Happy Pi Day!

"It's like Pi... you can keep figuring it out and always be right and never be done." -- John Currin




I highly recommend Smitten Kitchen's adaptation of Nigel Slater's apple plum pie for your celebration.

Fake Tales of San Francisco: Day Five

"Come back from San Francisco! It can't be all that pretty when all of New York City misses you." -- The Magnetic Fields

03.08.2010

I'm trying to fit three pounds of sourdough bread, my new dress, two new books, and my coat in my suitcase along with all the stuff that actually belongs there. I gasp. I pant. I pinch and pull. I throw myself face-down on the suitcase lid. I pull some more.

Yes! Optimal atomic packing factor achieved!

I take one last walk around Union Square, grab a croissant from Boudin Bakery for the road, and end up getting to the airport obscenely early. There's a line at the security gate despite the hour, though, and as I get closer, I realize why: SFO uses full-body scanners.

I step in and lift my arms. The beam sweeps across my field of vision. I lower my arms and step out of the scanner.

Security guard quote: "Looks like you've got about sixty cents in change in your front right pocket, a twenty dollar bill in your front left, and a driver's license in the back. Show them to me and you're good to go."

As any self-respecting engineer can understand, this amazing application of technology makes me really excited and I ask her if I can look at my scan. She inclines her head towards the scan's monitor and I peek at the image. It's hairless, high-contrast, and naked, but it's undeniably me.

How cool is that?! I laugh, give an excited little hop, and turn to retrieve my bags from the conveyor belt. The cute hipster is standing three feet away, staring at me.

I wonder if he saw my full-body scan image. Never mind; don't want to think about it.

He definitely saw the conference title emblazoned across my messenger bag, though.

Two long-haired skateboard-toting teens sit next to me on the airplane. They spend the entire flight watching Real Housewives reruns.

Once again, I'm awake for five and a half hours. I read a little, listen to some music, watch Alton Brown add soy sauce to caramels and take a kitchen torch to a grapefruit. I read, edit, and rewrite two sets of notes in my Moleskine. Half of the pages detail technical information learned at the conference and half of the pages will eventually become five blog posts outlining my trip. Cute hipster is seated directly behind me, and it doesn't seem like he's able to sleep much either.

Eventually, I can see the lighted streets of the Rockaways out the plane window. A few minutes later, we touch down at JFK.

Cute hipster helps me retrieve my suitcase from the overhead compartment. I thank him and offer a sweet smile before exiting the aircraft. I know I'll regret not giving him my name or my card in the upcoming weeks, but right now, a smile seems like enough of a promise.

Do I think I'm ready to fall in love? Nope. But I'm getting there.

Fake Tales of San Francisco: Day Four

"I wasn't born there. Perhaps I'll die there. There's no place left to go, San Francisco." -- The Animals

03.07.2010

I'm an author on two of the posters hanging in the exhibition hall today. I'm still not used to seeing my name in print, so I take lots of pictures of both posters. I wonder if my colleague ever gets used to the fact that an entire classification system is named after him.

I'd like to see data on the prevalence of performance status overestimation.

The conference is over! I'm walking out of the auditorium for the last time. Someone with an instantly recognizable smile crosses in front of me, suitcase in hand, and walks out the hotel's front door. Crap; I was looking forward to that conversation.

Homeless guy quote: "You have a lovely face and figure, ma'am."

It would make too much sense to sell Muni fare cards inside the Muni stations.

It would make too much sense to have a place to swipe or tap said card on each turnstile, instead of being forced to wander around in search of a station agent to let you in.

It would make too much sense to have complete maps of the Muni on the walls of the Muni.

The Muni trains would also make the G train feel well-endowed if they ever had to pull out the rulers and measure.

Zuni Cafe for lunch. I came for a chicken roasted over a wood fire, but I can't eat one by myself and all of my remaining colleagues are vegetarian. Thus, I order a tuna steak with grilled escarole, baby potatoes, and a hard-boiled egg crumbled on top. I should crumble hard-boiled eggs on my food more often.

A light fish course calls for white wine, so I order a glass of Santa Barbara pinot blanc even though I prefer my vino red.. I can't believe how fresh it tastes. I spend a few minutes swirling the wine over my tongue, exhaling, trying to recognize the finishing flavor before I finally place it: green grapes. I drank a wine that tasted like grapes. Unbelievable.

My dessert was an espresso granita. An espresso snowcone. Frozen, chopped-up coffee with whipped cream on top. I must try making one at home.

My waiter is muscular and very handsome. And he is being incredibly sweet and attentive. Maybe because I'm in a classy restaurant by myself, furiously scribbling in a Moleskine between bites?

A small girl keeps kicking the wall next to me. The heels of her sneakers keep lighting up on impact. The whole restaurant is shaking.

Taking the trolley up the godforsaken hill is a lot easier than walking up the godforsaken hill. I think walking might be faster, though.

A street musician near the Cannery is pretending to play the guitar along with a recording. I wonder if he's related to the guy in Grand Central who pretends to sing. At least this guy isn't selling CDs of "his" music.

Never mind. He is.

Having a Girl's Night In on my last evening in San Francisco, complete with ice cream, a romance novel, and the Oscars.

What happened to Barbara Walters' face?!

Fake Tales of San Francisco: Day Three

"A heart floats in the Bay. I hear it beating far away. There's no telling what I'll do if I don't return to you." -- Alkaline Trio

03.06.2010

Thank goodness for my red Tsubo pumps and their sneaker padding. I can't even feel my blisters while wearing them, which is a necessity considering that I'll be spending my entire day walking around at the conference.

My calves are on fire, though. And don't get me started on how my injured knee feels.

The chairman of my department -- all six and a half feet of him -- sits in front of me during the first lecture. It's like trying to see a projector screen through a brick wall.

MD quote: "This is why your hospital is so good. You come here while your PIs are away. My study coordinator goes skydiving while I'm away."

The dosing schedule for BCG therapy -- six cycles -- was originally determined because each shipment of the drug contained six treatments. Hahaha.

Among the few women here, the style of the moment seems to involve long denim skirts and Clarks. I feel very chic in my little black suit and red pumps.

One panel session includes audience polling! And question asking via Twitter and text message! Oh, I love technology -- and what a perfect forum for it!

MD quote: "You've been voted off the island."

The epigenome changes as a function of aging, so examining methylation patterns for cancer predictors may not yield accurate results in elderly patients.

A young man with long platinum hair just sat next to me. He's wearing a white suit. He looks fantastic, like Draco Malfoy's guardian angel.

One of the speakers presents a painting of Adam and Eve with a diseased kidney Photoshopped over the apple. His point? Don't be tempted into performing a radical nephrectomy when a partial will do the job just fine.

Quote from several MDs: "I love your red shoes. Can you click your heels three times to go home?"

Fake Tales of San Francisco: Day Two

"I was filled with so much hate until I saw the Golden Gate." -- Hello Saferide

03.05.2010

I've decided to avoid jet lag by refusing to change my sleeping habits. Thus, I'm awake at 5:30 in the morning, sitting at my desk with my Moleskine. The sun is rising over the Bay. What an inspiring way to start the weekend.

I skip the continental breakfast offered by the conference and go to Blue Bottle Cafe. It's located in an unmarked storefront at an intersection of two sidestreets that should really be called alleyways. I order a bowl of pecan granola -- super-fresh, very tender, makes the milk taste like honey and cinnamon -- and a coffee.

My coffee takes five minutes to prepare because each cup is drip-brewed to order. It's THE best cup of coffee I've ever had in my life. The smoothness, the depth of flavor. Words cannot describe either.

The two cute hipsters from the airplane walk into Blue Bottle when I have an inch of coffee left. The cuter one and I lock eyes a few times, but he offers no sign of familiarity. I'm not sure he recognizes me without my glasses.

I find a seat in the back of the massive conference hall, but I don't know anything about prostate cancer aside from the bare-bones basics and the stuff related to clinical trial design. The presenters could be speaking Greek and I wouldn't know any better.

Actually, I think I understand Greek better than I understand how androgen deprivation and Gleason scores work.

There are ridiculously few women at this conference. There are also ridiculously many handsome young men wearing wedding rings.

Traditional open radical prostatectomy and robotic radical prostatectomy result in very different pelvic anatomies after healing, but radiation fields are only optimized for the former. Interesting.

We break for lunch. I decide to take my PI's advice and spend the rest of the day walking the streets of San Francisco.

I didn't realize San Francisco has hills.

Yes, I've seen Full House.

Yes, I've seen pictures of Lombard Street.

I always thought the hills looked worse than they really are!

They're really worse than they look.

Fisherman's Wharf is my first stop. It feels like a tourist trap, and as a New Yorker, I'm trained to neither patronize nor linger in tourist traps. Plus, it was sad seeing so many lethargic-looking sea lions in one place.

It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to swim to the mainland from Alcatraz.

From Pier 39, I walk west along the Barbary Coast Trail to Fort Mason. I enjoy a crab cake from a street stand and a Ghirardelli's hot chocolate along the way.

Seagulls : SF :: Pigeons : NY. They are FEARLESS. One male -- a male, might I add, so large that he could easily feed a family of six if roasted correctly -- stands in my way and caws at me when I try to make him move.

I try to kick him. He flaps a few feet to the right and gives me the stink-eye.

No, really:

The Golden Gate Bridge really is stunning. Maybe all those hills were worth it.

My return trip is strategically plotted to avoid as many hills as possible, so I end up walking the entire length of Grant Avenue. A few blocks in, a very elderly Asian man says "beautiful!" as I pass him. Aw.

A few blocks later, another very elderly Asian man says "beautiful!" as I pass him. I start to suspect that "beautiful" is Canto for "ha ha look at the stupid white girl who didn't realize San Francisco has hills."

My cheeks are slightly sunburned. I'll have freckles by next week.

Three new blisters. I treat my feet to a long soak and lots of bandaging before I dress for dinner.

Hana Zen for yakitori. I let the waiter order for me. He chooses well.

Fake Tales of San Francisco: Day One

"I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan. I'm going home to my city by the Bay." -- Tony Bennett

03.04.2010

I drain half of my iced coffee in one gulp. Part of me feels like I should lay off the caffeine if I want to stand any chance of sleeping on the airplane, but the rest of me fears being trapped on an airplane with a caffeine withdrawal headache. And besides, I drink coffee before bed at night. It won't keep me awake!

Two men stand behind me as I wait to board the plane. They talk about whether they'll be able to sleep through the flight, whether they'll get any work done, the general precariousness of the gangway underfoot. I glance backwards under the pretense of repositioning my suitcase. They're both hipsters. Attractive, bearded, intellectual-looking.

We all move a few inches closer to the plane. The cuter hipster -- the one who looks like the cute brother of a cute guy I once knew -- says, "You know, I think I'm ready to fall in love." I envy his certainty.

The hipsters are seated in my row. The cute one is across the aisle and his friend is next to me.

I don't sleep a wink in the five and a half hours it takes the damn plane to land.

I burst out laughing in the BART because I realize that San Francisco has no palm trees.

The staff at my hotel has been coached to call all guests "Doctor" for the duration of the weekend. After the third time it happens, I decide to stop correcting people.

Crap, my room is enormous. I could have easily brought two friends with me and we still would have had room to spare.

My hotel is located in the shopping district of San Francisco, so I decide to spend my first few hours visiting every store that I already visit in New York on a bimonthly basis. The styles featured here are drastically different than anything I'm used to purchasing, though. Punchy colors, crazy patterns, and dangerously short skirts are everywhere. Where is my limitless selection of nearly identical black dresses?

I walk into a fitting room to try on a dress. Without being asked for his help, the attendant brings me six other dresses, three belts, and a sweater to try on. He chooses the correct size in everything, too.

At an intersection. The woman standing next to me hails a cab. The driver gets out, walks around to the curbside passenger door, opens it for the woman, closes it behind her, walks back around, gets in, and drives away. The man on my other side says what I'm thinking: "Jesus. In New York, you're lucky if the cabs STOP."

Homeless man quote: "You seem like a woman of fine taste. Wanna buy my album?"

I decide to go to bed at 7:30 PM. My colleague -- my fifty-something year-old colleague -- calls me an old lady for it.

Debug In Reverse Order

“Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century. That’s why I am committed to making the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education over the next decade a national priority.” -- Barack Obama

Five year-olds stop pursuing STEM careers because their parents and teachers don't make science fun.

Ten year-olds stop pursuing STEM careers because that's not what the cool kids do.

Fifteen year-olds stop pursuing STEM careers because their classes are too difficult.

Twenty year-olds stop pursuing STEM careers because they realize that they can make three times as much money working in finance and consulting.

Twenty-five year olds stop pursuing STEM careers because the job market denies them opportunities to do so, despite the fact that they're fully qualified to work in science and love it enough to have stood by it for a quarter of a century.

I applaud the President's efforts to reform STEM elementary education and rehabilitate its image among children, but technical knowledge is worthless if those of us who are passionate enough about science to study it at the college level aren't encouraged or even allowed to exercise our skills in the workforce. I'll gladly use my engineering degree to help America meet the challenges of this century, but in return, I should be able to find a technical job in America without killing myself and, once I've got one, I should earn a salary that's not an insult to my level of expertise. Just a suggestion.

The Future That Never Was

"Fifty years after the fair, I live in tomorrow town. Even on a wing and a prayer, the future never came around. It hurts to even think of those days, the damage we do by the hopes that we raise." -- Aimee Mann

Writing my last post got me thinking about Flushing Meadows Park. This, in turn, got me thinking about the two World's Fairs held there -- the first in 1939 and the second in 1964. Both events were the brainchildren of Robert Moses, the Master Builder who single-handedly designed the infrastructure of modern New York City. (Read up on the man if you have time. His life story is unbelievable.) Though Moses used the Fair as an excuse to turn the Flushing cinder dump into public parkland, the people of New York City saw it as so much more.

The World's Fair gave New Yorkers hope for a bright future when reality offered little encouragement; the first preceded World War II and the second came on the heels of JFK's assassination. One square mile of land in Queens was cleaned up for the cause, and different countries, US states, and major corporations erected lavish pavilions to showcase their products, people, and visions for the future of humanity. If you've ever been to EPCOT in Walt Disney World, that was the general idea. (And by "general idea," I mean that EPCOT was an idea that Walt Disney stole from the '64 World's Fair.)

I love learning about the World's Fair for the same reason I love EPCOT: I derive an inordinate amount of joy from studying my predecessors' expectations of the future. It's inspiring to see what innovations first presented at the World's Fair have enjoyed success (i.e. television, color photography, and the modem) and which never found a place in society (i.e. humanoid robots, Smell-O-Vision, and undersea vacation homes). It's even more interesting to compare our current technology with our grandparents' and parents' expectations of how our generation would live. True, we're not colonizing Mars or traveling at light speed, but I doubt that anyone in 1939 could have ever envisioned anything even remotely resembling the iPhone.

Despite which predictions came true and which predictions never came to pass, one aspect of the entire World's Fair experience can be recalled as indisputable fact: its optimism. The people of 1939 genuinely believed that humans would travel on automated highways and eat meals cooked by machines by 1960. The people of 1964 knew that they'd live to see moon bases and flying cars in the new millennium.

Flushing Meadows Park is still scattered with these certainties. Two time capsules filled with microfilm, "new" materials like stainless steel and nylon, knickknacks, and other symbols of our civilization are buried fifty feet under the cement with instructions not to open until 6939. A forty-foot sculpture of a Buck Rogers rocketship stands in a random driveway behind a building. A geodesic habitat designed by Buckminster Fuller houses forty species of birds at the Queens Zoo. The future of American architecture is slowly rotting despite preservation efforts, but it doesn't matter because most Americans only know it as something Will Smith shot out of the sky in 1997. Meticulous etchings of cars, robots, and transistor radios are underfoot everywhere. Tokens of world peace -- whether they're actual depictions of the world or pieces of native architecture donated by friendly nations -- are everywhere, too.

All of it makes me nostalgic and curious, but it also makes me sad. I'm a smart, forward-thinking research scientist with a firm grasp on technological innovations and a degree in the most cutting-edge discipline on the planet. And you know how I envision the future? Thinner cameras, iPods, and televisions. And that's about it. There are no robot butlers in my old age. No flying cars, teleportation devices, or jetpacks, either. I don't think we'll ever cure cancer or even come close to it. I don't think humans will travel any farther than the lunar surface. I don't envision food, architecture, or fashion significantly changing. No end to world hunger. No world peace.

I don't know if this makes me a pessimist or a realist, but when I walk through Flushing Meadows Park, it's nice to look back, look forwards, and forget.

The Beholder

"I have an eye for spotting men with designs. I have a sense for all the obvious signs. And pal, I know when someone's feeding me lines! Don't feel too bad; you had your try. You have the touch, but not with me! I have an eye." -- Lucie Arnaz

That quote sums up yesterday morning, and as such, it was a pretty amazing morning. Then I went to make copies. Scanned my document, asked for 60 collated and stapled copies, wandered away, wandered back, found the thing jammed and beeping on copy 47.

I'm unnaturally gifted at fixing copiers, so like any engineer with too much time on her hands, I peeled off my sweater, dropped to my knees, and popped the casing open. I twisted knobs, I flipped switches, I slid trays, and I found all the usual problem areas blissfully clear of paper. Then I noticed that one of my documents had been shredded in the narrow crevasse between the stapling tray and the output tray. And after a few moments of fruitless exploration, I realized that the machine manufacturers didn't account for paper ever getting jammed there.

I have thin arms and long fingers, so I was able to carefully reach inside the machine to tease the paper free in pieces. The jammed area had lots of sharp parts and little room for error, though, so I emerged from the experience with my right hand bleeding in four places. Open wounds aren't a good thing to have in my work environment, so I washed, treated, and bandaged my hand before returning to clinic. It looked pretty strange, but I swore off handshakes for the day and trusted people to not draw attention to it.

Then I got the hiccups. Big, scary, near-constant hiccups that refused to go away even after several hours. I held my breath, I swallowed three times, I drank water upside down, rightside up, and with a spoon in the glass, I endured countless colleagues jumping out of the shadows to spook me. Nothing worked, so I just came to terms with the fact that I'd have to talk to people around hiccups all day.

I perfected a little speech: "Hi, my name is Ashley. Before we speak about the research, you'll have to excuse me if [hic] I need to pause every sentence or so. I've had the hiccups all day [hic] and they won't go away." People tolerated it for the most part, surprisingly -- they laughed if I laughed first, but they had the grace to ignore my hiccuping if I didn't draw attention to it.

Then, at the very end of the day, after I had been speaking for several hiccupy minutes, one woman burst into hysterics. "Oh my god, this is terrible!" she said between giggles. "I can't believe you've been working like this all day!"
"It's been an interesting day."
"And if you don't mind me asking, what happened to your hand?"
I flexed my heavily bandaged appendage. "I had an altercation with the copy machine."
"Oh boy. You know what you need to do? You need to go home and go to bed before anything else happens to you today. Just get rid of August 20th a little earlier than usual and hope that August 21st is better."

I'm usually the one who sits in exam rooms and dispenses information to people, so to have it turned around on me was a peculiar change. Her treatment plan worked wonders, though -- I decided not to work overtime, declined happy hour with my colleagues, went home, changed into my oldest nightgown, and watched hours of Project Runway in the air conditioning. I woke up this morning with no hiccups and four beautifully formed scabs on my right hand.

Growth and Invasion

"It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me... and I'm feelin' good." -- Anthony Newley

Praise of the mundane will have to wait a while, since my past two weeks have been extraordinarily life-changing. Last Wednesday was my one-year anniversary at my job, and the following day, I left for my first-ever business trip. This was no run-of-the-mill jaunt, either: I got to spend six days at the largest cancer conference in the United States.

"For now there's life. For now there's love. For now there's work. For now there's happiness. For now there's comfort. For now there's friendship." -- from Avenue Q

Six other study coordinators were also selected to represent our department at the conference. We took turns driving, attended each other's poster sessions, stayed up until three in the morning confiding in each other, made each other breakfast, ironed each other's suits, sunscreened each other's backs, shared straws and clothing and bathrooms and beds, flirted and fought and compromised and laughed and took care of each other. Strangers often marked us as friends, relatives, or married couples... and we never made a correction or clarification.

"Anti-angiogenesis really works in TCC!!!!!" -- one of the presenting MDs

On the last day of the conference, I sat alone in the back of the biggest lecture hall I've ever seen and listened to three of our best discuss where our field is headed. A stupid grin was plastered on my face the entire time; two of the three speakers discussed my team's work as pivotal to the future of cancer care. My commute, my long hours, my diminishing knowledge of engineering... all of it became blindingly insignificant when I realized that the data flashing across the room's three projector screens was collected and abstracted by my hands.

"I'm finding who I am! And for the first time, I have no doubts! Yes, for the first time, I understand!" -- Phil Collins

The day before the lectures, I stood in the exhibition hall for four hours. Six feet to my right sat an MD from my team and between us stretched a poster representing her brainchild and my data. Doctors, scientists, statisticians, and pharmacists asked me dozens of probing questions about our work... and I was able to answer them, converse with them, share laughs and oncologic commentary and moments of enthusiasm with them. I've amassed more knowledge about this stuff over the past year than I ever thought possible, and when asked to put that knowledge to the test in front of the toughest crowd imaginable, I was able to deliver. Once my initial nervousness subsided, I began to operate with a confidence so genuine that, one week later, people can still see it in my eyes.

Better Than Ever

"I'm twenty-two for a moment. She feels better than ever... and we're on fire. We're making our way back from Mars." -- Five For Fighting

I became an engineer to put my talent for innovation to good use, to help people without having to directly interact with them, to satisfy my curiosity about the way things work, to play with fire and electricity and chemicals and really cool machines, to solve problems, to fix things that are broken, to "improve" things that aren't broken, to feel like a total geek and a total badass all at once, to live on the cutting edge.

Those are the basics. The specifics have changed a few dozen times during the last fifteen years and will undoubtedly change a few dozen more times before I retire, but last weekend, I was forcefully reminded of what started it all. I spent a few glorious days in DC with a few old friends, and despite meals, movies, Mythbusters, and many other fun experiences, we still found time to take a seven-mile walk around the city. We didn't stop for too long at any point along our stroll, but we did duck into the National Air and Space Museum for a few moments.

I walked through the doors. The security checkpoint was new, but the Gemini command module still loomed to my left, the moon rock still sat on my right, and The Spirit of St. Louis still hovered overhead. I was nine years old when I first set foot in that room and recognized my destiny in its contents. Biomedical engineering didn't really exist back then, so instead, I wanted to be a rocket scientist.

Specifically, I wanted to be John Aaron. Never heard of him? Not surprising, since he's the most perfect example of a true engineer that I know -- he made a career out of creatively fixing other people's messes from the sidelines. Aaron graduated from college in the early 1960s, and armed with nothing more than his physics degree, he took a job at NASA on a whim. Six months later, he was working for Mission Control handling flight operations for the Gemini missions. While nationally recognized heroes like Gus Grissom, Jim Lovell, and Neil Armstrong were out testing the limits of space, Aaron was one of the many faceless men keeping them alive from behind his computer screen.

I was obsessed with the NASA of the '60s and '70s during my childhood. How thrilling it must have been to explore space when space exploration was still so brand-new, and to actually have the ability to get your hands dirty in it! Troubleshooting efforts in those early days -- astronauts fixing broken lunar rovers with old maps and duct tape, flight controllers trying to make CO2 filters out of tube socks -- always sounded like so much fun to me. John Aaron was the unequivocal master of troubleshooting, and his common-sense cleverness saved the entire space program on more than one occasion. He was the guy who figured out how to bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth using only 12 amps of power. He was also the only person able to teach the crew of Apollo 12 how to reboot their electrical systems after the spacecraft was struck by lightning, saving the mission from certain abortion. How? Years earlier, he had heard of a similar problem during an obscure test mission, researched it to satisfy his own curiosity, and consequently became the world's only expert on the issue.

John Aaron made himself superhuman using only his brain and his ingenuity, which has elevated him to Batman-esque status in my estimation. He was my hero for most of my childhood and adolescence, and he's one of the main reasons why I had my sights set on a career with NASA for so many years. Problem is, there's no place at NASA for Aaron's brand of quick-and-dirty, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants brand of engineering any more. Everything is planned, budgeted, methodical, and triple-checked nowadays. It's neater and probably more efficient, but it's not nearly as fun.

It's not exactly better, either. On my way home from DC, I read an article on Project Constellation, the new NASA missions that plan to return humans to the moon by 2019. I learned that NASA plans to phase out space shuttles during the next few years and begin using Orion spacecraft -- which bear an eerie resemblance to the Apollo command module I wandered past in the museum last weekend. Seems like Aaron and his fellow engineers were more right about things than any of us could have guessed.

Seeing and Knowing

"I have a friend who's an artist... he'll say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.' There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts." -- Richard Feynman

Everyone has a completely different perspective on life, but just how different does the world look to someone with a strong educational background in physical and biological sciences? I pondered this question a great deal during the nine months between my acceptance to engineering school and my first day there. I thought about how an in-depth scientific education would change the way I look at the world and what the ramifications of such an understanding would be. To work through my conflicting emotions, I started writing a short story about a high school senior lured into a scientific education by extraordinary promises:

"“But when all of this is said and done, you’ll know exactly who you are and what you’re doing on this planet.”
“I won’t have time to think, let alone find myself.”
“It’s intrinsic to science, don’t you see?!” Tommy slid onto the desk and leaned close to me. His eyes, bright as hummingbirds and just as jittery, flitted across my face. “And you're going to learn more about your own life than anyone! You’ll get some paint on your shirt and visualize the chemical structure of the pigments. You’ll blink and calculate how air resistance curls your eyelashes. You’ll laugh and recognize what muscles relax to form the dimple in your left cheek." His gaze softened. "You’ll understand the reflex pathway causing you to blush whenever I look at you too closely.”
I lglanced at my hands, then remembered my molecular biology. “Beta-adrenergic stimulation activates adenylyl cyclase, which raises cyclic AMP levels, which dilates facial capillaries.”

The perspective of the story flits between the curious student and the jaded doctor she becomes, between a girl searching for some beauty in life and a woman who can't find beauty in anything. It took me four years to finish writing because it took four years for me to understand what I was trying to write.

120 credits of technical courses happened during those four years, and every circuit and every metabolic pathway and every differential equation made my world look a little bit different. So much science happened so gradually that I internalized an entire new world outlook without even realizing it.

Today, I took the elevator with a woman who tried -- and failed -- to make a phone call as we traveled between floors. She frowned at her BlackBerry, I muttered the words "Faraday cage," and she had no idea what I was talking about. For the first time in a long time, it dawned on me that people actually exist who can stand in an elevator without thinking of electrical fields rearranging charges.

As I rode the subway home today, shifting my weight from one leg to the other to balance against the inertia of the moving train, I tried to remember a life before scientific enlightenment and realized that I couldn't. But why would I want to? Honestly, how can someone book a stateroom on a cruise without first calculating the center of mass of the ship? How can someone examine a windshield crack without knowing how the defect will propagate? How can someone make cream of tomato soup without understanding why a spoonful of baking soda needs to go into the pot?

I agree with Richard Feynman; I adore knowing and find that life is incredibly beautiful when you understand the science behind it. But honestly, on some level, is not knowing just as fulfilling? Does my lack of ignorance mean that I'm missing out on the simple pleasures?

Secret Identity

"I'm not your princess. This ain't a fairy tale." -- Taylor Swift

For those of us who conduct cancer research, all roads lead to ASCO -- the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. For one weekend a year, the best cancer scholars in the world come together to listen, learn, and, if they're lucky, present their most cutting-edge research to their peers. And because I work with a few pretty influential oncologists, I'm lucky enough to have a hand in some of it.

Trouble is, abstracts are due six months before ASCO actually occurs. June minus six months, carry the one, equals three Tuesdays from now. And since our protocols need to be perfect and the abstract first authors need their data well in advance of that deadline, I've been really, really busy lately.

I have six things due at noon on Monday, so Friday was a long, hectic day. I was so busy that I didn't have time to go home between work and the Archimedes Society launch event, a super-swanky cocktail party being thrown by my alma mater that evening. Thus, I slipped into my black cocktail dress while queries were executing, brushed on eyeliner while brainstorming ways of describing genetics at an eighth-grade reading level, toed around under my desk for my suede heels while overwriting files, and pinned up my hair while receiving emails from my PIs about last-minute changes.

I was ready to go by 6:00, but pre-party plans never materialized. Thus, I worked until 8, dressed to the nines and feeling sexier than I have in a very long time, surrounded by data and printouts and protocol disks and biohazard bags filled with tubes. Forget my usual work personas of The Mad Scientist and The Researcher -- that night, I was Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, Professor Jones and Indy, Bruce Wayne and Batman. I was Cinderella in the fairy gown scrubbing down one last fireplace brick before running off to the ball, and it made me feel incredibly powerful. For a few hours I was a geeky clinician with a glamorous secret identity and, for a few hours after that, I was a glamorous engineer with a geeky secret identity. Then, for a night and a day after that, I was able to unwind as a mere woman and find comfort in the eyes, arms, and presence of some of the people who know me better than anyone else. That may have been the best part of all.

Destroyer of Worlds

"I explained that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous." -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, via Peter Sellars

I spent yesterday evening in the highest balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House to see the closing-night performance of Doctor Atomic, a new John Adams/Peter Sellars opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, the days leading up to the first test shot of the atomic bomb, and the conflicting emotions of the scientists involved in its creation. As a woman with a little opera training and a lot of scientific training, I was ecstatic to see two of my passions merge on stage. Of course, since I was headed to the world's most renowned opera house to see a production composed by an ultra-modern, minimalistic visionary, I didn't expect much nuclear physics to be involved in the production.

Thus, I was genuinely surprised to enter the house and face a white-on-black projection of the Periodic Table of the Elements rather than the usual heavy damask curtain. I examined the familiar grid as I settled into my seat, but something didn't feel right about it. It eventually dawned on me that a few elements -- and the entire actinoid series -- were missing:My companion, a chemist, deduced that the scrim showed the Periodic Table as it looked during the summer of 1945. We picked over the projection, noted what was there and what has been discovered since, became increasingly aware of the knowledge base of the scientists and engineers we were about to meet. When the house lights dimmed, we were already immersed in a singular moment in time, in an era of science before the discovery of francium and promethium, before the threat of nukes hovered over every war, before E=mc^2 was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Then the curtain rose and the neat grid of boxes was replaced by... a neat grid of boxes. Forty-two boxes to be specific, stacked three high and fourteen across, each covered by a screen bearing the ID card photograph of a Trinity Project scientist. The photos were creased and faded and covered in cellophane tape. Some names were typed, others handwritten, some misspelled and crossed out and re-inked. The names were difficult to read from my vantage point, but Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, I. I. Rabi, Niels Bohr, Robert R. Wilson, Edwin McMillan... they were all there. The men who dedicated their lives to stretching the boundaries of human thought were each identically posed and encased in an identical little box.

The photographs then rose to reveal forty-two cast members dressed as scientists, one in each cubicle, each armed with a piece of chalk, each madly scribbling unknown equations on the back wall. Over the next three and a half hours, some of them break free from their confines to express human emotion -- Oppenheimer, our Doctor Atomic, takes center stage and becomes almost Faustian in his efforts to balance his dedication to the bomb and his fear of its potential -- but, for the most part, the scientists remain spaces on a grid, insignificant parts of a significant whole.

Ultimately, the opera about nuclear physics becomes an opera about dozens of brilliant innovators who surrender their individual identities to accomplish something for their country. And that opera ultimately becomes an opera about scientists being forced to choose between doing what they know is right for their own edification and doing what they know is right for humanity.

During intermission, I said to my companion, "I've never been so proud to be a scientist, but I've also never been so ashamed to be a scientist." That's because, shortly before the curtain fell on the First Act, when the glowing wire-covered bomb rose away from Oppenheimer to cast a vaguely spherical shadow over half the stage, I realized that, if fate had somehow landed me and my engineering skills at Los Alamos in 1945, I would have made the same choice that Oppenheimer did. Despite being surrounded by discussion of Japanese target cities, possible ignition of Earth's atmosphere, and a new age of destructive power, I would have used every skill I possessed to get "the gadget" working properly. Just because I could.

The opera ends at t-minus-one second, but that one second is stretched into ten minutes of orchestral cacophony that nearly shakes the house with its intensity. The entire cast is bunkered down on stage, unmoving, staring wordlessly into at the audience as the scenery warps behind them. The audience never sees the explosion, but for a brief moment just before the curtain fell, I felt like the bomb.

As I Wait...

"It's something so surreal, the stupid way you make me feel. When everything is said and done, somehow you are still the one. Don't make me wait so long!" -- Locksley

Tuesdays are quite busy here.
My orders for some tests were clear,
But the lab techs were nowhere near

As I wait for my bloods to get drawn.

My coworker was frantic, too.
"Agh! I have so much to do!"
"I'll take care of it for you,"
As I wait for my bloods to get drawn.

I learn, after some consent checks,

Her protocols are quite complex.
The clinic staffers are all wrecks

As I wait for my bloods to get drawn.

Plus, I was interrupted twice.

"Ash, you package things so nice.
Ship these samples in dry ice?"
As I wait for my bloods to get drawn.

My last guy's seeing the MD.
In half an hour I can go free.
But my nurse has more work for me
As I wait for my bloods to get drawn.

After a scant ten hours of trials,

The lab tech hands me cryovials.
Tomorrow's tubes are in three piles...

College Confidential

"Progress and changing, growing then giving up. Somehow, we're never quite prepared, but I understand it. When you need a friend, you could count on anyone. But you know I'll defend the tragedy that we knew as the end." -- Brandi Carlile

Classes are back in full-swing at the metropolitan arm of the Ivy League, and for the first time ever, my days of attending them (or dreaming about attending them) are behind me. It's a surreal enough feeling that all of my friends seem to be blogging about it, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well.

In terms of academics, I was damn proud to call myself a biomedical engineer when I started college and I'm damn proud to call myself a biomedical engineer today. I loved nearly every aspect of what I studied, my courses spoiled The Mad Scientist part of my personality rotten for years, and I can't wait to return to my roots to truly work as a BME someday. Yeah, it would have been nice to have some time to take some art classes or finish my English minor or actually breathe during college, but I can't even entertain the thought of studying something else now that I know what I'm capable of surviving. I'm a BME now and forever... I'm just doing something else for a living until the world catches up with me.

My college extracurriculars followed the same pattern as they did in high school: I started off with a few carefully chosen organizations, then all of a sudden and with no recollection of how it happened, I found myself involved in everything. I loved being involved in as much as humanly possible, though -- I'd rather not sleep than see something pass without my input -- so no hard feelings there.

I dreaded living on my own before college -- after all, no one in my family ever has -- but now I can't wait to get back out there and reclaim my life again. I learned how to cook, how to iron, how to balance a checkbook, how to hold down a job and classes and still find time for play, how to eat for a week on twenty bucks, how to manage my time and a household. I started college a scared kid and left college a completely independent woman with a perfect sense of who I am and how I like to live. I never thought in a million years that I would ever make a good wife or a good roommate, but now I'm sure I would.

I'd like to say that I graduated with no regrets, but there are certainly a few things I would change if I could do it all over again. I wish I had made friends during my first two years of college; maybe I would have spent more nights out having fun and fewer nights alone and miserable in my dorm room. I wish I had formed study groups early on instead of trying to do every problem of every homework assignment by myself for three semesters; maybe my GPA would have been high enough to actually get into a Ph.D program right away. I wish I had the courage to act on my feelings when I found someone attractive; a few lives would certainly be different today. I try to tell myself that everything happens for a reason -- if life didn't play out the way it did, maybe I would have turned out less self-reliant, less respectable, less well-rounded, possibly pregnant. However, considering that the friends, coursework teams, and personal relationships I eventually made were all directly responsible for the awesomeness of the second half of my college experience, it's pretty easy to silence that voice of reason.

However, the fact remains: the second half of college, especially senior year, was AMAZING. The time since has been amazing as well (albeit in entirely different ways), mainly because the people I met and things I learned in school have carried over into my post-college existence. If college did nothing for me aside from decorating the set and populating the cast of characters of the sitcom of my life, that's more than enough to make it all worthwhile.

The Odd Couple

"You're not at all the funny, awkward little girl I knew. Oh no! I was mad not to have seen the change in you. When did your sparkle turn to fire and your warmth become desire?" -- Alan Jay Lerner

As you all know, I'm a trained geek working as a geek. And though I've always recognized different breeds of geekery in society, it took a comment on this blog for me to recognize different brands of geekery within myself. A few days ago, Red remarked that my posts tend to show off my dorkiest colors. I always have been -- and still am -- a dork, but lately, I seem to have morphed into a new breed of dork.

There's a part of me who lives to get her hands dirty and loves to experiment -- let's call her The Mad Scientist. She thrives is tank tops and Chuck Taylors and thinks best at three in the morning. She's not afraid to use trypan blue as a plaster dye, mix concrete and wood hardener to invent a new type of sealant, pop the lock off of someone else's milling machine to do some impromptu woodcarving, or explode a capacitor or three trying to perfect a wave-generating circuit. She's always the first to pull out a Leatherman, always the fastest to dream up an alternate solution, always the last to settle for something that doesn't look quite right. The Mad Scientist is a little scatterbrained, but she treads that fine line between genius and insanity with practiced precision.

Lately, though, another geek personality is starting to dominate: The Researcher. As the Keeper of the Protocol (or seven), she has no time for imagination. She plays by the rules -- and Lord help you if you don't. She strolls around in a suit and stilettos on most days, calmly handling the affairs of patients and physicians and firmly handling the FDA and the networks. She's perfectly kind and perfectly patient, but she's efficient and super-knowledgeable and isn't afraid to show it. The Researcher commands respect. She double-checks every move she makes and triple-checks every move her colleagues make because, in her world, one mistake can put someone in his coffin.

The Researcher thrives whenever I find myself on the upper east side, but sometimes, The Mad Scientist comes out to play. She emerges whenever the copy machine breaks, whenever an odd piece of code is needed for something, whenever someone needs to know which test tubes contain clotting factors or what metals are MRI-compatible. And though The Researcher is a good person to be in this world, I was The Mad Scientist for so long that I can't help but miss her.

The Mad Scientist was the woman who knew entirely too much about Materials Science in the elevator earlier in the week, and for one beautiful moment, she made everyone forget that she was a mere intruder on The Researcher's workday.

Elevator Crystallography

"Livin' it up while I'm goin' down." -- Aerosmith

After an hour of reading scans in the fifth-floor CT suite of the outpatient pavilion, I wait entirely too long for the elevator. When the doors finally open, there's room for one and I gladly occupy it. The car descends one floor, the doors open, and the people on the other side turn away disappointed. It descends another floor and the doors open to reveal a man who looks like a cross between Howdy Doody and an excitable puppy, grinning madly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Of course, he tries to wedge his way in.

"Come on, people! We're all in this together!" he half-shouts as we all jostle to give him room. "This is a New York elevator! Things can get more dense! It's a matter of engineering!"

This piques my interest, so I shift my bag to buy him a few more inches. He squishes in front of me and the doors close. "Yeah!" he says. "That's it! We've achieved optimal atomic packing!"

"With no vacancies on the lattice," I respond with a smirk.

The man stops bouncing for a moment, tilts his head. "Though it would work better if we were all hexagons," he ventures, his voice tinged with curiosity.

"Or face-centered cubes," I offer.

"Ohhh!" says my sparring partner. "She knows how to play, doesn't she?"

The doors open on the first floor, he spots someone familiar in the lobby, and he bounds off to offer a greeting and a hug. I walk out to 53rd Street to wait for my transport back to clinic.

Bloodletting

"Have I lost my way? The path of least resistance is catching up with me again today." -- Brandi Carlile

Mom found a bunch of unused Barnes & Noble gift cards in my stash this morning and commented that I never read for pleasure any more. "I don't have time for it," I responded, and she shrugged. "You didn't have time for it. Now you do." Thus, for the first time in a year, I picked up a book that wasn't filled with medical diagrams and transport equations: Vincent Lam's Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. From what I gather after twenty pages, the book follows a group of people from pre-med classes through med school through their early years as doctors. And even though it's well-written and interesting, my ESC is acting up and preventing me from fully enjoying Lam's work.

"ESC" stands for "Engineering Superiority Complex," and you'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer who doesn't have one. In order to obtain our degrees, we had to study copious amounts of science and math. However, while pure scientists could ace their classes simply by memorizing their textbooks, we were forced to understand the material deeply enough to manipulate it, apply it, and use it to solve technological problems. Our GPAs end up lower than they should be as a result of this expectation, but we emerge from our studies with a deep appreciation for and innate knowledge of what makes science tick.

And maybe I'm doubly biased in this respect, but I think the most valid justification for the existence of ESC is the difference between bio/chem/neuroscience pre-meds and BME/ChemE pre-meds. At Columbia, engineers felt so much disdain for "normal" pre-meds that they avoided using the term on themselves; my friends would always say "I'm a biomedical engineer who is going to med school" instead of "I'm a pre-med" out of fear of incurring the unholy wrath of their fellow BMEs. Most med-school bound BMEs study biology by learning the concepts, their applications, and all of the math behind their every nuance. Most normal pre-meds memorize what they need to know to get into med school. And because the system is flawed and rewards regurgitation rather than passion, regurgitators ruin the curves in our classes and get into med school before we do.

This seems like a gross generalization, and I would readily admit it probably was one if I haven't seen it proven with my own eyes. In the last semester of my senior year of college, a few of those med school-bound BME friends of mine decided to take a normal pre-med physiology class, and because I had nothing better to do and could use the study time, I tagged along to their lectures. All of us had already taken two semesters of quantitative physiology as a BME requirement and expected the non-technical version to be a piece of cake. It was; the material required minimal complex thought and no computation. However, the normal pre-meds in the class often described it as "the hardest class I've ever taken in college." Moreover, every time the professor would ask a question that required any deductive reasoning, the normal pre-meds would recite the textbook and hope for the best. At least once a class, the following exchange would happen:

Professor: [asks a question]
Pre-med: [gives an answer]
Med school-bound BME: [nudges me and points to his class handout, where the pre-med's answer appears word-for-word]
Professor: [asks pre-med for clarification]
Pre-med: [pauses and re-phrases the regurgitated answer]

What prompted this rant? You see, in the first story of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, one character -- with a perfect GPA and an infallible studying technique -- gives a thoughtful, inquisitive, brilliant friend (who is failing his pre-med classes on grading technicalities) some advice:

"It's not that concepts are unimportant," Ming reassured Fitzgerald, "It's simply that they're not essential to scoring top marks."

If that seems ridiculous, it absolutely is. And yet that's the mindset of most of the people I know who are attending the country's top medical schools in the fall. It's sad and scary that America's med schools are filled with Mings while many of the Fitzgeralds in my life -- brilliant innovators and thinkers to whom I'd gladly trust my health and well-being -- struggled to even get interviews.



Pardon the rant; I have a lot of venting time on my hands, apparently. It's finally starting to dawn on me that, for the first time in years (and possibly my entire adult life), I have time to sit around and do nothing. Well, not nothing; I'm working on my pulp-comic cartooning skills, I made pizza from scratch today -- dough and all -- and grilled it on the barbecue, and I'm putting a dent in my KnitPicks laceweight sampler by making fingerless gloves, the finished one of which can be seen above. I'm not sitting in front of the TV for eight hours a day by any means, and yet I still feel like I'm wasting my time.