Senescence sucks: The final chapter (part 6)

(An elderly Eskimo on an ice floe in the final days of his life.  I would do this now, but I hate the cold.)

Yesterday, I had my follow-up visit with the doc who did the upper GI endoscopy procedure a few weeks ago.  With his scope he looked around in there and took some biopsies.  Turns out I have eosinophilic esophagitis, a disease only discovered in 1978 at the Mayo Clinic.  Not as bad as it sounds.  It is an accumulation of white blood cells in the esophagus, where they should not be, caused by allergens of some type.  It results in food sticking in that pipe for a few minutes on occasion, which is not pleasant.  Treatment is to shoot a steroid inhalant into the mouth twice a day, and then swallow it.  Do this for six months and then see the doc again.

Then, this afternoon, I finally had the follow-up visit to get the results of the sleep experiment I did a month ago.  Remember those 1,000 pages of data?  As expected, I suffer from sleep apnea.  Treatment is to wear this mask that injects air into your mouth while you sleep, a thingie called a CPAP, which reduces the apnea.  We'll find out soon if it makes me feel young again.

So let's summarize.  I have arthritis between two vertebrae in my lower back, I suffer from peripheral neuropathy (which I have not discussed), I have eosinophilic eosphagitis and a hiatal hernia, I exhibit sleep apnea, and I have high cholesterol.  All of this simply proves my point that as you get older, all sorts of systems and parts of your body deteriorate (= senescence).  (J.F. Fries' classic study in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 lays all of this out beautifully.  Over the past century, average longevity has increased dramatically, primarily due to reduction of juvenile mortality due to infectious disease.  But maximum longevity has not increased and is not likely to do so, even if we eliminated all diseases.  Maximum longevity is about 85, with only 1 in 10,000 persons making it to 100.  Organ dysfunction simply takes over with advancing age, regardless of any disease process.  The goal, therefore, would seem to be as vigorous as possible until the predicted, and inevitable, "terminal drop".)  My list of medical afflictions is probably pretty standard and, fortunately, doesn't include anything really serious.  For example, when I was diagnosed with neuropathy, my neurologist said to me, "Tom, this is not what is going to kill you".  Oh great!  I love surprises.  Cancer, heart attack, Mack truck, step bare-footed on a rusty garden rake, or stray bullet from a deer hunter?  The possibilities are endless.

It is said that the Eskimos put their elderly on an ice floe when they are near death and send it out into the frigid waters.  This could be a rural, snowy myth--not sure.  But I hate the cold.  In the U.S., we spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last 1-3 months of life, and then die anyway.  So I have been pondering what would work for me.  When it is obvious that I am on death's door, here is what Management can do to hasten the end inexpensively:

1.  put me in front of a tv and make me watch NFL football for 24 hours straight while eating Lay's plain potato chips; to cut the time in half, turn on Fox News

2.  wheel me into a room full of cell phones, which are all ringing, bonging, and vibrating; to speed up the process, make sure that some of the ringtones include the William Tell Overture or rapping by Eminem

3.  have a dozen students who I haven't heard from in 10 years contact me to write them a letter of recommendation for law school

4.  take me to Cornell, and have me sit-in on faculty meetings in five different departments in the Ag College in one day when they are discussing budget issues

All of those suggestions will bring the end more quickly and save someone a lot of money.  But for the finale to be more peaceful, and more pleasant, please do the following for me.  Place one of my blue canvas folding chairs in my forest under a large red maple, and then leave me alone with a bottle of scotch and a lap full of cigars, and a dog.  Latin music playing in the background would be a nice touch, but that depends on the cost.  Don't be too extravagant.  The music doesn't have to be live.  Dominican cigars, not Cuban.  A cocker spaniel, not a French poodle.  And 12-year old scotch, not 18.  Then I can drift off wondering why I had been such a gall-darned cheapskate all my life.

The culture of science and the theory of evolution

(Young Charles Darwin.  For a great read on his early life and explorations, see "The Voyage of the Beagle".)

I find constantly that the general public doesn’t understand how science works, especially how university scientists do their work. For example, the university pays us a salary, gives us an office, and requires us to teach some courses (that applied to me before I retired). Then, they expect us to develop an active research program, but they usually give us no money to accomplish that. We have to find all of that money from funding agencies by writing research proposals, and this is a very competitive process. The National Science Foundation only funds about 10% of the requests they receive. If you do not develop this research program, you do not get tenure, and you lose your job after about 7 years.

This is relevant to the issue of doing research on evolution, or on any other established theory in science. If one of us could disprove Darwin’s theory, we would become absolutely the most famous biologist of the century. We would undoubtedly win the Nobel Prize for Biology, be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, obtain all the grant money we could ever use, be offered the very best university positions, get the best graduate students and that large corner office---in short, life would be really, really sweet. No one gets rich or famous in science by repeating what is already believed to be true; you make a name for yourself by being the first to come up with something new. Scientists are not like a group of people who get together to reaffirm their common belief. We go to scientific meetings, and we sit there and say to ourselves: “I know I can do better than that guy”, “I just know he is wrong and I am going to prove it”, “That SOB is full of %4$##”.

But after 150 years, Darwin’s theory still holds. There is almost no working biologist out of 10s of thousands who does not conclude that the theory makes sense, that enormous evidence supports it, and that nothing in biology makes any sense without it. Evolutionary biologists (FYI, I am not even categorized professionally as an evolutionary biologist) argue about mechanisms of natural selection all the time---whether meiotic drive is more important than mutation in bringing about change in species, whether genetic drift is more influential than selection, etc. But the overall theory always wins as the best explanation for the data.

Every so often the creationist community finds someone who will write a pamphlet or small book claiming that evolution can not be true. If they are lucky, they find someone with a Ph.D., but this is never taken seriously by the scientific community, because the arguments contained there are easily refuted. The same goes for arguing about the age of the planet. Thousands of geologists, paleontologists, and biologists have spent their entire lives over the past 300 years or so trying to get the best answer possible to this question, and they arrive at an estimate of about 5 billion years. Are all these people in some giant conspiracy to overthrow creationism? No. They did their work and that is their answer.

One more thing---what does the word “theory” really mean. On the street, we use that term all the time: “I have a theory why the Yankees are doing so poorly”, or “I have a theory why it is raining so much lately”. These are not theories in the scientific sense at all; they are hypotheses, which are of lower rank than a theory. In science, a published theory is a really, really big deal. Sir Isaac Newton’s theory on universal gravitation and his laws of motion, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection are considered as close to facts as we ever get in science. They are comprehensive, well-considered, well-tested, well-argued.

It really is time for creationists to give up their reluctance to acknowledge organic evolution via natural selection as the formative process on this planet. Realize that Darwin’s theory never had anything to say about the very origin of life in the universe. Darwinian evolution is about the process of how life changes once it started; the same process would apply regardless of where in the universe life got started, however. So, I suppose, religious folks could then fall back on the role of their creator in the beginning. There are scientists who believe in the existence of some higher power, and who also believe that life evolved on this planet via natural selection. And that is fine if it gives you solace. What happened at the very beginning of the universe is incomprehensible to me. But then, just a few centuries ago, the fact that there was a large body of land west of Europe before you reach Asia (now called North America) was incomprehensible to almost everyone.

One goal of mine on this portal is to stress the importance of conservation, but another is to introduce evolutionary thinking. This will take some time. It is an extremely powerful tool to use to understand life on this planet, and to understand the behavior of all organisms, including humans. All sorts of human behavior start to make sense (e.g., racism, greed, love, aggression, infidelity, etc.) once you begin analyzing life as a cost/benefit ratio with survival and reproductive fitness as currencies. Once you begin to view the world through this lens, I doubt you will ever go back. It is downright fun!

The tale of the look-alike shoes

(Would you lower your young son into one of these to retrieve an expensive pair of shoes?)

In 1985, I took a bunch of grad students from Cornell to a big meeting on conservation biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  This was the meeting where it was decided to form a scientific organization on the subject, to be called the Society for Conservation Biology.  So we piled into a 9-passenger van and off we went.

My first mistake was taking the "short-cut" from Ithaca to Ann Arbor, by crossing the border into Canada and driving through Ontario, rather than the longer drive to Ohio and then turning north by staying in the U.S. all the way.  When we got to the Canadian border, the border guard asked if there were any non-U.S. citizens in the van.  I proudly announced that we had a German, a Costa Rican, a Venezuelan, and two Colombians.  Big mistake.  "Pull over. Pull over there.", the guard barked, as I parked the van near the visitor station.  All the foreign students had to go inside and sing the Canadian national anthem in English or something, because it was two hours before we were back on the road again.  One of the foreign students mumbled something about hoping that guy had to cross from Nicaragua into Costa Rica some day when she was on duty at that border.  Get his name.  I thought I heard the words "strip search" in her Latino accent.

We arrived safely in Wolverine country and attended presentations for 2-3 days.  For the last evening, I had purchased tickets to attend the banquet.   I had even brought a suit of clothes and planned to make a good visual impression on my comrades in the fledgling society that was being formed that week.  Who knows.  Maybe someday I would want to be Supreme Ruler of the organization, and those kinds of potentates never wear jeans at formal dinners.  But that morning I realized I had forgotten my black dress shoes to go with my suit.  All I had were tennis shoes--not potentate footwear at all.  A couple of students suggested I go to a local thrift store and buy a pair of black shoes.  Great idea.  I went, I saw, and I purchased a pair of black leather shoes for $2 that looked very similar to what I had left at home. I attended the banquet and lived happily ever after, although I never became Supreme Ruler of anything.

But those $2 shoes never really fit.  It was painful to wear them for more than a few minutes, and they looked as cheap as they were if you really examined them.  So one evening on my way home from work, I dropped the shoes into one of those bins at a nearby strip mall where you can donate clothes you no longer want.  I always feel good giving to those who have less than I do.  But later that evening, I realized that the black shoes I was putting on were the cheap shoes I had bought in Michigan; I apparently had taken my good shoes by mistake to the Salvation Army bin and thrown them away.  Yikes!  Those shoes cost me $80, which was a lot of money to pay for shoes in the mid-80s.  Then, the idea came to me.

The following morning at 5am, I gathered up my 9-year old son Matt and we drove to the mall, and parked in front of the bin. The slot in that bin was pretty large.  And unless they emptied the bin since yesterday, my shoes should still be in there.  I explained to Matt what he was looking for as I carefully lifted him up and lowered him down into that large metal container.  To this day, I can hear his little voice from inside the bin saying, "Daddy, it's dark in here."  At that time I wanted to say something like, "Buck up kid.  You're the son of a wildlife biologist.  How large could the rats in there possibly be?".  Matt searched around as best he could, came up empty-handed, and I then realized that the bin was empty.  Shoes gone.  I hate giving things away of real value to those who have less than I do.  In addition, as I was lifting Matt out of that thing, I ripped my new jacket on the edge of the bin opening.  Kharma 2, DrTom 0.

I kept the $2 shoes around for a long time to remind me of this incident.  I guess I thought that maybe Matt would want to wear them when he got older.  And we could retell the story.  And we would laugh together like fathers and sons do in the movies.   Instead, all he remembers is the time that his father put him in a dark, scary can to look for something.  And I feel like a child abuser.  And a cheap SOB.  And not like a potentate should feel at all.

Cell phones: The device I love to hate

I have hated cell phones since their inception. Maybe it is because I have always hated talking on the phone to almost anyone at anytime. I just don't like to talk that much, so the act of actually carrying around a device in your pocket where people can talk to you anytime is totally repulsive. Maybe it is because my family and I lived in Monteverde, Costa Rica in the mid-1980s, where we had no phone. Mail was delivered only once per week, and any mail from the states took about three weeks to arrive. And there was no internet there then. And we had no car. And life was pretty good there. So I know we can live happily without cell phones.

But there is more to it than that. It is the almost narcotic-like attachment that other people seem to have to their cell phones that repels, angers, and disgusts me. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, so I know what that kind of addiction is. When you are a smoker, you can't wait to get out of a meeting or a class so you can go someplace to light up. For the past decade, when I saw students leave a classroom, the first thing they did was to retrieve their cell (remove the pack of cigs from their pocket), flip open the cover (flip up a cig from the pack), dial a number (light up), and begin to talk (take a drag). Of course, this sequence is then followed by a slight smile of pleasure as you hear the voice of the person you called (as the nicotine hits your lungs). This compulsion to use the phone as soon as it is socially acceptable to do so looks exactly like the cigarette smoking habit with which I was all too familiar.

If I see someone driving their car while talking on a cell phone, I literally want to ram their car with mine. They are putting other people's lives in danger so they can find out whether they were supposed to pick up Miracle Whip or real mayo at the grocery, or whether Emily or April is picking up the kids after soccer practice, or whether Harry should get black olives on the pizza he is about to pick up. I don't really know what those drivers are talking about, but I will bet my dog's first born that 99% of the time it is about nothing important. The cell phone is mostly for chit chat, gossip, and entertainment in a life that seems boring without constant digital stimulation.

So for many years, I resisted getting a cell. After all, if I ever wanted to make a call on the fly, everyone with me always had one. Cell owners are all too proud to offer up their phone for use, to show you all the neat things it can do and how kewl it looks. I parasitized this pride for a long time and, in the process, probably saved thousands of dollars in cell phones and cell plans.

However, last year my wife and I got our first cell. We actually have two landlines at home, but my wife’s work often has them both tied up for hours or days. Our children insisted that we get a cell so they can contact us during the day if necessary. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But I am still basically clueless. I can dial and receive a call, but I don’t know how to text, to send a picture, to retrieve a message, or even to put it on vibrate. I really don’t care to know, because Management can do some of these things. It is a basic model that we got free with our plan, so it is not a “smart” phone. Therefore, I guess it must be a dumb phone.

My ignorance about cell phones can result in some interesting moments. A few months ago, my wife handed me the cell that she had just put on vibrate to put in my pocket in a restaurant in Albany, NY. A few minutes later, I felt a very strange sensation coming from my mid-section. I waited, it passed. A short while later, it happened again. I jumped out of my seat, wondering what was happening to my stomach. I was about to alert my wife to dial 911, because this is not normal. When you get to be my age, you wake up every day wondering if this is the day you get THE CALL. Turns out, I was getting A CALL, just not THE CALL, from the cell in my pants. I always thought that vibration machines were supposed to bring pleasure, not trepidation.

Then, last weekend, my daughter and her family decided to go to the local mall when visiting us. After she left, I realized I needed to call her about something REALLY IMPORTANT. I dialed her cell from my cell, because Management was using our landline. As soon as I dialed, another cell phone that was sitting on our kitchen counter began to ring. Not our phone; we only have one. I hung up, ran over to answer it, and no one was there. I redialed my daughter on my cell, and the same thing happened again. What an incredible coincidence that that cell rings at exactly the same time I am using mine. I hung up again, jumped across the kitchen to answer it quickly, but no one was there. I HATE PHONES! About an hour later, I realized I was calling my daughter’s cell from my cell in the same room. I guess if I had not hung up my cell, I could have had a pretty interesting conversation with myself.

It should be clear by now that I hate cell phones, and I suppose I always will. The myth we tell is that cell phones were developed to make our lives better, but they were actually developed so companies could make money selling them. But in addition to the irritations enumerated above, there is another. On nearly every hill of any size in America, there is a cell tower. Another bit of environmental degradation, another bit of visual pollution, another ugliness on the landscape. All this, so Harry can find out whether he should get olives on his pizza. Go progress!