God Only Knows by The Beach Boys

The Pet Sounds album by The Beach Boys was released in 1966. The album ranks in the top ten of almost everyone's list of best albums (English/American culture). It's #2 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Tine.

I wasn't a big fan of the album but I adored God only knows, and I still do.¹ It's one of my top ten favorite songs. The song ranks at #25 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Paul McCartney, who played for another popular group in the 1960s, says that God Only Knows is his favorite song of all time.

The music was written by Brian Wilson² and the lyrics are by Tony Asher. I don't know very much about music so you'll have to read the Wikipedia article to appreciate why so many people admire Brian Wilson. Carl Wilson, Brian's younger brother, sings the song.

The video is from Good Timin': Live at Knebworth England 1980. It's one of the rare occasions after 1965 when all six Beach Boys (Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston) are together. I think it's the only video where Brian Wilson is playing on God Only Knows. (That's him on the piano.)

I never saw a live performance of the original Beach Boys but I've seen the Mike Love version twice.

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1. Some atheists will never like this song because it mentions God. That sort of thing doesn't bother me. I can still sing God Save the Queen and the Canadian national anthem without batting an eyelash. There are much more important things to fret about.

2. I just read in the Wikipedia article that he was inspired by the Lovin' Spoonful song You Didn't Have to Be So Nice. That song is also one of my personal favorites but I never twigged to the similarity until now.

Little Richie Dawkins

One thing that draws me to the ID movement is that it has the polite and understated ethic that science is supposed to have -- but does not have when the subject is evolution.

Stephen A. BatzerHere's a video that was posted today on Uncommon Descent by Salvador Cordova. Before watching it, read my post on: Why are Darwinists do uncivil?. It links to an IDiot post by Stephen A. Batzer where he complains about "Darwinists" being uncivil.

Here's one of the points that Batzer makes ...

Thought leaders in the Darwinian movement, such as Dawkins, Prothero, Shermer and so on, inculcate and advocate incivility by their own example. Look at the way biologist James Shapiro and philosopher Jerry Fodor have been treated. It's ugly.

The video was produced by Mike Booth. Decide for yourself if the evolution side of the debate behaves like the IDiots. (Apologies to Richard Dawkins for propagating this nonsense but people need to see the depths to which the Intelligent Design Community can sink.)


UPDATE: Denyse O'Leary has responded to this post [Huh? Actually, we thought Little Richie (Dawkins) was a special creation, just for us…]. She says, "Moran thinks it originated in the ID community. Unclear why because it’s really not about our usual questions and concerns." Actually I don't know anything about Mike Booth or whether he is a support of Intelligent Design Creationism. I looked, but I couldn't find anything. What I do know is that IDiots like Denyse O'Leary post the obnoxious video on their websites. O'Learly also says this about the video, "It’s also not a lot nastier than the old showman himself." I think I'll let intelligent people decide for themselves who is nastier. I'm glad that Denyse O'Leary at least acknowledges that the video she posted was nasty.

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Unchained Melody by The Rightous Brothers

Is it true that the music of the Baby Boomers is a whole lot better than the music of Generation-X or the Millennials (Generation-Y)? Of course it's true. Those whippernappers couldn't touch the best music of the 1960s.

Here's a song that makes my top ten list, although I will admit that it's only #374 on 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. I'm pretty sure this must be a mistake. Rolling Stone also seems to have made a mistake with #9.


(For some strange reason, my son and daughter don't seem to appreciate the music of my generation. I don't know where I went wrong.)

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A new definition of kindness and empathy? (on educating children)

Today's version of the Toronto Star has several articles on kindness and empathy. The feature article appears on the front page of the "Insight" section. The title of the print version is "Kindness: A fledgling movement aims to instil empathy and make us a kinder, gentler, society." The online version is How to fight meanness? Try a bit of kind.¹

The article is written by education reporter Louise Brown. The gist of the article is that we need to teach empathy and kindness² and perhaps the schools should be involved. But the main teachers should be parents.

Denyse O'Leary is at it again! (re: junk DNA)

In Denyse O'Leary's latest post she claims (again) that "Darwin's followers" used junk DNA as an argument for their position [What? Darwin’s followers did not use junk DNA as an argument for their position?].

No, Denyse, "Darwin's followers" (i.e. adaptationists) never used the presence of large amounts of junk DNA as evidence of the power of natural selection. Such a position would be absurd. The vast majority of "Darwin's followers" were opposed to the idea of large amounts of junk in a genome. Many still are.

Read this post and the links it contains: Darwinists Don't Believe in Junk DNA. You might enjoy my critique of Jonathan Wells book. (You can read, can't you?)

Denyse, you and the other IDiots are confused about a lot of things but this particular debate seems to have you all completely flummoxed. None of you seem to be capable of listening or of understanding simple logic.

It's true that many supporters of evolution evolutionary biologists like Francis Collins, Richard Dawkins, and Ken Miller used the presence of similar pseudogenes in different species as powerful evidence for common descent. They also pointed out that IDiots have a hard time explaining such pseudogenes. A direct challenge, by the way, that IDiots have avoided.

It's true that pseudogenes are junk. That does not mean that Collins, Dawkins, and Miller believe that most of our genome is junk. They are not saying that because most of our genome is junk, evolution must be true.

Denyse doesn't buy this when a commenter on her blog tried to explain it. She asks,

Question for readers here: Is it a sign of weakness in the Darwinians’ position that they can’t acknowledge that they made mistakes? They seem to have to defend, then deny.

Oops! Did I forget to tell you to turn off your irony meters? Sorry.

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

• November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
• April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
• June 6, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
• July 21, 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.

You tell me that I need to forget these events as though they never happened?

You tell me that you don't care because you weren't born yet?

This post was prompted by something that Andrea Habura wrote on Facebook. She says that she is an "R&D Scientist at Next Advance, Inc." Here's what she wrote ...

The demographics of Camelot: As you will no doubt have heard by now, today is the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I've also been repeatedly informed that everyone is still shocked and saddened by it, and that "we" will never forget how we felt when we heard the news.

Dear newscasters: Most Americans were either not alive yet, or too young to notice. Only 25% of Americans are over 55 (http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/demographics_profile.html), and some of them were living in other countries in 1963. To most of us, the shooting in Dallas was about like what happened in Ford's Theater, with the exception that our teachers seemed to feel *really* strongly about it. Let it go.

Just for the record, I understand how my parents felt on May 5, 1945 (VE Day) even though I wasn't born yet. I understand how they felt when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. I think I know how they felt on March 29, 1945 when President Roosevelt died.

I understand what my parents and my grandparents went through on October 29, 1929 when the stock market crashed and life's saving were lost. I listened when they told me of the pain and suffering during the great depression. I never told them to "let it go."

I'd like to think I know how traumatic it must have been for Americans on April 15, 1865 even though I wasn't there.

Dear Andrea,

The world did not begin when you were born. Listen and learn from your elders. You will be a better person.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
                                                                        George Santayana

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On a Friday Afternoon 50 Years Ago

It was about 3pm and I was sitting in my geometry class at Nepean High School in Ottawa, Canada. This was my final year of high school. I liked this course and I liked my teacher (Mr. Pollack).

The loudspeaker crackled and I heard the Principle's voice. Mr. Callan said that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.

Kennedy was not my President but it was still a great shock. It seemed like Camelot had been destroyed.¹ I spent the next three days in front of the television set. Nobody knew what was going to happen to America.

You know how everyone says they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when major events happen? That's certainly true for me on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It's one of only two days in my life that I remember so vividly.² If it was traumatic for a young Canadian boy, I can't imagine what it must have felt like for Americans.

How many of you remember Nov. 22, 1963?

It looks very naive now but back in 1963 we really believed that Camelot and King Arthur could be real. Here's Richard Burton in the Broadway production. It seems like everybody had the album.

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1. The musical, Camelot had been playing on Broadway since 1960 and everyone was familiar with the music from the LP (record album). The Kennedy family and the Kennedy administration were intimately associated with the idea of Camelot.

2. The other was Sept. 11, 2001.

What Could Possibly Be Wrong with Putting a Cute Dog on the Cover of Science?

Nothing could be wrong until you realize that Science writer editor Elizabeth ("Liz") Pennisi is behind it. That changes things entirely.

To find out why you have to read Dan Graur's latest at: A Dog on the Cover of @ScienceMagazine: Sins of Omissions.

At some point, the big bosses at Science magazine are going to have to wake up to the fact that they're publishing a lot of bad papers and commentaries. Something is seriously wrong.

David Klinhoffer likes Elizabeth Pennisi: Shooting the Messenger: Elizabeth Pennisi. He says ...

As we frequently hasten to emphasize about daring writers and researchers in science, I have no reason to think Pennisi is a Darwin skeptic much less a proponent of ID. Still, she's a reporter who is open to promoting "evolution heresy." She's unafraid to challenge the old guard. More than once she has stuck her finger in the eye of ancient régime. Now you know why she ticks off guys like Graur and Moran.

Yep. He got that right. Graur and I are definitely part of the old regime and we don't like people who promote evolution heresy ... or their sycophants.

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Claudiu Bandea Shows Why Attacking Dan Graur Is a Very Bad Idea

Claudiu Bandea is a frequent commenter on this blog. Whenever the subject of junk DNA comes up he reminds us that he had a theory over twenty years ago. Now he has published(?) an advertisement at: On the concept of biological function, junk DNA and the gospels of ENCODE and Graur et al.. Here's the abstract ...

In a recent article entitled “On the immortality of television sets: "function" in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE”, Graur et al. dismantle ENCODE’s evidence and conclusion that 80% of the human genome is functional. However, the article by Graur et al. contains assumptions and statements that are questionable. Primarily, the authors limit their evaluation of DNA’s biological functions to informational roles, sidestepping putative non-informational functions. Here, I bring forward an old hypothesis on the evolution of genome size and on the role of so called ‘junk DNA’ (jDNA), which might explain C-value enigma. According to this hypothesis, the jDNA functions as a defense mechanism against insertion mutagenesis by endogenous and exogenous inserting elements such as retroviruses, thereby protecting informational DNA sequences from inactivation or alteration of their expression. Notably, this model couples the mechanisms and the selective forces responsible for the origin of jDNA with its putative protective biological function, which represents a classic case of ‘fighting fire with fire.’ One of the key tenets of this theory is that in humans and many other species, jDNAs serves as a protective mechanism against insertional oncogenic transformation. As an adaptive defense mechanism, the amount of protective DNA varies from one species to another based on the rate of its origin, insertional mutagenesis activity, and evolutionary constraints on genome size.

It's not a good idea to attack someone who; (a) is an expert in the field, (b) is intelligent and outspoken, and (c) has a blog. But that never stopped Claudiu Bandea before so why should it now?

Here's part of how Dan Graur responds at: A Pre-Refuted Hypothesis on the Subject of “Junk DNA”. There's more, read it all.

The first problem with this hypothesis is that big eukaryotic genomes consist mostly of very few active transposable elements and numerous dead transposable elements. So, big genomes seem to need little protection. Moreover, a positive correlation exists between genome size and number of transposable elements. In 2002, Margaret Kidwell published a paper entitled “Transposable elements and the evolution of genome size in eukaryotes.” In it, she showed that an approximately linear relationship exists between total transposable element DNA and genome size. Copy numbers per family of transposable elements were found to be low and globally constrained in small genomes, but to vary widely in large genomes. Thus, the major characteristic of large genomes is the absence of selective constraint on transposable element copy number.

Given that the vast majority of transposable elements are dead, the most parsimonious explanation is that the continuous accumulation of dead transposable elements is the reason for genomes becoming large. Let me spell it out: the “large” part in “large genomes” is made of transposable elements. Genome do not become large first and then protect genetic information by becoming sinks of transposable elements.

The other problem with the protection-from-mutation hypothesis is that it assumes selection on mutation to be effective. Selection on mutation is referred to in population genetics as second-order selection. The reason is that this type of selection is anticipatory. It protects against a possibility, not an actuality. Second-order selection on mutation (mutability) requires huge effective population sizes, so huge in fact that they are only found in a few bacteria and viruses. Unfortunately for the protection-from-mutation hypothesis, genome size is known to be inversely correlated with effective population size. In other words, huge genomes are found in species that have very small effective population sizes. So small, in fact, that even regular selection (first-order selection) is not very effective.

Thomas Huxley was proven right again: "The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Several ugly facts in this case.

I can't count the number of people who have tried to explain to Claudiu Bandea that his idea is ridiculous. Hopefully, this last embarrassment will silence him.

Naturally, the Intelligent Design Creationists are all over it [Another response to Darwin’s followers’ attack on the “not-much-junk-DNA” ENCODE findings].

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Which Way Did Darwin Walk?

For some reason the title reminds me of "What Does the Fox Say." Oh well, PZ Myers is desperately interested in knowing which way Darwin walked when he took a stroll on the Sandwalk [An important historical question!].

I know which way PZ walked 'cause I led him!

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Sylvia Browne Blows Another Psychic Prediction

I first became aware of Syvlia Brown when I saw her on Larry King Live ten years ago [Interview with Sylvia Browne]. As most of you know, Larry King is a real sucker for quacks of all types and he used to let psychics like Sylvia Browne respond to listeners who called in to the show. It was always good for a laugh.

In the middle of that part of the show we have this exchange.

KING: OK. Do you know when you're going to die?

BROWNE: Yes. When I'm 88.

Later on I was happy to post a link to Anderson Cooper's debunking of Sylvia Browne on CNN [Psychic Sylvia Browne Is Nothing but a Con Artist and a Fake].

Sylvia Browne died yesterday [Psychic Sylvia Browne, famous for TV appearances, dies at 77]. She was 77 years old. Only off by 11 years.

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[Hat Tip: PZ Myers: Didn’t see that one coming]

Is Baker's Yeast a Good Model for the Evolution of Multicellularity?

R. Ford Denison has an excellent blog called This Week in Evolution. He recently posted an article about the evolution of multicellularity [Evolving-multicellularity lab exercises]. That post contains a link to a paper he recently published with a former student (Ratcliff et al., 2013). Here's the abstract.

Multicellularity was one of the most significant innovations in the history of life, but its initial evolution remains poorly understood. Using experimental evolution, we show that key steps in this transition could have occurred quickly. We subjected the unicellular yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to an environment in which we expected multicellularity to be adaptive. We observed the rapid evolution of clustering genotypes that display a novel multicellular life history characterized by reproduction via multicellular propagules, a juvenile phase, and determinate growth. The multicellular clusters are uniclonal, minimizing within-cluster genetic conflicts of interest. Simple among-cell division of labor rapidly evolved. Early multicellular strains were composed of physiologically similar cells, but these subsequently evolved higher rates of programmed cell death (apoptosis), an adaptation that increases propagule production. These results show that key aspects of multicellular complexity, a subject of central importance to biology, can readily evolve from unicellular eukaryotes.

Here's the problem. Most fungi are multicellular and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast) almost certainly evolved from an ancestor that could form hyphae. In fact, wild-type diploid strains or Saccharomyces cerevisiae will form multicellular filaments (pseudohypha) in response to starvation for nitrogen (Liu et al., 1996).

Many of the common lab strains have lost the ability to form multicellular pseudohyphae because they carry a nonsense mutation in the FLO8 gene (Liu et al., 1996). Presumably, those strains have been selected by bakers and brewers over the past several thousand years.

In their discussion, Ratcliff et al. (2012) say ...

Although known transitions to complex multicellularity, with clearly differentiated cell types, occurred over millions of years, we have shown that the first crucial steps in the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity can evolve remarkably quickly under appropriate selective conditions.

I don't this this is quite fair since the yeast strain is just reverting to a primitive condition. This might only have required one or a few mutations. It's not a very good model for de novo evolution of multicellarity.

The work from Gerry Fink's lab (e.g. Liu et al. 1996) is a good example of why we should be cautious using yeast as a model for anything. The yeast strains used in the lab have been selected for specific characteristics since bread-making and beer-making were first invented over 4000 years ago. We need to be cautious about drawing general conclusions based on work with lab yeast strains.

The lab exercise based on the Ratcliff et al. (2012) paper [Experimental Evolution of Multicellularity] may be interesting but it's also misleading. The description of that experiment implies that students are reproducing the ancient evolution of multicellularity from single-cell organisms. Instead, what students are actually looking at is the reversion of a derived, exclusively single-cell strain, to the more primitive multicellular state. That's not the same thing.

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[Photo Credit: That's Ford at a rally in Ottawa where we were protesting the Conservative government's clamp-down on science in Canada. He took advantage of the audience to advertise his book.

Liu, H., Styles, C.A. and Fink, G.R. (1996) Saccharomyces cerevisiae S288C has a mutation in FL08, a gene required for filamentous growth. Genetics 144:967-978. [PDF]

Ratcliff, W.C., Denison, R.F., Borrello, M. and Travisanoa, M. (2012) Experimental evolution of multicellularity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 109:1595-1600. [doi: 10.1073/pnas.1115323109]

Textbook Publishers Respond to Texas School Board: "Up yours!"

There are a lot of myths surrounding the influence of the Texas Board of Education on the content of biology textbooks. Most people seem to think that major publishers have watered down or eliminated evolution in response to pressure from the Texas board. There's very little evidence to support that claim.

In any case, the situation has changed as reported by Josh Rosenau on the NCSE website [What’s the Future of Texas Textbook Battles?].

The adoption process ending this week will be the first science textbook adoption in a decade. Creationists on the board opened the door to abuses with the standards they passed in 2009, and lame duck board members after the 2012 elections snuck in ideologically-driven textbook reviewers. This summer, these reviewers attacked evolution and climate change in biology textbooks, looking to influence publishers and the board. The hope was that the board’s influence over purchasing decisions would be powerful enough to compel publishers to undercut the science.

But publishers are stronger now. A 2011 law (passed in response to the absurd process in 2009 and 2010) allows local districts to buy any book they want, whether or not it’s on the board’s approved list. Districts are still going to prefer an approved textbook, but if the board goes too far, local districts can opt for a book not on the list, which means the publishers can walk away from the adoption process rather than weaken their textbooks. This science standards adoption is the first under the new law, a test case for battles to come (especially next year’s social studies textbook adoption).

So far, the publishers are standing strong. Creationists pushed them to water down evolution coverage, but they seem to be finding ways around the reviewers’ suggestions. As Ron Wetherington (who won a Friend of Darwin Award from NCSE in honor of his work on the 2009 standards) told the Dallas Observer "I reviewed the publisher’s response to this. In this particular case, the publisher said, ‘Up yours, we’re not going to change anything.’" We don’t yet know whether the state education agency will accept that response and recommend these textbooks for adoption.

Here's the view from TFN Insider [Important News: Publishers Are Resisting Pressure to Dumb Down Their Biology Textbooks for Texas].

We have now had our first look at changes publishers have submitted in response to objections — many of them attacks on evolution and climate change science — raised by official state review teams evaluating new science textbooks for Texas. And we have very encouraging news:

All 14 publishers are refusing to water down or compromise instruction on evolution and climate change in their proposed new high school biology textbooks.

These publishers deserve our thanks for standing up to pressure from right-wing politicians and activists working to corrupt the science in our children’s textbooks.

Contrast this with the question asked by Paul Waldman a few months ago [The Missing Piece in Coverage of Texas Evolution Controversies].

So here's the missing piece: what about the textbook companies? When this issue is discussed, the publishers are talked about as if they have no agency, no ability to affect the outcome of these events. But they're morally culpable for participating in these farces. If they wanted, they could stand up to the state of Texas. So how can the people who work at a publisher in good conscience agree to write a biology textbook that treats evolution as a wild, unsupported idea? What if the Texas Board of Education demanded that their books discuss the "controversy" about whether the Earth travels around the sun or vice-versa, or the "controversy" about whether earthquakes happen because the turtle on whose back the world sits is scratching an itch, or the "controversy" about whether stars are actually faeries winking at us from up in the sky? Would the publishers say, "OK, if that's what you want, we'll write it and print it"? Someone should ask them where they draw the line on their integrity.

This was gleefully cross-posted to Jerry Coyne's blog website [Textbooks and Texas] where his sycophants jumped all over me for suggesting that publishers were not actually modifying their textbooks in any significant way.

Here's an excerpt from Jerry Coyne's latest post [Creationism on life support at the Texas Board of Education].

This week the Texas Board of Education will consider which biology texts to “recommend” for Texas public-school students. I say “recommend” rather than “adopt” because the rules have changed. The list of approved books, from which all school districts were once required to choose, is now gone, and the Board can only recommend books. Texas school districts can now choose whichever books they want to use, including material from the Internet. That’s a huge bonus to publishers, who used to have to rewrite many of their biology and history books so they’d be acceptable to Texas, largely purging them of evolution and giving a more conservative point of view on American history. Now they won’t have to do that, and publishers are beginning to resist such changes anyway. If all the publishers resisted, Texas wouldn’t have any books to buy!

I still think it's misleading to say that publishers "used to have to rewrite many of their biology ... books so they’d be acceptable to Texas, largely purging them of evolution." I've got copies of Miller & Levine's biology textbooks, for example, and they cover evolution quite well. I could be wrong but I don't think the Texas Board of Education ever rejected a biology textbook. They were all on the list of "approved" textbooks even though they covered evolution.

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Oops! MOOCs Didn't Work Out So Good for Sebastian Thrun

From Tressie McMillan Cottom at tressiemc [The Audacity: Thrun Learns A Lesson and Students Pay].

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the most high-profile private sector attempts to "disrupt" higher education discovered inequality this week. Thrun has spent the last three years dangling the shiny bauble of his elite academic pedigree and messianic vision of the future of higher education before investors and politicos. He promised nothing short of radically transforming higher education for the future by delivering taped classroom lessons of elite professors through massive open online courses. So what went wrong?

After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. The "godfather of free online education" says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU [San Jose State University], "were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit." It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing.

Thrun's goal was to market lectures by "elite" professors at places like Sanford¹. His new company, Udacity, was going to make tons of money by selling lists of successful students to private companies who are looking for talent. Guess what? It turns out that there are lots of disadvantaged students in introductory courses at SJSU who don't learn from lectures given by elite Stanford professors. Who would have guessed?

In case you've forgotten the hype that Sebastian Thrun created when he formed Udacity, read: Sebastian Thrun Will Change Education. And watch the video.

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1. My position on this is that the professors at Harvard and Stanford are not necessarily the best teachers. In my field of biochemistry, for example, we have direct evidence that professors at MIT do a horrible job of teaching biochemistry [Where Are the Best University Teachers?]. In my experience, the best biochemistry teachers are often located at small colleges where they pay attention to the latest pedagogical literature and actually read the textbooks they use in class.

Fred Sanger (1918-2013)

BBC News is reporting that Fred Sanger

has died [Frederick Sanger: Double Nobel Prize winner dies at 95]. Sanger is one of the few people to win two Nobel Prizes. His first was for sequencing insulin and his second was for developing a technique for sequencing DNA (Sanger sequencing).

Most people, even most scientists, have no idea how much he influenced molecular biology. Sanger worked at Cambridge (UK). When Francis Crick first arrived at Cambridge in 1947 he soon met a number of important scientists. Here's how Horace Freeland Judson describes Sanger in The Eight Day of Creation (pp. 88-89).

One of these in particular, the biochemist Frederick Sanger, came to have great intellectual importance in Crick's thinking and then to molecular biologists generally as the field developed. Sanger is temperamentally and in scientific style Crick's opposite. Where many scientists, Crick among them, flower at conferences and do a great deal of their science by talking, Singer is a quiet man—reticent, even shy, a man who worked with his hands, at the bench. He almost never talked to the press, never despite the editor's importuning wrote the big article for Scientific American. One might spot him bicycling to work on a spring morning, in a drab brown coat, in the rain. Once I stopped to talk with him in the corridor of the laboratory building, where he was waiting in the queue for his turn at the ultraviolet-light box, in order to illuminate the spots on a sheet of chromatography paper he was holding. Sanger is a Quaker by upbringing, and stayed at Cambridge through the second world war; holding only a junior fellowship in the biochemistry department, and even when the war dried up the usual sources of research funds, with family money he was able to keep going. In the course of nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-forties, Sanger settled upon the new techniques of chromatography to determine the amino-acid sequences of the two chains of the bovine insulin molecule. He proved that the sequences are unique and always the same, meaning that every molecule of insulin in every cow is exactly like every other. Yet the sequences show no general periodicities: they are not predictable from ordinary chemical rules.

Sanger published very rarely. His papers came to be red with heart in mouth by other scientists, for they are technically brilliant. Even as he worked, though, the news slowly spread and the implications sank in. For one thing, his department held a biochemistry tea club where perhaps once a month research that was relatively finished, though not yet submitted for publication, was presented. Brigitte Askonas, later an important figure in immunology in England, came to Sanger's lab as a doctoral student late in 1948, staying on into 1952. "Even then, Fred had only a minor fellowship—and some had wanted to kick him out," she told me once. "When one would ask him how his work was going, he would say very little. 'Oh, I've got another peptide.'" Then at a lab meeting he would bring a stack of cards showing overlapping short sequences, and slowly, diffidently, build up his latest segment of the molecule. "Crick always came to the tea club," Askonas said. "And he always asked awkward questions. Enfant terrible questions. And then he would explain, somewhat disingenuously, 'You see, I'm just learning.'" Sanger's general conclusion was forceful by 1949, when he went to the annual symposium on quantitative biology at Cold Spring Harbor (his only such visit). In a paper published on the first of June of that year—the earliest of his magisterial series of papers on insulin appearing every odd-numbered year until 1955—he was already able to say that "there appears to be no principle that defines the nature of the [amino-acid] residue" occupying any particular position in a protein. The conclusion was definitive by 1951. For this work and the methods of sequencing he invented to do it, Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1958. (He later turned to the more difficult problem of sequencing nucleic acids, which earned him a share of another Nobel Prize, in 1980. Crick, from his first arrival in Cambridge, new of Sanger's work step by step, months and even years before new steps were published.

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