Immortal

The first lecture on kidney transplant was about perfusion during my conference today. Perfusion – the imperfect art and science of keeping an organ alive after it has been removed from a human body – is striving for vitality of an organ without blood and oxygen supply. The technique isn’t perfect, but hopefully can buy time for the transplant team to find the matched organ transplant recipients. For patients, they can recover quicker with better quality of the kidney organ. For surgeons, they can get some sleep after the first organ recovery surgery, before the second transplant surgery.

The perfusion machine and technology seem promising. Even so, perfusion keeps a donated organ alive outside the body for a finite number of hours. That's why I found the story of immortal human cells of Henrietta Lacks astonishing. Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman who died of an aggressive cervical cancer at the John Hopkins. She could not go elsewhere for treatment in 1951, because that was the only charity hospital accepting black patients at the era of Jim Crow. If Henrietta showed up at white-only hospital, she would have been sent away. At Hopkins, she could at least be segregated in coloured wards, the only place black patients were allowed to go.

To this day no one’s entirely sure why her full-fledged tumour wasn’t picked up when she delivered a baby two months prior to the diagnosis. Not even at the six weeks' return visit postpartum. There’s no way of knowing exactly what happened during her checkups. Rebecca Skloot, who authored a science biography of Henrietta Lacks, wasn't sure, too.

George Gey, head of tissue culture research at Hopkins, had been trying for years to develop the perfect culture medium – not a perfusion machine, not yet – to keep cells growing outside a human body. That means liquid recipe like witches’ brews to feed cells in a test tube or Petri dish. He tried the plasma of chickens, purée of calf fetuses, special salts and blood from human umbilical cords.

Hailed as “the world’s most famous vulture feeding on human specimens”, George Gey drove to local slaughterhouses at least once a week to collect cow foetuses and chicken blood. His ongoing experiment to find the perfect medium was never successful, until he took a sliver of cervix tumour from Henrietta Lacks. George Gey’s assistant dutifully labeled the culture using the first two letters of the patient's first and last names. That means HeLa for Henrietta and Lacks. Unlike other human cells, her cells kept growing and turned not the immortal HeLa cell line.

The success of HeLa cells in scientific contribution is infinite. On the other hand, the tarnished story of biomedical research by exploitation of vulnerable subjects without consent turned out to be a legacy that lasted forever.

Adelaide

Being invited to give talks in scientific meeting in Australia is an honour. The only two reasons to accept the invitation – and they’re good ones – are intellectual exchange and chance to visit Adelaide.

Even though there isn’t direct flight into Adelaide Airport, travel to Adelaide is easy. I slept through the journey soon after watching one documentary by David Attenborough on the plane. By the time of landing, I realised my missing the meals.

That didn’t matter. I was happy enough to have arrived one day before the conference. There has never been a more exciting time to explore the city before long days of conference. I headed straight to forest walk on arriving at Adelaide this afternoon, skipping breakfast and lunch. 

My pick was Waterfall Gully surrounding Cleland National Park. The trail to Mt Lofty Summit through steep hills and stingybark forests is every Adelaidian's favourite climb. That's where I saw many cardio crusaders and sweaty joggers. That's where I listened to birdsongs of golden whistlers and chirps of superb blue wrens. That's the best welcome event for an academic conference.

Woman

Not all stories are epic. They can be as simple as a mother-daughter story like A Thousand Splendid Suns, that takes place in Afghan society. Or else, a story about three generations of Palestinian women, as what I have read in Etaf Rum's novel A Woman is No Man.

The title of the novel, by itself, is telling a good story.

And yes, that would be an immediate answer to any Palestine girl who asks why she can't do so-and-so.

"Because. You can't compare yourself to your brothers. You're not a man."

"Fair or not, no girl is going to college."

"A woman will always be a woman."

Although I can't find a satisfying ending from the novel, I have witnessed the courage of a storyteller who speaks up and shows us the unsettling culture. And no matter how difficult it would be, we will come across someone like Malala Yousafzai. One day, if not now.

Middle

English is often called a "mixed" or even a "mongrel" language; the words come from a true hybrid of Saxon, Celtic, Latin, French, Norse and Greek.  

My recent reading turned out to be an intricate mix of Greek heritage or mythology. That's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the mysterious title Middlesex.

The truly classic style of writing, paradoxical as it may seem, is the narrator voice of Cal telling the story of grandparents since 1922, all the way to Cal's birth in 1960. Back then, fetal sonogram was unheard of, and the next best thing to predict Cal's sex was a silver spoon dangling over the belly of Cal's mother. In what they claimed to be science, the silver spoon tied to a string twirled over the mother's belly, moving round and round in an Ouija-board way, until the path flattened to a direction that foretold Cal is a boy. "Koros!" The room erupted with shouts of "Koros, koros." 

The baby guessing appeared to be wrong by the time Cal was born. As far as the parents and doctors could tell, Cal was feminine. What they didn't realise was a tricky enzyme deficiency hitchhiking the journey of one paired chromosome numbered five. Cal's body doesn't produce dihydrotestosterone hormone. That means Cal followed a primarily female line of development despite the sex chromosome telling otherwise.  Cal was brought up around dolls, hair clips, full set of Madeline books, party dresses, the Easy-Bake Oven, the hula hoop.

That is how Cal was born twice: first a a baby girl with birth certificate name of Calliope Helen Stephanies; and then again, as a teenage boy, after which his driver's license recorded the first name as Cal.

Hang Seng

Picture a northwestern crow soaring to great heights, scanning coastal British Columbia for his breakfast treats. The crow loves Japanese littleneck clams the most. Once the crow locates the target molluscs, it picks up speed to dive-bomb at the mudflats and dig the clams out of the sticky ooze with their beaks.

The next code to crack is opening the shell without clam opener and forks. That's how the crow does. Shortly after flying with the heavy shells, the crow drops the clams on the nearby rocks. The trick works magic like shouting "open sesame." In case it doesn't work the first time, the crow retrieves it, flies it up in the air again, and drops it the second time. The third time. The fourth or even fifth time.

I'd never seen birds so clever in my entire life. I just heard this story from two Simon Fraser University scientists. The two scientists took a closer look at the crows and noticed something strange. The crows would occasionally drop the shell and leave it behind. Why on earth should a crow work so hard to dig up perfectly delicious clams only to abandon them halfway? One simple reason is the rejected clams were too small to warrant that much efforts to extract the breakfast. Another reason, to my dismay, is some scrounger crows simply lurk near the rocks to sweep in and steal the buffet meal. 

Think about the field "bioinspiration", and we can turn to these crows and learn from their knowledge gained over evolutionary time. We can think of those clam hunting behaviour as our money earning strategy or we can think of the scrounger crows as our thieves. Either way, it is irrefutable that we can learn a lot from them. Less experienced ones –  be they crows or humans – are vulnerable to be stolen. My family has had such bad experience, when the bank account password was stolen and cracked recently. Like a scrounger crow with free meal, the scammer took our money. Fighting back was less easy than what I'd expected. If you thought reporting to police immediately and the transaction could be halted, think twice. This is bad luck if you happened to have chosen a bank without heart to protect the customers, like us. Our bank customer service – and even if you wish not to call this a service at all – refused to disclose the account number of the scammer to the police.

My goodness, that is even worse than an animal. It's unprecedented. In all of human history. Shameful as it is to say, that's the worst bank service. 

Be warned.