sister Sally and I had just summered at the cottage with our spouses and children, and right at the end of the season, something incredibly minor and (literally) forgettable had happened that had everyone in an outraged tizzy.  The phrase on my lips when my eyes opened was: "Of course, Sally and I were beside ourselves."

This was such a funny echo of yesterday, when I spent the morning grouchy and irritable over little nothings - careless comments, small inconveniences - forgetting till nearly 2pm to appreciate the many good things in my life.  Gratitude is a value that some cultures and religions try to instill as a moral value.  But it's also much simpler; it opens the doorway to happiness with Right Now.  It's a powerful gift you can give yourself.  And since I was raised with protestant ethics like duty, and can't totally shake it, I will say that it probably does behoove me to be more aware of the privelege and bounty in my life now.

Social butterfly hand in hand with autism

My social dream calendar was packed last night, which turns out to be the case in real life too.

Tonight I've got two different dances to attend - the queer social at Century and the monthly "Third Friday" salsa dance put on by one of my favourite salsa leads.  Saturday, after I work for the usual 8h long teaching day, I'm heading to a destination birthday party.  Sunday is lunch with a friend.

In last night's dream I was finalizing plans for a potluck with my granny aerobics group when my sister showed up unexpectedly from out of town - with ten friends in a big car caravan - in order to party at my house.  I was thrilled to have her but unsure how to organize and attend both events.  Finally I realized the first group, which consisted of mostly older women, would wrap up around 9, around the time my sister and her friends would probably just be getting started.

I drove to the store to get some supplies and just before the supermarket parking lot, saw a car come to a sudden screeching halt inches away from driving into the median ditch on the freeway.  It was a small navy blue compact and the front tire had gone flat.  I stopped to help and discovered the driver was my friend Phil* from grad school, who now runs a lab in upstate New York.

Phil's wife Bea got out and literally handed me their son, also Phil.  Which is to say she took Phil Jr.'s hand, a boy of about 15, gangly, eyes downcast, and put it in mine.  "Would you mind watching him while we take care of this?" she asked.  

Phil's son was autistic, but relatively high-functioning and verbal.  He needed his hand held 24h a day.  He rambled facts and observations off to me as we walked hand in hand to my car.  Let his hand go, Bea had warned me, and he'd become more and more anxious, till he was screaming and crying.

Phil had never told me about his son's condition and I wondered if it was because he had a hard time dealing with the situation.  I pondered what seemed to me to be the sudden rise in autism - going through all the causes I knew had been proposed.  I thought about my handful of friends whose autistic children were nonverbal and how difficult that made things. 

Phil Jr would never be independent, not if he needed physical contact every moment of the day - though perhaps at some point he could transition to a companion animal.  But he had a set of basic skills and he could talk. That was no small something.

Phil returned and it was instantly clear he deeply loved and enjoyed his son.  Also it was clear that Phil had become entirely gay.  The vibe practically rose from him like a heat wave.  I glanced at his wife, wondering if she knew, or if it just seemed beside the point with a special needs child.  

  *not his real name.

So in the real world, I know as many people with autistic children as I know people who've had breast cancer.  Does this seem like a large number to you?  It does to me.

I'm not suggesting cancer and autism are similar in a superficial way - one is a progressive life-threatening disease; the other a developmental condition.  The comparison holds for another reason. Cancer is ultimately genetic and it runs in families, but not in a straightforward Mendelian way.  It skips generations; it doesn't affect everyone with identifiable "cancer genes".

For years cancer eluded sophisticated treatment or biological explanation because it turns out that several cellular systems have to fail one after another before cells become cancerous.  Much of the research was like that old story about the blind men stroking the elephant.

So each progression towards cancer, we now know, shares broad similarities. And still many challenges remain since each cancer is the result of a rapid, independent series of evolution events and so is best treated on a case by case basis.

Likewise there does not seem to be one easy answer that explains the autistic spectrum.  My money is on some combination of side effects from the processes of first world industry.  Some pollutant, hormone disruptor, factory-made chemical, waste product.   Something in the environment or our lifestyle or both is boosting the disruption of a genetically complex system whose dysregulation drives autism.

I think there will turn out to be autism genes, not one or two but many, from select classes of molecules that perform similar functions and converge on the same process.  Cancer genes are in one of five or six classes, but each class has several members, so that the suite of genetic defects in a given breast cancer is not necessarily identical to another similarly-behaving tumor from another individual - or even a second tumor in that person's own body.

I also think that, like cancer, autism will prove difficult to treat or predict even once we have a biological mechanism.  Cancer retreats and recurs.  Anyone with a severely autistic child is familiar with the disconcerting, sometimes heartbreaking, ebb and flow of skill acquisition. 

In my dream we sat at a table under a huge umbrella at an outdoor fast food hamburger place - me, Bea, Phil, and their 15 year old son.  It was a bright day, no clouds, a little breezy.  Phil held his son's hand, and Phil Jr. talked about everything under the sun.

With no pause in his stream of chatter, Phil Jr said, "Wet.  I'm wet."  Bea immediately rose and took her son to the bathroom to be changed.  I hugged Phil and said how nice to see him and his family.  I left to go home and finish party planning.

The department of transportation

My dream world last night was very busy with intrigue, lapses in narrative flow, and blatant disregard for the rules of physics.  But what I remember best about last night's kaleidoscope of vignettes was that I took every possible form of transportation, including something that hasn't been invented yet.

There were planes, trains, and automobiles as well as a cross-country journey on foot, at the onset of the apocalypse.  My final dream was of sightseeing in Manhattan with my family.  We exited a taxi, took an elevator to the 11th floor of a historical building on Columbia U campus, and boarded what I had assumed would be a train, for a quick five-block journey.  Instead, after 11 people were packed into the small cabin, we were instructed to put on our seatbelts and our hovercopter rose into the air. 

We watched the varied New York landscape whiz by as we descended and rose, always keeping fifteen feet off the ground.  The copter followed a crow's trajectory and rather than avoid the constant obstacle highrises, simply skimmed up and over them.  It was a roller coaster subway ride I'll never forget.

Finally we landed on another roof and disembarked.  My sister and I tipped the driver and then set off on the most urgent task of that moment: locating the restroom.

Look where you're going

The thought I woke up with was: we should be studying the healthiest people, not the sickest.

This is a sleepy oversimplification of what I really believe.  Obviously we shouldn't stop researching disease or creating models of cellular dysfunction.  But there is also value in studying a process that is working optimally.  You may learn a lot about car engines by studying the contents of junk yards and trying to resurrect or improve them; but, it would be really valuable to have a Ferrari and a Prius purring in the front lot, so you know what to aim for.

In my field of basic biological sciences, it is far easier to pinpoint "dead" as a relevant experimental output.  But the goal of what we learn from the dysfunctional data points in basic sciences is to reconstruct how-this-works - when it's working - and see if that informs how-it-works in all animals including us.  Recent advances in imaging and data mining have allowed us to look deep inside even those cells and processes that are humming along perfectly and see what is really going on.

I imagine in medicine it is easier to justify pumping money into interventions that will improve lifespan or healthspan, or open a new market for prescription drugs, when the starting point is "really sick", rather than "doing OK, not great".  There is a field of preventative medicine and though I'm told that funding is tight, I personally know little about it.  So this will largely be a half-awake ramble outside my expertise.

When I was learning to drive, the most lasting, practical lesson was not "10 and 2" or even FINALLY grasping how to parallel park.  It was "look where you're going".  I took a crash avoidance course and in a crisis, the instinct is to stare, deer in headlights style, at whatever you are hoping not to hit - the oncoming vehicle in the wrong lane, the guardrail you ventured too close to, the dog that is running in front of your car - is very powerful.  And disastrous. 

The bromide that applies here is "look where you are going"; the related human rule of physics: you go where you look.  The course taught drivers to use the seconds before a possible collision to scan the environment for escape routes, rather than the obstacle.  Drive past the scene of an accident and your wheels drift in the direction of the crash you are staring at.  Round a corner to find a huge rock in your lane and you just might avoid it if you can keep your head, check the other lanes for an opening and swerve out of the way.

Coincidentally, I was in a tunnel yesterday, driving my lab to a Vancouver conference, when a truck three cars ahead began losing engine parts; the jumbo sized muffler landed right in the middle of my lane as we were going about 40 miles an hour.  I couldn't go right (tunnel wall) or left (cars in adjacent lane) or come to a dead stop without getting rear-ended, so I went over.  The sidewall of the front right tire on my car and the car directly ahead of us that also had to make this decision were both torn out.  We shared a bonding moment after exiting the tunnel on our rims, changing tires on the side of the road.

This is not directly related to my thesis; on a further tangent I have to say my tires always go flat at the least convenient and most dangerous places.

Despite our roadside adventure, we made it to the Vancouver Regional Worm meeting on beautiful UBC campus, and I even got a chance to obtain a delicious sushi assortment from Jun Sushi near Blanca and Broadway - a mom and pop that was one of THREE sushi options within walking distance of Big O Tires.  Their mango and dynamite rolls will both make you cry with happiness.

Yes, Vancouver IS awash in good, cheap sushi.  Sushi for four?  $33 including tax. I share here a picture of the feast about three minutes into our feeding frenzy.  There's nothing like a near death experience to make you appreciate wild caught salmon sashimi.





My favourite talk of the conference, besides of course the killer jobs done by my own colleagues and an excellent keynote address from a very established female PI, was from a woman using C elegans as a model for ALS.  So I'm not a hater, yo.  For reals.  This kind of research is fascinating and valuable; the presenter had some very exciting results to share and it was truly a showcase for what model systems can tell us about being human, which is nice since I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to this kind of basic science research.

I also watched a TEDx talk recently about Dr. Wahls', a physician who cured her own severe MS with a daily diet of:
3 cups leafy greens like kale
3 cups sulfur vegetables like brussel sprouts
3 cups bright colors like roots and berries
grass-fed animal protein and organ meats like liver

MS is a debilitating progressive disease and the most modern pharmaceutic and technological interventions at BEST buy a minor reduction in decline or minimal increase in comfort.  Like ALS, there is no medically sanctioned cure.  Typical lifespan after an ALS diagnosis is less than four years.  The picture of MS is of patients in wheelchairs.

I'm fairly healthy and I've always been fit and active, but at 40 I've finally reached a point where if I don't watch what I eat very carefully I gain - oh let's say theoretically - 30 pounds in two years.  I wake up stiff and sore, and if I don't stretch and manage injury properly I find I can't go running, hiking, dancing, or even walking without pain.

My friend in toxicology believes environmental chemical pollutants and poor diet are at the heart of much of modern first-world disease.  There is a small but growing medical community that is getting behind this idea.  I've been inspired to try this MS diet and see what happens to my inflammation and weight. 

What I woke up thinking was that we should be focusing on those people who are extra healthy - populations where cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's are at a global low - and figure out what they are doing right.  Of course this is not a new idea; people have tried to correlate red wine drinking in France, olive oil use in Greece, fish and rice consumption in Japan, with health benefits.  I am eager to see the large studies on hunter gatherers asking whether a lifelong diet of nuts, berries and wild caught game, environmentally imposed diet restriction cycles, and a physically active lifestyle is associated with decreases in heart disease or senility.

I'm not a luddite and I don't think that technology is evil per se, though there can be no doubt that first-world-technology-driven pollution is a giant problem with devastating environmental effects.

I just think we should be looking where we want to go at least as much as we stare at what scares us.  Figuring out how the healthiest bodies work, not to downgrade the care and treatment of people suffering from chronic illness, but to raise the bar.  There is value in finding the drug that will keep someone alive an extra six months.  I want that to be six months worth living.