Famous First Words #16: The Dawn of Resting State fMRI -- Biswal et al.

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature wherein we have a look at the opening line of a famous scientific article.

Scientists' view of the brain tends to track the popular tech of the day. Descartes, for example, knew about horses so he concluded the soul was riding the brain horse-wise and even identified an anatomical rein from which the habenula gets its name. Fast forward many years and birth of the computer got everyone certain the brain trafficked in the ones and zeros of these marvels. At various other times the brain was a state machine, or a control system, or an associative net, or a Hebbian steam engine. Who knows what models tomorrow will bring, perhaps something about dark matter or quantum foam or "rap" (I once overheard a student argue we should study the brains of "rappers" because -- and I quote -- they are the intellectuals of society.)

More to today's point, somewhere between the equine and the Boolean, psychology got enamored with operant conditioning, popularized by BF Skinner and namesake of the box that bears his name. You go in the box. You do something good and a reward (sugar pellet, whiskey, tenure) appears. You do something bad and a punishment (electrical shock, 1040, "rap") appears instead.

The effect was we came to view the brain as a passive lump existing in a kind of sensory miasma, waiting for and then responding to a never-ending parade of stimuli called life. Anyone in possession of this device might find such a description overly simplistic. If you are like LabKitty, and why wouldn't you be, your mental existence isn't a grey fog punctuated by external interruptions, but rather a rich internal tapestry of hopes, dreams, and revenge fantasies.

Famous First Words #15: The Fast Fourier Transform -- Cooley and Tukey

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature wherein we have a look at the opening line of a legendary scientific article.

LabKitty has gushed about the FFT to anybody who will listen and to many who will not. Second only to eigenvalues in sphere, reach, and influence, the FFT remade the world. It was at once better mousetrap and longer-lasting lightbulb. Tastes great and less filling. Potato stuffing. The FFT is so celebration worthy it has even appeared on a t-shirt. And leggings! And a t-shirt!

Albeit kicking around in various forms since Gauss, the FFT didn't really get on the wish list until nerds got computers. I imagine Ada Lovelace whiled away many a frigid Nottinghamshire night dreaming of putting fewer cranks into her Babbage Engine to whack out a power spectrum. But the FFT we know and love was only announced in 1965. In perhaps the one instance of WW II failing to invent everything, the FFT slept right though the war years until necessity bumped it from slumber. Alas, the inspiration was still killeachother because of course it was. As WillyPete informs us "...Tukey came up with the idea during a meeting of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee where a discussion topic involved detecting nuclear tests by the Soviet Union."

Kee-ripes. Can't humans ever invent something inspired by -- I dunno -- Bob Ross. Or sporks?

This is why we can't have nice things. Or maybe why we can.

But I digress.

Famous First Words #14: Finite Element Analysis -- Turner et al.

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is one of the genuine Rosetta stones of engineering. Imagine drawing a thingy on your computer, then having that thingy respond as if it existed -- no mere pretty picture, but real virtual reality in space and time. You might say FEA was the lighting that rose Frankenstein CAD off the slab. With the arrival of finite elements, computer models didn't just look cool, they also behaved right -- in theory, at least -- when pulled, pushed, squished, stretched, accelerated, crushed, fractured, heated, magnetized, electrified, flowed, impacted, exploded, or gronkulated.

FEA crawled from the primordial computing ooze around the time NASA started putting meat into orbit. The punchcard era, old-timers call it and shake their heads, back when computers were as big as bread trucks and you submitted jobs to them in great stacks of meticulously formatted FORTRAN-IV like a pilgrim offering a swaddling babe to the Shrike (often with similar results). And yet, this primitive wonder of nerdcraft ate the world. Heutzutage, there's almost nothing you live in, ride on, drive over, or talk at that did not have some essential ingredient shaped by finite elements. It's an active research area in universities everywhere, not to mention a billion dollar industry employing thousands around the globe. Consider: ANSYS and ABAQUS -- both household names, in households where that sort of thing is -- and we haven't even gotten out of the As yet. These days, there's even finite element packages that run, badly, on your phone.

I know what you're thinking: It's time the Prometheus of this great fire is given his or her due!

Here we encounter trouble.

Famous First Words #13: Dolly the Sheep -- Wilmut et al.

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a gander at the opening of an historic scientific article. I take the liberty of rewriting the opening for dramatic purposes. Do with this information what you will.

Someday we may curse the name of Dolly, say, in a future world where hordes of genetically-enhanced sheep roam the streets in search of human flesh. (Although you gotta admit: if the world has to end, we could do worse.) In the meantime, let's just bask in the prospect of advances in medical treatments made possible by the first successful mammal cloning.

What was with all the "frankensheep" hoopla anyway? Once revealed, the details of the experiment were rather anticlimactic. Ian Wilmut, Angelika Schnieke, Jim McWhir, Alexander Kind, and Keith Campbell extracted the nucleus from an adult mammary cell, transferred it into an enucleated oocyte, then implanted the whole schmeer into the uterus of an idling ewe (a "uterewe," as it were). The fertility clinics down in Lino Lakes do stranger things before breakfast. In fact, LabKitty was hoping the experiment was more like that scene in The Thing where MacReady sticks a hot wire into some protogoo and Dolly lept, fully formed, from the petri dish.

No such luck. Dolly and some of her offspring apparently had a propensity for congenital defects, but not a one developed a freakish taste for blood or a burning desire to kill Jedis.

Here's how the team began their announcement:

Fertilization of mammalian eggs is followed by successive cell divisions and progressive differentiation, first into the early embryo and subsequently into all of the cell types that make up the adult animal.

Viable offspring derived from fetal and adult mammalian cells. Ian Wilmut, Angelika Schnieke, James McWhir, Alexander Kind, and Keith Campbell. Nature 385:810 (1997)

Pleasant enough, I suppose. However, as has become customary here on FFW, LabKitty now supplies an alternate opening that may offer a more engaging entry point for the casual reader. Enjoy after the jump.

Famous First Words #12: The Polymerase Chain Reaction -- Kari Mullis

Kari Mullis couldn't get arrested in this town when he first tried to get polymerase chain reaction noticed (well, maybe he could get arrested, just not for PCR). As Mullis recounts in his autobiography, both Science and Nature rejected his announcement. Science would eventually publish an account; Nature never did, although they did publish a paper on time travel Mullis wrote as a grad student (go figure). Mullis had to go slumming in Methods in Enzymology to get his work into print. (Ha! I kid the MiE. Seriously. You guys are aces in LabKitty's book.)

What is PCR, you ask? Short answer: Superwicked technique for making gonzo quantities of DNA that spawned a billion-dollar biotech industry and got Mullis a Nobel prize. Long answer: Um, go read the WillyPete article on it.

The bad news is I can't show you the opening to Mullis' seminal paper because MiE doesn't allow random internet schmucks to access their back issues on-line. The good news is this gives me licence to invent one. In the tradition of Thucydides (who defended his largely-invented history of the Peloponnesian War by claming he did not write what people said, but rather what they would have said had he bothered to interview them), I give you how I like to think Mullis' opened his announcement of PCR.

Um, after the jump.

Famous First Words #11: Dinosaur Extinction -- Luis Alverez et al.

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we have a gander at the opening line of an historic scientific article. I then take the liberty of "punching it up," as we say in the blogging biz.

What killed the dinosaurs?

That simple question created one of the most acrimonious debates science ever witnessed. I shan't get into the sordid details here (a wonderful telling can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which you should buy and read immediately, for the dino story and everything else) but here's the short version: It had been long known that dinosaurs -- after dominating the planet for millions of years -- disappeared suddenly.

Many explanations were proposed -- volcanic activity, overpopulation, cigarette smoking -- but none fit the available data, the most perplexing of which was a thin layer of iridium-rich sediment in the rock strata where dino fossils ended. Iridium is not found much on Earth, but it is found lots in asteroids. Earth gets hit by asteroids all the time; usually they're smallish (go outside at night, look up, and wait) but sometimes they're anything but. It's not divine retribution, it's gravity. It's what big floaty rocks do. And they're out there in the millions.

Famous First Words #10: The Hodgkin-Huxley Equations -- Hodgkin and Huxley

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article. Sometimes I take the liberty of punching it up. Today is not one of those times

The squishy sciences tend to lag behind engineering and physics in re the embrace of mathematics, in no small part because the complexity of living things dwarfs that of an airfoil or a quark. So it was quite the coup when Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published their famous equation describing the membrane potential of a neuron -- more accurately: the membrane potential of a giant squid axon* -- which let math into neuroscience like some sneaky Trojan rabbit. To what end is not clear. Heutzutage, neural models have become so complicated you may as well be doing wetwork. Still, physicists need jobs now that there's none for them in physics, so we must tolerate their ilk living among us.

I suppose I should show you the equations before moving on to the prose, since that's the point of it all my baby dolls.

Famous First Words #9: The CNO Cycle -- Hans Bethe

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we have a gander at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

The sun isn't all rainbows and photosynthesis, it's also a vicious inferno that will someday kill us all. Perhaps that explains humankind's obsession with the thing. From Helios driving it across the sky in his golden chariot to other suns shining through pinholes in the firmament, people have been trying to explain stars for millennia and mostly getting it wrong. We only figured out what was really going on up there in 1939, when Hans Bethe published his stellar paper on thermonuclear reactions. The sun is not "burning" in any conventional sense; it is mostly a giant ball of hydrogen fusing to produce helium and other things besides. This had been known for some time but Bethe worked out the reactions in detail, concluding most of a star's energy is derived from the participation of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen -- the eponymous CNO cycle.

Famous First Words #8: The First Extrasolar Planet -- Wolszczan and Frail

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which I take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

It's tough being an astrophysicist. While in the popular mind, the exploration of new life and new civilizations is some Iowa farm boy chasing alien tail, your version of extraterrestrial affairs consists of combing through 40 years of stellar interferometry data looking for periodic Doppler shifts. For Cat's sake, man: Where are the space babes? That's all people want to know. This is perhaps the greatest hurdle in encouraging our jaded youth to take an interest in science.

Famous First Words #7: The Double Helix -- Watson and Crick

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

It was a saga worthy of a Mexican soap opera (or Mexican wrestling) albeit no spandex and more modest bosoms. The egos, the backstabbing, the sexism, the big shot who grabs too soon for the brass ring and goes down in flames, paving the way for the little guys to snatch the glory (see The Double Helix for all the gory details). Watson and Crick didn't discover DNA nor did they posit it's role in heredity. They weren't even the first ones kicking around the helix idea. But they were the first to publish a detailed account of its structure and get it right. Thus were the floodgates opened on an entire field of molecular biology. No Watson and Crick, no codon dictionary, no antivirals, no Dolly, no PCR, no Human Genome project. Their discovery really does deserve the "watershed" moniker.

Both of them took their fame out for a ride after the fact, with Crick eventually landing at the Salk Institute where he spent the rest of his career making wacky claims about how the brain works and Watson settling in at Harvard and from time to time inflaming the lay press by saying things people don't want to think about (he also co-wrote a couple of bitchin' molecular biology textbooks).

Here's how it all began:

Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids:
A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid
J. Watson and F. Crick Nature 171:737 (1953)

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA).

Famous First Words #6: Fission -- Meitner and Frisch

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature that takes a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

When Einstein was confronted after the fact that his famous equation of mass/energy equivalence pointed to way to the release of unimaginable quantities of energy and maybe not in a good way, do you know what he said? He said: Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht! That's roughly German for GTFO. Such a release would require splitting the atom, a feat most theorists of the day viewed as impossible. Rutherford -- the Father of Nuclear Physics -- famously dismissed talk of the large-scale release of nuclear energy as "moonshine." He would not live to see himself proved wrong, dying in 1937 after falling from a tree he was pruning (no kidding).

As usual, the experimentalists spoiled the party. Otto Hahn and Fritz Straussman bombarded uranium with neutrons, and what kept coming out was something chemically identical to barium. Which was ridiculous. Rutherford had demonstrated it was possible to transmute elements, but his products only shifted one or two slots in the periodic table. Barium was less than half the size of uranium. What the Hector Lonzo was going on?

Famous First Words #5: Special Relativity

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

The most famous nerd tale of all is the tale of Einstein's annus mirabilis, the single year (of 1905) in which he published three ground-breaking papers (Relativity, Photoelectric Effect, and Brownian Motion) which rocked the scientific world and rocketed him to fame. This all-the-while working at the patent office and boinking his cousin Elsa. (Corrigendum: cousin boinking came later). Einstein praised the simple life as superb for theoretical work, going so far as to suggest would-be Einsteins take jobs at lighthouses as a means of granting them unencumbered quiet time to focus on their ideas. Well, maybe. With Tea Party efforts to kill research funding in America roundly successful, there are probably more Ph.D.s working McJobs than at any time in history and we have yet to see a spate of revolutionary scientific articles overturning established dogma. Maybe the only thing holding us back from perpetual motion machines and proof of aliens is peer review. Maybe we just need more lighthouses.

Famous First Words #4: The Michelson-Morley Experiment

Famous First Words is a recurring feature in which we have a gander at the opening of an historic scientific article

Light is both wave and particle, so contemporary physics tells us. But in the 19th century, and stretching all the way back to Newton and Huygens before then, light was just a wave. A wave in what? everyone was asking. The ether, of course. No, not the kind you huff to get your tonsils out or join the fraternity. Rather, the luminiferous ether -- the stuff that permeates empty space and wiggles as light passes through. How could it be otherwise? There are waves in water, right? No water, no waves. No waves, no surf. No surf, no surfing. Why even bother looking for the stuff?

Famous First Words #3: Charge of the Electron - Robert Millikan

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we have a gander at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

The charge of the electron was famously first measured by Robert Millikan, who got a Nobel prize and a library at Caltech named after him for his trouble. The problem was that Millikan flubbed the measurement. Eventually science figured it out and corrected his number -- that's what science does. Still, irregularities in his oil-drop data have been held up as proof that those of us in the rough trade are power-hungry freakozoids who simply can't be trusted.

Famous First Words #2: Discovery of the Neutron - James Chadwick

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature in which we take a look at the opening line of an historic scientific article.

Ah the good ole days, when atoms were just protons, neutrons, and electrons, just like it said in your high-school science book. (Assuming you didn't go to high school in Texas. Rumor has it the TASB is changing the science books so that all occurrences of "atom" read "godicule.") These days, the standard model is a mishmash of eleventy whatever quarks and particles and force carriers; bosons and leptons and bears. Oh my.

Introducing: Famous First Words! (Also: FFW #1)

In his muy excellente The Theoretical Biologists's Toolbox, Marc Mangel encourages every scientist to become a student of the short story. Why? Because it will immeasurably improve your writing. For what is a research article if not a work of fiction that happens to be true? A good article has much in common with good literature, and just because your protagonists are DNA or neutrinos doesn't mean you shouldn't tell a good story.

And what could be more important in telling a good story -- other than grammar, spelling, and a big advance -- than that very first sentence? Here is your moment to shine. The opening. The hook. The opportunity to grasp the reader fully by the throat. See the child. The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit. Where is it written that nonfiction is not similarly obligated?

As Princess Irulan reminds us, beginnings are delicate things.