Dear Governor Palin,

today you gave what your campaign called your first “policy speech” to an audience in Pittsburgh, PA, on the topic of the McCain-Palin ticket’s three broad reform proposals for addressing the issue of education and services for children with special needs. One of these proposals is the commitment to fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA: legislation signed into existence in 1975, but never backed by enough cold hard government cash to properly benefit those for whom it was written.

Let’s set aside the fact that John McCain has repeatedly voted against increasing federal funding for IDEA, shall we? (Barack Obama voted last year to raise funding for IDEA by over 44 billion dollars.) Let’s also set aside the fact that you personally have said you would, given the choice, oppose a 0.1% sales tax increase (that’s a one cent tax on every ten dollars spent) in order to fund programs for the developmentally disabled in Colorado.

Let’s just talk about how your speech today managed—somehow—to raise the display of your contempt for scientific inquiry to greater heights than ever before.

In lamenting the lack of federal funding for IDEA, Governor, you laid the blame squarely on one of your campaign’s favorite demons: earmark spending. Specifically, this is what you said:

We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That’s more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Governor…when I heard you speak those words, it sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you. I didn’t know quite how to react. But I’ll try, because what you said today betrayed not only an astonishing ignorance of nearly one hundred years of research in genetics, human development, and medicine, but also a stunning lack of understanding of the basic mechanisms of scientific study.

As many biology-taking high schoolers will be able to tell you, Governor, the humble drosophila melanogaster—besides being an incredibly annoying daily visitor in kitchens across the country—is also one of the most important and useful tools of biomedical research we have ever had. It helped us discover, for one thing, that genetic information is carried on chromosomes. The guy who figured that one out won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, actually. Imagine that. A Nobel Prize for fruit fly research.

Fruit flies also share almost 60% of our genetic code, and when it comes to genetic markers of disease, that number jumps to something a lot closer to 75%. That means it’s really easy to induce horrible human conditions in the tiny little buggers and try to figure out what causes those conditions, as well as how to fix them. Since a fruit fly is also very cheap to house and feed, and since its life cycle is short enough to make multi-generational studies very quick and feasible, drosophila’s been helping us make amazingly important discoveries about pathology and treatment for nigh on a century now.

In fact, Governor, to anyone who may have read a newspaper or two in the last several decades, your remarks this afternoon sounded as absurd as if you’d said, “And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s research. Silly things like studying cancer and AIDS. And oh, yeah—don’t let me forget—it also goes to things like genetic research, science that enables us to better understand the origins of disorders like Down’s syndrome and autism.”

I. Kid. You. Not.

As a former teacher, Governor, and a person who now works extensively on producing educational materials, many designed for children with special needs, I applaud your devotion to improving services for this criminally underfunded population (although you might want to remember that children with special needs tend to grow into adults with special needs—who also need services). But your sunny, sarcastic, seemingly deliberate scientific illiteracy is an insult to scientists across this country and the world, the vast majority of whom work on tiny pieces of research that would probably seem worthless or irrelevant to you (stuff like investigating a tiny bit of fruit fly DNA, say). That is, they’d seem worthless until five, ten, or even twenty years went by, and some other scientist fit it together with another tiny piece of research, and suddenly there it was: a cure for cancer. Or a new kind of biofuel that could help this country become energy independent and escape the dark menace of your other favorite demon, foreign oil. Or even, Governor, a definitive answer about the causes of autism or Down’s syndrome.

There are those of us who would dearly love to be able to give you the benefit of the doubt, Governor. We would like to believe that even if you are not our choice for Vice President, you are still a competent and intelligent human being whose opinions are deserving of respect. We want to believe this because the alternative is far too depressing. The alternative is believing that someone who willfully and cheerfully dismisses the intrinsic worth of scientific research—someone who is so lacking in knowledge and education that she could make the kind of baseless and uninformed argument you did today—that a person like that is running for the second highest office in the land.

And we are letting her.

Very sincerely yours,
Me
(a permanent resident who is starting to wish with all her heart that she’d become a citizen before this election).

Today was the day of Ross’s scholarship lunch, where he and the other students awarded grants traveled to a tony building in the Loop to meet sponsors, display huge scientific posters, and talk about their work.

He wore a new suit. It looked awesome.

When he came home he seemed exhausted but exhilarated by the experience of having people be interested in and enthusiastic about what he does, asking questions, listening closely, and saying, of his poster, “Yours was the only one I understood!”

I love my guy. And I’m proud of him.

More soon on unrelated topics. I’ve been writing about meiosis all day and parsing the relationship between DNA, genes, chromatids, chromosomes, and homologous chromosomes has me a little dazed.

—photo by hilectric

It’s not easy, breathing well. I once had a singing teacher (you may remember her) who tried to show me all the ways a human body can expand to allow more room for air in its lungs. She stood with me in a loose embrace, her hands gently resting against the small of my back, and told me to try to push them away. But that’s nowhere near my lungs, I protested, hardly believing I could press my whole flesh and frame outward simply by drawing in oxygen. But it was true: given time, muscle and bone gently gave way to the swelling force of a knowing breath. I could, I learned, control to an astonishing degree the rate, depth, sound, and shape of my breathing.

What was also astonishing was how difficult it was. Not just physically, although training half-forgotten parts of my body to stretch and contract on command was tiring enough. Equally laborious was the mental effort. I had to consciously take charge of a process that, given the slightest excuse, my brain would simply take over. During exercises, focusing on the fact of my breathing alone, I’d become a champion of deep, slow inhales and strong, steady exhales. But as soon as I started to sing, my mastery fell away. Unless I paid perfect attention to the feel of the air flowing through my lungs, I’d wind up running out of it.

Sucking in ragged breaths at the end of a note, all became clear. It was a dance I was in. My brain and I had to take it in turns to grasp and cede control over the rhythmic steps of my breathing—and I was not at all used to leading.

But how exactly does the brain lead this dance? What process is responsible for perpetuating the simple, indispensable pattern of muscle movements that persists from first breath to last?

The fact that breathing is necessary to sustain life is plain. The fact that the brain controls breathing is somewhat less plain (the Greco-Roman physician Galen was one of the first scientists to realize this, after noticing that respiration—among other things, one would imagine—suddenly ceased in an unfortunate gladiator whose brain stem had been severed from his spinal cord).

The actual mechanisms by which the brain controls breathing are delicate, complex, and not at all obvious. Until quite recently, for instance, neurobiologists believed that a single center in the brain was responsible for directing the intake and outflow of breath. A few years ago, however, it became clear that at least two networks of cells, both located in the brain stem, are involved.

One system, known as the pre-Botzinger complex, appears to adapt the rhythm of breathing to adjust for internal and external environmental factors. Our breathing can change, after all, in an instant—the sweet, deep hypnagogic breaths of drifting into dreams after a long day’s work racing without pause into the sharp, shallow gasps of what was that sound that just broke the night? The second system, made up of cells known as pre-I (for pre-inhalation) neurons, has been called breath’s pacemaker. It, scientists think, works to tug the rhythm of our breathing back to its regular rate—ensuring that it remains, above all, steady, stable, and unfaltering.

Apart from the times in which we (struggling to calm a nervous heart or maintain a state of meditative bliss) seize conscious control over our respiratory systems, these two cellular networks in our brains seem to be involved in their own elaborate dance of give and take—balancing the incredible responsiveness of our breathing with its unfailing reliability.

Or almost entirely unfailing. German folklorists tell the tale of a water nymph named Ondine, as beautiful and lithe a creature as any mermaid ever was. Unfortunately for Ondine, she falls in love with a human; her lover Hans is as fickle and inconstant a creature as any mortal man ever was. When he leaves her for another lover, Ondine’s father—king of the sea and possessed of both power and cruelty in equal measure—curses her capricious paramour. Since once he swore to be faithful to Ondine with his every waking breath, Hans is now doomed to lose his breath forever the very moment he falls asleep.

“Ondine’s curse” is what the medical literature prettily calls congenital central hypoventilation sundrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects the autonomic nervous system in such a way as to cause the failure of automatic breathing. Children born with CCHS breathe normally when they are awake, but often “forget” to do so once they enter quiet sleep, and most can only hope for long-term survival if they undergo tracheotomies that allow them to be hooked up to ventilators at night. CCHS brains are quite literally unable to take over control of the body’s inhalations and exhalations; these children have lost a partner in their constant dance.

Having read about Ondine’s curse, I can’t help thinking about it sometimes, in the drowsy, comforting minutes before I fall asleep at night. As I feel my chest rise lightly, fall gently, under my own volition, I am suddenly struck by how soon I must let go of all my intention. And I try, paradoxically, to stay awake while I lose consciousness. More than anything, more than the fear of stillness, I long to trace that silent passing of the baton from my conscious self to my involuntary brain. I long to know the impossible: what it feels like to be at once awake in my body and in the grip of an ancient will that is all my own and yet, after all, does not belong to me.

Happy LHC day! Now there’s an accomplishment with which to face death.

I spent the day working on a new project for a new client. It’s pretty great, and I’m extremely excited about it, but it kind of ate my brain (and all my energy). So you’ll just have to settle for knowing that I’m busy, happy, happy, and busy.

P.S. I probably owe you an email, but it might have to wait until I’m idle and sad.

…is pretty hellish for people who dislike crowds in general, and screaming crowds of children in particular. I really ought to have realized that; it was the same when we went to the free day at the Field Museum a few months ago (winter is just as bad as summer, come to think of it). Oh, well. We got to see Michelle Kaufman’s gorgeous Smart Home: Green + Wired exhibit in relative peace, since they limit the tours of the house (which induced in us a never-before-felt urge to buy shiny property) to 20 people. That was yesterday. Also yesterday, the baking of the second iteration of the banana-chocolate bread we made last month, and the watching of Miller’s Crossing. I can’t tell you how much I love that loaf pan. Well, maybe I can: slightly more than I love Gabriel Byrne.

Today was gloriously quiet. I worked. I went out in the afternoon to take a break on the swings and ended up next to a frickin’ cute little boy being pushed by his mom; I glided slowly so as not to shake the swing frame too much, and it was probably the most relaxing thing I have done in weeks.

I have done many, many relaxing things in the past few weeks, including drinking six glasses of wine while sitting on grass listening to an orchestra and chatting with a bunch of friendly folks. So I know from relaxing.

In a minute we’re going to have more banana-chocolate bread, and tomorrow we have a Wordpress upgrade scheduled that may cause Distances Between Ports to go down for a while, but to make up for how complicated it may be—we’ve skipped a couple of upgrades, so it might be kind of tricky to convert all my incredibly stylish touches to the new platform—we’ve promised ourselves some deep dish pizza and soda. So if you do come by and notice that my blog has disappeared, just imagine that there is a post on it that says, “Upgrading Wordpress. Very full.”

Man, I am pooped. (Incidentally, after I typed that I searched my archives to find out how many times I have told you I was pooped, and the answer is five since 2004. I also turned up one special entry that was not about me, but about how pooped Sophie used to get when she was learning to crawl.)

I wish I could say I was tired from a schedule packed full with thrilling events, but that’s only partially true. What I’ve mostly been doing is writing. I’ve been writing some front matter for a teacher’s handbook. I’ve been writing several passages, poems, and plays for the little kiddos whose educations I shape with my hot little hands (I was meant to be editing those, but sometimes manuscript comes in with…issues). I’ve been writing and rewriting an article for a magazine, which has now gone through two editorial reviews and two extensive revisions. The process has taught me a great deal about the job I want to have, and eliminated any last traces of ego I may have retained about my writing, which makes me extremely happy. I don’t mean that I’ve been horribly torn down; I mean that I’m more used than ever to taking edits and running with them, and to kissing what I may have thought were delicious phrasings goodbye when someone suggests a change to what I wrote. It’s also been helpful because it reminded me that science journalism takes many forms, and some forms prohibit editorializing. Since it’s editorializing that I love the most (I know, I bet you’d never have guessed), that knowledge is also going to shape the job I’m working on creating for myself.

It’s kind of a fun learning curve. I feel like I’m putting myself through a professional course of sorts—an extremely scattered and slow one with no student fees.

Anyway, tired me. No new photos in a while. I’m working on that too.