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The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.
Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.
Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.
The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.
“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.
On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.
Mr. Makanza is an assistant medical officer, not a fully trained physician. Assistant medical officers have education similar to that of physician assistants in the United States, but with additional training in surgery. They are Tanzania’s solution to a severe shortage of doctors, and they perform many basic operations, like Caesareans and appendectomies. The hospital in Berega has two.
Abortions in Berega come in seasonal waves — March and April, August and September — in sync with planting and harvests, when a lot of socializing goes on, Dr. Mdoe said. He said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
“They just poke, poke, poke,” he said. “And then the woman has to come here.” Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis.
In the past some hospitals threatened to withhold care until a woman identified the abortionist (performing abortions can bring a 14-year prison term), but that practice was abandoned in favor of simply providing postabortal treatment. Still, women do not want to discuss what happened or even admit that they had anything other than a miscarriage, because in theory they can be prosecuted for having abortions. The law calls for seven years in prison for the woman. So doctors generally do not ask questions.
“They are supposed to be arrested,” Dr. Mdoe said. “Our work as physicians is just to help and make sure they get healed.”
He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.
The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.
In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.
But in other African nations like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, abortion is not available on request, and the figures on contraceptive use are even lower than Tanzania’s and maternal mortality is higher. Nonprofit groups are working with the Tanzanian government to provide family planning, but the country is vast, and the widely distributed rural populations makes many people extremely hard to reach.
Geography is not the only obstacle. An assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, said: “Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous.”
In interviews, some young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer.
Mr. Kaneno said the doctors were trying to dispel those taboos and convince women that it was a good thing to be able to choose whether and when to get pregnant.
“It is still a long way to go,” he said.
Observatory: Evolving Mosquitoes in the Galapágos
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
The animals of the Galapágos have been studied extensively since the days of Darwin and his finches. But there’s been less scrutiny of some of the archipelago’s insects, including mosquitoes.
Now, a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by scientists from the University of Leeds, the Zoological Society of London and Galapágos National Park, sheds light on the black salt marsh mosquito, Aedes taerniorhynchus. Since it is the only mosquito found throughout the archipelago, the findings raise concerns about the impact of mosquito-borne diseases.
Arnaud Bataille and colleagues conducted a genetic analysis that showed that the mosquito, one of three species found in the Galapágos, was not introduced recently by humans but instead arrived about 200,000 years ago. Since then the insect has evolved so much it is practically a distinct species from the mainland variety.
For one thing, the insect has adapted to be able to feast on the blood of lizards, tortoises and other reptiles and not solely on mammals, as it does on the mainland. The mosquito also has a wider range than on the mainland.
All of that could spell trouble, the researchers say, if West Nile virus or a similar pathogen were to reach the island. A. taerniorhynchus would appear to be poised to rapidly spread such a virus, with potentially devastating consequences. The researchers suggest that all planes and boats arriving in the Galapágos be treated with pesticides.
Well: Better Running Through Walking
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
I am more couch potato than runner. But not long ago, I decided to get myself into shape to run in the New York City Marathon, on Nov. 1, just 152 days from now. (Not that I’m counting.)
To train for my first marathon, I’m using the “run-walk” method, popularized by the distance coach Jeff Galloway, a member of the 1972 Olympic team. When I mentioned this to a colleague who runs, she snickered — a common reaction among purists.
But after interviewing several people who have used the method, I’m convinced that those of us run-walking the marathon will have the last laugh.
Contrary to what you might think, the technique doesn’t mean walking when you’re tired; it means taking brief walk breaks when you’re not.
Depending on one’s fitness level, a walk-break runner might run for a minute and walk for a minute, whether on a 5-mile training run or the 26.2-mile course on race day. A more experienced runner might incorporate a one-minute walk break for every mile of running.
Taking these breaks makes marathon training less grueling and reduces the risk of injury, Mr. Galloway says, because it gives the muscles regular recovery time during a long run. Walk breaks are a way for older, less fit and overweight people to take part in a sport that would otherwise be off limits. But most surprising are the stories from veteran runners who say run-walk training has helped them post faster race times than ever.
One of them is Tim Deegan of Jacksonville, Fla., who had run 25 marathons when his wife, Donna Deegan, a popular local newscaster and cancer survivor, began organizing a marathon to raise money for breast cancer research. When Mr. Galloway volunteered to help with the race, Ms. Deegan asked her husband to take part in run-walk training to show support.
“The only reason I did this is because I love my wife,” said Mr. Deegan, 49. “To say I was a skeptic is to put it very nicely.”
But to his surprise, he began to enjoy running more, and he found that his body recovered more quickly from long runs. His times had been slowing — to about 3 hours 45 minutes, 15 minutes shy of qualifying for the Boston Marathon — but as he ran-walked his way through the Jacksonville Marathon, “I started thinking I might have a chance to qualify for Boston again.”
He did, posting a time of 3:28.
Nadine Rihani of Nashville ran her first marathon at age 61, taking walk breaks. Her running friends urged her to adopt more traditional training, and she was eventually sidelined by back and hip pain. So she resumed run-walk training, and in April, at age 70, she finished first in her age group in the Country Music Marathon, coming in at 6:05.
“My friends who were ‘serious’ runners said, ‘You don’t need to do those walk breaks,’ ” she said. “I found out the hard way I really did.”
Dave Desposato, a 46-year-old financial analyst, began run-walk training several years ago after excessive running resulted in an overuse injury. He finished this year’s Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City, Mich., in 3:31:42, cutting 12 minutes off his previous best.
“I run enough marathons now to see everybody totally collapsing at the end is very, very common,” he said. “You wish you could share your experience with them, but they have to be willing to listen first.”
Another unconventional element of walk-break training is the frequency — typically just three days a week, with two easy runs of 20 to 60 minutes each and a long run on the weekend. The walk breaks allow runners to build up their mileage without subjecting their bodies to the stress of daily running, Mr. Galloway said.
Many runners take their own version of walk breaks without thinking about it, he says: they slow down at water stations or reduce their pace when they tire. Scheduling walk breaks earlier in a run gives the athlete control over the race and a chance to finish stronger.
While I’m planning to use run-walk training to complete my first marathon, I’ve heard from many runners who adhere to a variety of training methods. So later this week, the Well blog will have a new feature: the Run Well marathon training tool, with which you can choose any of several coaches’ training plans and then track your progress.
Besides Mr. Galloway, plans are being offered by the marathoner Greg McMillan, who is renowned for his detailed training plans that help runners reach their time goals; the New York Flyers, the city’s largest running club, which incorporates local road races into its training; and Team for Kids, a New York Road Runners Foundation charity program that trains 5,000 adult runners around the world.
The Run Well series also gives you access to top running experts, advice from elite runners, reviews of running gadgets and regular doses of inspiration to get you race-ready.
So please join me, the coaches and other running enthusiasts every day at the Well blog, nytimes.com/well, during the next five months of training. For me, this is finally the year I’ll run a marathon. I hope it will be your year too.
Scientist at Work: Viktor Deak
Where Art and Paleontology Intersect, Fossils Become Faces
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, June 2, 2009
For his first date with a fellow art student, Viktor Deak suggested “Bodies,” the exhibit of flayed and plasticized humans.
She said yes, even though she had already seen it. He thought that was promising. But it was dinner afterward that convinced him this was the real thing.
“Any woman who could go to ‘Bodies’ with me and then eat a steak,” he said, “and still be dainty and fun and all, was a girl I could be with forever.”
Mr. Deak (pronounced DAY-ahk) and Xochitl Gomez were married at the Bronx Zoo, in the gorilla grotto. Which makes sense, given how much time they spend there. He brings the camera, she totes the big looking glass.
“They know it’s a mirror,” he said of the zoo’s gorilla family. “They come up, make faces, check out their teeth. I’ve gotten some really great shots.”
His interest in gorilla grimaces, like his interest in displays of dissected flesh, is professional. Mr. Deak, 32, is one of the world’s leading paleoartists. If you find yourself face to face in a museum with Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei, you may be looking at his work.
Many of the images of hominids in the new Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History are his, as are those in the book “The Last Human,” both of which he did in collaboration with Gary J. Sawyer, the museum’s physical anthropologist.
(Much of Mr. Deak’s work can be seen on his Web site, www.anatomicalorigins.com.)
His 78-foot-long mural showing six million years’ worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as part of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy.” The exhibit’s centerpiece is the fossilized skeleton of Lucy — three million years old, less than four feet tall, hailing from the Afar Depression of Ethiopia and named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which was playing in the camp when she was found in 1974.
But his mural, a vast Photoshop collage, is more fun to ponder than the bones. The background uses thousands of his photos of vegetation, rocks, valleys and outcrops from the South Dakota badlands, the Puerto Rican jungle and the Wyoming prairie. Only one speck of it, a friend’s mother’s safari shot of faraway thorn trees, was actually snapped in Africa. But Ethiopia today, of course, no longer has the lush rainforest and grassy savannah of Ethiopia three million years ago, so Mr. Deak had to improvise. His landscape is filled with ape-men morphed from photos of his sculpted heads overlaid with photos of chimpanzee hair like a late-night hair restoration commercial, each one set atop the body of a human — usually Mr. Deak, his wife, or friends — in a primeval pose, then further adjusted to have longer arms, jutting buttocks or whatever is accurate.
You do not want to be alone in his apartment at night. His shelves have more skulls than a heavy metal album cover, some of them only partly defleshed. Even his little pasta machine is creepy. He uses it to extrude red clay at just the right thickness for face muscles.
There is something lost in time about the place. Maybe it’s the lack of artifacts from any time zone between his fossil racks and his Transformer robot collection.
It’s not just that as an artist, Mr. Deak has little patience for contemporary art. It’s that he disapproves of pretty much everything from the last 100,000 years, the entire Homo sapiens canon.
After all, he says, not only did our immediate ancestors wipe out many big mammals, but they probably killed off and ate some of his favorite objets d’art, including Homo neanderthalensis, erectus and floresiensis.
“Is it any wonder we have a hard time hanging out with our neighbors,” he asks rhetorically after a long discourse on extinctions, “when at one time we went through the whole planet and just cleaned house?”
Mr. Deak is in touch with his inner hominid. His bodybuilding hobby — the dumbbells are on his studio floor — gives him that “don’t mess with me” look sought by all male primates, and he does a mean “Nutcracker Man with a rock” pose from his own mural.
But the threatening mien is belied by his personality, which is both scholarly and a little star-struck. He is in awe of the early paleoartist John Gurche and the novelist and former New York Times reporter John Darnton, whose book “Neanderthal” he carries everywhere, wrapped in plastic.
“I was a strange little kid,” he answers when asked how he got into paleoart. One of his first sculptures was done at a family barbecue, a human skeleton from chicken bones. Other defining moments, he said, included a book of dinosaur illustrations his Budapest grandfather bought for him, seeing Luke Skywalker get a robotic hand and watching an eighth-grade science film of Mr. Gurche playing Pygmalion to a fossil skull. (Mr. Deak was born in Hungary but grew up in Connecticut.)
His big break came when he was a School of Visual Arts student sketching in the natural history museum. A staff member saw his work and introduced him to Mr. Sawyer.
“I could tell he could think three-dimensionally, abstractly and symbolically,” Mr. Sawyer, whom Mr. Deak refers to as his “spiritual mother,” said in a telephone interview. “That’s the kind of student I wanted to work with.”
At his urging, Mr. Deak went to SUNY Downstate Medical School to dissect cadavers.
“I remember one time he called me, his hands were full of guck, and he said, ‘This is fantastic!’ ” Mr. Sawyer said.
Both recall one of Mr. Deak’s early efforts at Homo heidelbergensis. After weeks of work, he showed it to Mr. Sawyer, who studied it silently, then snatched up a scalpel and began stabbing the nose.
“I almost tackled him,” Mr. Deak said. “Then he said, ‘The nose is wrong. Do it again.’ It’s maybe not the way I’d teach a student, but he taught me that no work is sacred, you have to be ready to destroy it.”
Mr. Sawyer didn’t dispute either the event or the point.
“Viktor didn’t have that deep, deep background in anatomy he does now,” he said. “He’s evolved.”
Hazings like that proved a blessing because, in paleontology, photorealism has its nitpickers. Picasso never had to explain that his mistresses weren’t actually cubic, but Mr. Deak has taken grief over as little as a flexed knee. One academic critic who saw his Lucy mural publicly boasted that he himself “had the good fortune to examine Lucy when she was in Donald C. Johanson’s lab in Cleveland, and I can assure you that the anatomy of the lower back, hips, feet and knee and ankle joints all provide clear evidence that those early hominids stood just as erect as we do.”
Mr. Deak replied on the same Web site that he knew perfectly well that Lucy could stand up, but he had depicted her crouching because she was pulling away from a predator — the viewer. She was, he explained, protecting the baby in her arms and about to run off.
To prove his point, he picks up a cast of her skull. The angle of the foramen magnum, the hole where the spine enters the vault, he explains, shows that she could stand erect.
Anatomical decisions aside, there were other advantages to hunching Lucy over, turning her sideways and adding a baby. Besides the added tension, it avoided the distracting Playboy Primate Playmate aspect of his early drafts, which showed Lucy in full-frontal fecundity. Unlike Homo idaltu, a homo sapiens subspecies extinct for a mere 150,000 years who is also in the mural and who sports a spear and a fetching loincloth, Lucy bipedally strode the earth before clothes were invented.
But the real controversy, Mr. Deak said, is in the idea his work represents. When he was waiting tables as a student, he served a family that had just visited the natural history museum. When he said he worked there part time, they were excited — until he said he worked on the Hall of Human Origins.
“They said, ‘Shh, please — don’t say anything around the kids,’ ” he said. “ ‘We believe in a young Earth. We teach our children that we’re made directly in God’s image, and the Earth is about 5,000 years old.’ ”
“Well, did you see the dinosaurs?” he asked.
“ ‘Yes. We tell them these are the creatures that didn’t make it to the Ark.’ ”
“I felt a chill of fear,” Mr. Deak said. “I still do when I think about it. I’ve seen, sometimes firsthand, the evidence that came out of the ground. It’s terrifying that people can look at it and say, ‘It’s not there’ and believe in something that was just dictated to them.”
“But,” he added, “I was a waiter. I wanted a tip. I bit my tongue and just got out of there.”
Essay: Wisdom in a Cleric’s Garb; Why Not a Lab Coat Too?
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
There is a warm fuzzy moment near the end of the movie “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.
Mr. Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon has just exposed the archvillain who was threatening to blow up the Vatican with antimatter stolen from a particle collider. A Catholic cardinal who has been giving him a hard time all through the movie and has suddenly turned twinkly-eyed says a small prayer thanking God for sending someone to save them.
Mr. Hanks replies that he doesn’t think he was “sent.”
Of course he was, he just doesn’t know it, the priest says gently. Mr. Hanks, taken aback, smiles in his classic sheepish way. Suddenly he is not so sure.
This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.
These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.
It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.”
“Angels & Demons,” a prequel to “The DaVinci Code,” also directed by Mr. Howard and starring Mr. Hanks, and based on a mega-selling book by Dan Brown, opened at No. 1 at the box office in May despite lackluster reviews, and is still doing respectably.
It’s not likely that all those people flocked into the theaters to ponder the relationship between science and religion. “Angels” is a “24”-style thriller, in which Mr. Hanks and his fellow traveler, a biophysicist played by Ayelet Zurer, race the clock following clues left around Rome by the Renaissance artist and sculptor Bernini to find out who is killing a group of cardinals and has vowed to blow up the Vatican.
The new movie has torture, gorgeous cinematography, including cool shots of the collider firing up, bizarre plot twists and turns, and, like the earlier movie, Mr. Hanks dashing into the library (in this case the fabled Vatican archives) at crucial moments to retrieve and decode in a few ticking minutes some long-lost document.
But it is the ages-old conflict between science and religion that supplies the framework for all this action. Since the early 17th century, the story goes, a secret network of scientists and skeptics known as the Illuminati, who have included Galileo and Bernini, have been engaged in an underground war against the church.
My first response upon reading the book earlier this year was to wonder if any part of this history could be true. I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that the short answer is no. Mr. Brown is so successful at spinning his fables that a whole industry has grown up around debunking him.
There was indeed an organization called the Illuminati formed in Bavaria in 1776 — too late for Galileo or Bernini — but according to historians it died out a decade or so later. Nevertheless the Illuminati have lived on in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.
For Mr. Howard, who has been lauded for getting things right in movies like “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind,” the vagueness between what is real history and what is made up in Dan Brown’s books is part of the fun. “He doesn’t invent things, he creates suppositions,” Mr. Howard said.
The church did burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for various heresies, including espousing the Copernican sun-centric view of the solar system, in 1600, and sentenced Galileo to permanent house arrest as “violently suspect of heresy,” in 1633. But in recent times Catholics have gotten better about science, especially compared with some of their fundamentalist cousins in the United States. The church has been cool with the Big Bang origin of the universe since 1951, and the current pope, Benedict, has signaled his acceptance of evolution, at least as an explanation of how humankind came about, if not why.
In a recent interview, Mr. Howard said that he didn’t think there was any conflict between science and religion. Both are after big mysteries, but whatever science finds, he said, “There’s still going be that question: ‘And before that?’ ”
I don’t really mind that the movie and book have rewritten history, and the movie takes fewer liberties with science than much science fiction.
But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart.
Maybe I am making too much of this cinematic grain of sand to see the whole history of science and religion in it. But I have a feeling the scene wouldn’t work if the boyish Mr. Hanks were replaced by someone more formidable, say, Frank Langella or Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart.
Part of what gives the movie its kick is the old Henry Jamesian notion of a headstrong American encountering old European tradition. We’re still in awe of all that tradition, even as we insist, like teenagers exclaiming that Dad is an out-of-it old fogey, that it’s a new world.
And they are still patting us on the head.
Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.
The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.
Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.
The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.
If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.
Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.
In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.
Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.
I miss my dad, but I’m glad I stood my ground and kept flailing at a writing career when he wanted to rescue me and set me up in a family business. Mr. Hanks should hold his ground too.
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.
Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.
Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.
The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.
“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.
On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.
Mr. Makanza is an assistant medical officer, not a fully trained physician. Assistant medical officers have education similar to that of physician assistants in the United States, but with additional training in surgery. They are Tanzania’s solution to a severe shortage of doctors, and they perform many basic operations, like Caesareans and appendectomies. The hospital in Berega has two.
Abortions in Berega come in seasonal waves — March and April, August and September — in sync with planting and harvests, when a lot of socializing goes on, Dr. Mdoe said. He said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
“They just poke, poke, poke,” he said. “And then the woman has to come here.” Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis.
In the past some hospitals threatened to withhold care until a woman identified the abortionist (performing abortions can bring a 14-year prison term), but that practice was abandoned in favor of simply providing postabortal treatment. Still, women do not want to discuss what happened or even admit that they had anything other than a miscarriage, because in theory they can be prosecuted for having abortions. The law calls for seven years in prison for the woman. So doctors generally do not ask questions.
“They are supposed to be arrested,” Dr. Mdoe said. “Our work as physicians is just to help and make sure they get healed.”
He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.
The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.
In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.
But in other African nations like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, abortion is not available on request, and the figures on contraceptive use are even lower than Tanzania’s and maternal mortality is higher. Nonprofit groups are working with the Tanzanian government to provide family planning, but the country is vast, and the widely distributed rural populations makes many people extremely hard to reach.
Geography is not the only obstacle. An assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, said: “Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous.”
In interviews, some young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer.
Mr. Kaneno said the doctors were trying to dispel those taboos and convince women that it was a good thing to be able to choose whether and when to get pregnant.
“It is still a long way to go,” he said.
Observatory: Evolving Mosquitoes in the Galapágos
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
The animals of the Galapágos have been studied extensively since the days of Darwin and his finches. But there’s been less scrutiny of some of the archipelago’s insects, including mosquitoes.
Now, a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by scientists from the University of Leeds, the Zoological Society of London and Galapágos National Park, sheds light on the black salt marsh mosquito, Aedes taerniorhynchus. Since it is the only mosquito found throughout the archipelago, the findings raise concerns about the impact of mosquito-borne diseases.
Arnaud Bataille and colleagues conducted a genetic analysis that showed that the mosquito, one of three species found in the Galapágos, was not introduced recently by humans but instead arrived about 200,000 years ago. Since then the insect has evolved so much it is practically a distinct species from the mainland variety.
For one thing, the insect has adapted to be able to feast on the blood of lizards, tortoises and other reptiles and not solely on mammals, as it does on the mainland. The mosquito also has a wider range than on the mainland.
All of that could spell trouble, the researchers say, if West Nile virus or a similar pathogen were to reach the island. A. taerniorhynchus would appear to be poised to rapidly spread such a virus, with potentially devastating consequences. The researchers suggest that all planes and boats arriving in the Galapágos be treated with pesticides.
Well: Better Running Through Walking
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
I am more couch potato than runner. But not long ago, I decided to get myself into shape to run in the New York City Marathon, on Nov. 1, just 152 days from now. (Not that I’m counting.)
To train for my first marathon, I’m using the “run-walk” method, popularized by the distance coach Jeff Galloway, a member of the 1972 Olympic team. When I mentioned this to a colleague who runs, she snickered — a common reaction among purists.
But after interviewing several people who have used the method, I’m convinced that those of us run-walking the marathon will have the last laugh.
Contrary to what you might think, the technique doesn’t mean walking when you’re tired; it means taking brief walk breaks when you’re not.
Depending on one’s fitness level, a walk-break runner might run for a minute and walk for a minute, whether on a 5-mile training run or the 26.2-mile course on race day. A more experienced runner might incorporate a one-minute walk break for every mile of running.
Taking these breaks makes marathon training less grueling and reduces the risk of injury, Mr. Galloway says, because it gives the muscles regular recovery time during a long run. Walk breaks are a way for older, less fit and overweight people to take part in a sport that would otherwise be off limits. But most surprising are the stories from veteran runners who say run-walk training has helped them post faster race times than ever.
One of them is Tim Deegan of Jacksonville, Fla., who had run 25 marathons when his wife, Donna Deegan, a popular local newscaster and cancer survivor, began organizing a marathon to raise money for breast cancer research. When Mr. Galloway volunteered to help with the race, Ms. Deegan asked her husband to take part in run-walk training to show support.
“The only reason I did this is because I love my wife,” said Mr. Deegan, 49. “To say I was a skeptic is to put it very nicely.”
But to his surprise, he began to enjoy running more, and he found that his body recovered more quickly from long runs. His times had been slowing — to about 3 hours 45 minutes, 15 minutes shy of qualifying for the Boston Marathon — but as he ran-walked his way through the Jacksonville Marathon, “I started thinking I might have a chance to qualify for Boston again.”
He did, posting a time of 3:28.
Nadine Rihani of Nashville ran her first marathon at age 61, taking walk breaks. Her running friends urged her to adopt more traditional training, and she was eventually sidelined by back and hip pain. So she resumed run-walk training, and in April, at age 70, she finished first in her age group in the Country Music Marathon, coming in at 6:05.
“My friends who were ‘serious’ runners said, ‘You don’t need to do those walk breaks,’ ” she said. “I found out the hard way I really did.”
Dave Desposato, a 46-year-old financial analyst, began run-walk training several years ago after excessive running resulted in an overuse injury. He finished this year’s Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City, Mich., in 3:31:42, cutting 12 minutes off his previous best.
“I run enough marathons now to see everybody totally collapsing at the end is very, very common,” he said. “You wish you could share your experience with them, but they have to be willing to listen first.”
Another unconventional element of walk-break training is the frequency — typically just three days a week, with two easy runs of 20 to 60 minutes each and a long run on the weekend. The walk breaks allow runners to build up their mileage without subjecting their bodies to the stress of daily running, Mr. Galloway said.
Many runners take their own version of walk breaks without thinking about it, he says: they slow down at water stations or reduce their pace when they tire. Scheduling walk breaks earlier in a run gives the athlete control over the race and a chance to finish stronger.
While I’m planning to use run-walk training to complete my first marathon, I’ve heard from many runners who adhere to a variety of training methods. So later this week, the Well blog will have a new feature: the Run Well marathon training tool, with which you can choose any of several coaches’ training plans and then track your progress.
Besides Mr. Galloway, plans are being offered by the marathoner Greg McMillan, who is renowned for his detailed training plans that help runners reach their time goals; the New York Flyers, the city’s largest running club, which incorporates local road races into its training; and Team for Kids, a New York Road Runners Foundation charity program that trains 5,000 adult runners around the world.
The Run Well series also gives you access to top running experts, advice from elite runners, reviews of running gadgets and regular doses of inspiration to get you race-ready.
So please join me, the coaches and other running enthusiasts every day at the Well blog, nytimes.com/well, during the next five months of training. For me, this is finally the year I’ll run a marathon. I hope it will be your year too.
Scientist at Work: Viktor Deak
Where Art and Paleontology Intersect, Fossils Become Faces
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, June 2, 2009
For his first date with a fellow art student, Viktor Deak suggested “Bodies,” the exhibit of flayed and plasticized humans.
She said yes, even though she had already seen it. He thought that was promising. But it was dinner afterward that convinced him this was the real thing.
“Any woman who could go to ‘Bodies’ with me and then eat a steak,” he said, “and still be dainty and fun and all, was a girl I could be with forever.”
Mr. Deak (pronounced DAY-ahk) and Xochitl Gomez were married at the Bronx Zoo, in the gorilla grotto. Which makes sense, given how much time they spend there. He brings the camera, she totes the big looking glass.
“They know it’s a mirror,” he said of the zoo’s gorilla family. “They come up, make faces, check out their teeth. I’ve gotten some really great shots.”
His interest in gorilla grimaces, like his interest in displays of dissected flesh, is professional. Mr. Deak, 32, is one of the world’s leading paleoartists. If you find yourself face to face in a museum with Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei, you may be looking at his work.
Many of the images of hominids in the new Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History are his, as are those in the book “The Last Human,” both of which he did in collaboration with Gary J. Sawyer, the museum’s physical anthropologist.
(Much of Mr. Deak’s work can be seen on his Web site, www.anatomicalorigins.com.)
His 78-foot-long mural showing six million years’ worth of the proto-humans whose bony bits have been found in northeast Africa is coming to Manhattan in June as part of the exhibit “Lucy’s Legacy.” The exhibit’s centerpiece is the fossilized skeleton of Lucy — three million years old, less than four feet tall, hailing from the Afar Depression of Ethiopia and named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which was playing in the camp when she was found in 1974.
But his mural, a vast Photoshop collage, is more fun to ponder than the bones. The background uses thousands of his photos of vegetation, rocks, valleys and outcrops from the South Dakota badlands, the Puerto Rican jungle and the Wyoming prairie. Only one speck of it, a friend’s mother’s safari shot of faraway thorn trees, was actually snapped in Africa. But Ethiopia today, of course, no longer has the lush rainforest and grassy savannah of Ethiopia three million years ago, so Mr. Deak had to improvise. His landscape is filled with ape-men morphed from photos of his sculpted heads overlaid with photos of chimpanzee hair like a late-night hair restoration commercial, each one set atop the body of a human — usually Mr. Deak, his wife, or friends — in a primeval pose, then further adjusted to have longer arms, jutting buttocks or whatever is accurate.
You do not want to be alone in his apartment at night. His shelves have more skulls than a heavy metal album cover, some of them only partly defleshed. Even his little pasta machine is creepy. He uses it to extrude red clay at just the right thickness for face muscles.
There is something lost in time about the place. Maybe it’s the lack of artifacts from any time zone between his fossil racks and his Transformer robot collection.
It’s not just that as an artist, Mr. Deak has little patience for contemporary art. It’s that he disapproves of pretty much everything from the last 100,000 years, the entire Homo sapiens canon.
After all, he says, not only did our immediate ancestors wipe out many big mammals, but they probably killed off and ate some of his favorite objets d’art, including Homo neanderthalensis, erectus and floresiensis.
“Is it any wonder we have a hard time hanging out with our neighbors,” he asks rhetorically after a long discourse on extinctions, “when at one time we went through the whole planet and just cleaned house?”
Mr. Deak is in touch with his inner hominid. His bodybuilding hobby — the dumbbells are on his studio floor — gives him that “don’t mess with me” look sought by all male primates, and he does a mean “Nutcracker Man with a rock” pose from his own mural.
But the threatening mien is belied by his personality, which is both scholarly and a little star-struck. He is in awe of the early paleoartist John Gurche and the novelist and former New York Times reporter John Darnton, whose book “Neanderthal” he carries everywhere, wrapped in plastic.
“I was a strange little kid,” he answers when asked how he got into paleoart. One of his first sculptures was done at a family barbecue, a human skeleton from chicken bones. Other defining moments, he said, included a book of dinosaur illustrations his Budapest grandfather bought for him, seeing Luke Skywalker get a robotic hand and watching an eighth-grade science film of Mr. Gurche playing Pygmalion to a fossil skull. (Mr. Deak was born in Hungary but grew up in Connecticut.)
His big break came when he was a School of Visual Arts student sketching in the natural history museum. A staff member saw his work and introduced him to Mr. Sawyer.
“I could tell he could think three-dimensionally, abstractly and symbolically,” Mr. Sawyer, whom Mr. Deak refers to as his “spiritual mother,” said in a telephone interview. “That’s the kind of student I wanted to work with.”
At his urging, Mr. Deak went to SUNY Downstate Medical School to dissect cadavers.
“I remember one time he called me, his hands were full of guck, and he said, ‘This is fantastic!’ ” Mr. Sawyer said.
Both recall one of Mr. Deak’s early efforts at Homo heidelbergensis. After weeks of work, he showed it to Mr. Sawyer, who studied it silently, then snatched up a scalpel and began stabbing the nose.
“I almost tackled him,” Mr. Deak said. “Then he said, ‘The nose is wrong. Do it again.’ It’s maybe not the way I’d teach a student, but he taught me that no work is sacred, you have to be ready to destroy it.”
Mr. Sawyer didn’t dispute either the event or the point.
“Viktor didn’t have that deep, deep background in anatomy he does now,” he said. “He’s evolved.”
Hazings like that proved a blessing because, in paleontology, photorealism has its nitpickers. Picasso never had to explain that his mistresses weren’t actually cubic, but Mr. Deak has taken grief over as little as a flexed knee. One academic critic who saw his Lucy mural publicly boasted that he himself “had the good fortune to examine Lucy when she was in Donald C. Johanson’s lab in Cleveland, and I can assure you that the anatomy of the lower back, hips, feet and knee and ankle joints all provide clear evidence that those early hominids stood just as erect as we do.”
Mr. Deak replied on the same Web site that he knew perfectly well that Lucy could stand up, but he had depicted her crouching because she was pulling away from a predator — the viewer. She was, he explained, protecting the baby in her arms and about to run off.
To prove his point, he picks up a cast of her skull. The angle of the foramen magnum, the hole where the spine enters the vault, he explains, shows that she could stand erect.
Anatomical decisions aside, there were other advantages to hunching Lucy over, turning her sideways and adding a baby. Besides the added tension, it avoided the distracting Playboy Primate Playmate aspect of his early drafts, which showed Lucy in full-frontal fecundity. Unlike Homo idaltu, a homo sapiens subspecies extinct for a mere 150,000 years who is also in the mural and who sports a spear and a fetching loincloth, Lucy bipedally strode the earth before clothes were invented.
But the real controversy, Mr. Deak said, is in the idea his work represents. When he was waiting tables as a student, he served a family that had just visited the natural history museum. When he said he worked there part time, they were excited — until he said he worked on the Hall of Human Origins.
“They said, ‘Shh, please — don’t say anything around the kids,’ ” he said. “ ‘We believe in a young Earth. We teach our children that we’re made directly in God’s image, and the Earth is about 5,000 years old.’ ”
“Well, did you see the dinosaurs?” he asked.
“ ‘Yes. We tell them these are the creatures that didn’t make it to the Ark.’ ”
“I felt a chill of fear,” Mr. Deak said. “I still do when I think about it. I’ve seen, sometimes firsthand, the evidence that came out of the ground. It’s terrifying that people can look at it and say, ‘It’s not there’ and believe in something that was just dictated to them.”
“But,” he added, “I was a waiter. I wanted a tip. I bit my tongue and just got out of there.”
Essay: Wisdom in a Cleric’s Garb; Why Not a Lab Coat Too?
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, June 2, 2009
There is a warm fuzzy moment near the end of the movie “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.
Mr. Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon has just exposed the archvillain who was threatening to blow up the Vatican with antimatter stolen from a particle collider. A Catholic cardinal who has been giving him a hard time all through the movie and has suddenly turned twinkly-eyed says a small prayer thanking God for sending someone to save them.
Mr. Hanks replies that he doesn’t think he was “sent.”
Of course he was, he just doesn’t know it, the priest says gently. Mr. Hanks, taken aback, smiles in his classic sheepish way. Suddenly he is not so sure.
This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.
These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.
It was as if the priest had patted Einstein on the head and chuckled, “Never mind, Sonny, some day you’ll understand.”
“Angels & Demons,” a prequel to “The DaVinci Code,” also directed by Mr. Howard and starring Mr. Hanks, and based on a mega-selling book by Dan Brown, opened at No. 1 at the box office in May despite lackluster reviews, and is still doing respectably.
It’s not likely that all those people flocked into the theaters to ponder the relationship between science and religion. “Angels” is a “24”-style thriller, in which Mr. Hanks and his fellow traveler, a biophysicist played by Ayelet Zurer, race the clock following clues left around Rome by the Renaissance artist and sculptor Bernini to find out who is killing a group of cardinals and has vowed to blow up the Vatican.
The new movie has torture, gorgeous cinematography, including cool shots of the collider firing up, bizarre plot twists and turns, and, like the earlier movie, Mr. Hanks dashing into the library (in this case the fabled Vatican archives) at crucial moments to retrieve and decode in a few ticking minutes some long-lost document.
But it is the ages-old conflict between science and religion that supplies the framework for all this action. Since the early 17th century, the story goes, a secret network of scientists and skeptics known as the Illuminati, who have included Galileo and Bernini, have been engaged in an underground war against the church.
My first response upon reading the book earlier this year was to wonder if any part of this history could be true. I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that the short answer is no. Mr. Brown is so successful at spinning his fables that a whole industry has grown up around debunking him.
There was indeed an organization called the Illuminati formed in Bavaria in 1776 — too late for Galileo or Bernini — but according to historians it died out a decade or so later. Nevertheless the Illuminati have lived on in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists.
For Mr. Howard, who has been lauded for getting things right in movies like “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind,” the vagueness between what is real history and what is made up in Dan Brown’s books is part of the fun. “He doesn’t invent things, he creates suppositions,” Mr. Howard said.
The church did burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for various heresies, including espousing the Copernican sun-centric view of the solar system, in 1600, and sentenced Galileo to permanent house arrest as “violently suspect of heresy,” in 1633. But in recent times Catholics have gotten better about science, especially compared with some of their fundamentalist cousins in the United States. The church has been cool with the Big Bang origin of the universe since 1951, and the current pope, Benedict, has signaled his acceptance of evolution, at least as an explanation of how humankind came about, if not why.
In a recent interview, Mr. Howard said that he didn’t think there was any conflict between science and religion. Both are after big mysteries, but whatever science finds, he said, “There’s still going be that question: ‘And before that?’ ”
I don’t really mind that the movie and book have rewritten history, and the movie takes fewer liberties with science than much science fiction.
But I can’t help being bugged by that warm, fuzzy moment at the end, that figurative pat on the head. After all is said and done, it seems to imply, having faith is just a little bit better than being smart.
Maybe I am making too much of this cinematic grain of sand to see the whole history of science and religion in it. But I have a feeling the scene wouldn’t work if the boyish Mr. Hanks were replaced by someone more formidable, say, Frank Langella or Clint Eastwood or Humphrey Bogart.
Part of what gives the movie its kick is the old Henry Jamesian notion of a headstrong American encountering old European tradition. We’re still in awe of all that tradition, even as we insist, like teenagers exclaiming that Dad is an out-of-it old fogey, that it’s a new world.
And they are still patting us on the head.
Why should wisdom and comfort inhabit a clerical collar instead of a lab coat? Perhaps because religion seems to offer consolations that science doesn’t.
The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said that what gives great leaders power is the ability to comfort others in the face of death. But the iconic achievement of modern physics is the atomic bomb, death incarnate.
Moreover, since the time of Galileo scientists have bent over backward to restrain their own metaphysical rhetoric for fear of stepping on religious toes. Indeed, many of them were devout believers convinced they were exploring the mind of God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist and author, famously referred to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”
The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.
The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors, like gay marriage, are right and wrong.
If science drains the world of certainty, maybe that is invigorating as well as appropriate. The cardinal is free to revel in the assurance of his absolutes, while Tom Hanks and I can be braced by the challenge of being our own cosmologists, creating our own meanings.
Meanwhile, America is not so young and innocent anymore, and science has its own traditions and, yes, wisdoms, stretching back to antiquity.
In science the ends are justified by the means — what questions we ask and how we ask them — and the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the process by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.
Those fatherly pats on the head sound comforting, but as an answer to life’s struggles and quests, they lack something.
I miss my dad, but I’m glad I stood my ground and kept flailing at a writing career when he wanted to rescue me and set me up in a family business. Mr. Hanks should hold his ground too.
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Date: 2009-06-02 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 11:51 pm (UTC)