Discovery

From today’s Seattle Times:

It surfaced by accident, when a rookie lab assistant was too zealous with the cleanser.

Scientist Patricia Hunt was doing genetics studies on female mice when a temp worker cleaning up one day scoured the animals’ cages and water bottles with harsh detergent. When the creatures showed abnormalities in their egg chromosomes, Hunt later linked the changes to a substance released from the plastic by the abrasive and the scrubbing — bisphenol A.

Baby bottle. Courtesy the |G| from Flickr.

That was 1998. A decade of research and controversy later, Hunt, now a professor at Washington State University, has helped push Washington toward becoming one of a handful of states to ban many products that contain the plastic-hardening agent BPA.

Perhaps as early as Friday, the state Senate is expected to vote on whether to fine manufacturers and retailers that make or sell baby bottles, sippy cups, and cans or jars of infant food that contain the chemical because of health concerns for young children. A similar measure passed the state House 95-1 this week.

Read more in the Seattle Times.

Read the Washington State Magazine article from Fall 2008 about Pat Hunt’s work, and the work of other WSU researchers studying human chromosomes.

Ketchikan-based artist Ray Troll (MFA ’81) migrated south this winter for the opening of his latest show at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

Poster for Ray Troll's show at the Burke

Kicking off the show in December with a private, invitation-only event, the museum hosted several hundred people from tots and teens to aged professors, all eager to visit with Ray and his traveling companion and co-author paleontologist Kirk Johnson, who grew up in Mercer Island.

Troll’s work is fanciful, but accurate. Every scale, proboscis, and fin is accurately rendered. Still it’s all slightly “bent,” Ray’s words, not mine. Ray creates a dual world where the dinosaurs mingle with the modern features, like gas stations and televisions. The exhibit pairs Troll’s paintings and murals and Johnson’s research with real-life fossils from the museum’s collections.

Troll’s style is to pep it up with cool colors, 3-D, video shorts, and music that he co-created, like “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway,” and “Paleonerd.” The videos include action-filled scenes from Washington, including a beach on the Olympic Peninsula where Johnson and Troll break nodules of hardened ancient sediment to look for fossils of “little critters.”

Searching for Concretions

(Watch all the videos at the Cruisin’ website)

Since we last checked in with Ray, he has made another trip to the Amazon last spring, where he was again wowed by the fish, the foliage, and the food. And Ray and his band, The Ratfish Brothers, have released a CD titled, like the exhibit, “Cruising the Fossil Freeway.” To hear a selection of the songs visit the band’s MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/ratfishbrothers.

If you’re looking for something fun to do on a rainy weekend, or even on a sunny day, the Burke show is fun for everyone from the smallest kid to the oldest paleoethnobotanist. It will be in Seattle through May 31.

Links

Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway – Ray Troll’s show at the Burke Museum

Ray Troll: A story of fish, fossils, and funky art – Article from Spring 2007 issue of Washington State Magazine 

TrollArt – Ray’s official website

Write “Conan,” “Leno,” and “failed experiment” in a search engine and you’ll get several thousand results. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who think NBC was conducting an experiment when it moved Jay Leno from “The Tonight Show” to prime time, with Conan O’Brien taking his place at 11:35 p.m.

But was it really an experiment? And even if Leno’s prime-time appearances failed to bring profitable audiences, is that a failure in a scientific sense?

We asked Jerry Gough, who teaches the history of science at Washington State University. His response:

The problem here, I think, is that (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) there exist two quite distinct definitions of the word “experiment”, one of which applies to theory (“An action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown, to test a hypothesis, or establish or illustrate some known truth”) and the other of which applies to practice (a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose).

In the pure sciences (whose aim is simply to ascertain the truth), I am not sure that there can be such a thing as a failed experiment (as long as it is properly conducted—e.g., there was no hole in the filter paper, no one dropped the flask or added a destructive chemical by mistake).  Experiments are usually conducted to test pre-conceived hypotheses.  If the expected results do not come about, this does not mean the experiment has failed, but either that the hypothesis being tested needs correction or that the experiment did not really test the hypothesis in the way that the experimenter thought it did. In either case, something new is learned, and since learning is the goal of the operation, the experiment was in some sense “successful.”

NBC’s Jeff Zucker is no Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

An example of this was the case of great chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier who in March of 1775 collected the gas given off by heating the “red calx of mercury” (mercuric oxide).  He was probably expecting to get what was called “fixed air” (carbon dioxide).  However, when he applied the standard test for “fixed air” by mixing the gas with limewater (Ca(OH)2), he got a negative result (i.e., the limewater did not give off the chalky precipitate [CaCO3] that it normally does in the presence of “fixed air”).  However the experiment was not a failure.  Knowing that the gas was not what he had expected gave rise to further experiments that resulted in his successfully identifying oxygen as the cause of combustion.

In the applied sciences, the situation is not quite the same.  Let us suppose, for example, that the makers of the first atomic bomb had produced only a fizzled explosion.  The primary goal in this case was not to learn something but to produce a desired result. Scientifically they might have successfully learned something; practically, they would have failed, and I think most of the people involved with the operation would have described the trial as a failed experiment.

The NBC officials who moved Leno to his 10 o’clock spot were expecting to draw larger audiences than their competitors at a lesser cost.  Unless they were complete idiots, they had to have known that there was some uncertainty concerning the result of their actions and thus what they did was to some extent an experiment in the second sense of the word (the root meaning of “experiment,” by the way, is “trial”). One of the participants has claimed that the experiment was improperly conducted, because not enough time was allowed for the desirable results to come about.  But, of course, even if they believe this to be true, the directors at NBC cannot afford to continue the experiment, and so however successful it might have been in theory, it was in practical terms a failure.

There’s just no getting around the fact that solving some of the world’s most persistent animal diseases can get a bit bloody. That’s quickly obvious in a visit to the Bustad Hall necropsy suite run by the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab.

Veterinarians on this visit are performing necropsies—animal autopsies, if you will—on three bighorn sheep that state wildlife workers shot outside Vantage. Veterinarians want  to see if they have been exposed to a bacterium suspected in the pneumonia killing sheep in the Yakima River canyon.

Photo courtesy of Barry Maas

“Not a real pretty place,” is how Charlie Powell, a vet school spokesman, describes the lab as he brings me and the Northwest News Network’s Anna King into a nearby viewing room. There lie three plainly dead bighorn sheep, their horns not all that big, the floor beneath them stained with wide streaks of blood. Over the next half hour or so, veterinarians and students essentially take the animals apart. They disarticulate a shoulder, cut through the ribs with long-handled pruning shears, remove organs, draw blood and gingerly bag sample upon sample of tissue.

It’s as if they are stripping a car for this accessory and that while leaving the bulk of the parts on a sheep rug. It isn’t exactly gross, and if you think it is you probably haven’t read this far. But it is literally morbid—these things are dead. And it is truly fascinating, particularly when one’s gaze moves to a quarter horse being dissected directly in front of the viewing room window.

Here is an animal so huge it has to be brought in on the room’s two-ton electric hoist, and it is unfolded to reveal a study of anatomy writ large—huge ribs, big liver, big intestines. Out of this, veterinarians can home in on the smallest, most banal killer. In this case, Jim Stanton, a clinical assistant professor, taps along the intestine and points out a hard section. A student slices it open and pulls out a softball-sized bolus. Better than a smoking gun, it is the soft, fibrous bullet that caused the colic that felled the horse.

WSU pathologists are now analyzing the sheep samples for an even smaller nemesis: Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae. WSU researchers found the bacterium in bighorn sheep from Hells Canyon just a couple of years ago, says Tom Besser, a professor of veterinary microbiology. They’re now finding signs of it in herd upon herd of pneumonia-plagued bighorn sheep. Besser says he doesn’t know if it is in this herd yet, “but that’s what I’m going to look for.”

Read and hear Anna King’s report, “Scientists Scramble To Save Northwest’s Iconic Bighorn Sheep”