Other weighty matters

I’ve been writing weighty stuff of late. A piece for Nature Chemistry about the literal stardust that sprinkles the earth every year (10 million kilograms of it). An op-ed on metaphorically weighty matters, what gutting NIH funding might mean for people’s health, from my perspective of a patient who has benefited from fundamental research begun at the NIH. 

It’s 1.5 ounces of mass that’s been almost as much a miracle as the medication I take. A hexagonal weight that slides onto a $0.79 Bic pen. And with it, like magic, I can write a grocery list, scribble a thought down on a sticky note, jot notes on a journal article I am reading. Write a short letter to a friends. I suspect I can write comments on students’ papers again, though on a sabbatical leave this year I haven’t tried. 

Like the new found joy of folding my socks, I imagine that I will be excited about grading again. Who knew?

I feel a bit like Disney’s version of Cinderella. A fairy godmother has waved her wand and turned a pumpkin of a pen into something that can take me to the ball. I love my Japanese gel pens and my fountain pens, but I love more being able to make my mark on a sheet of paper.  And it may be that metaphorical midnight might come — and poof! — this hack will cease to work. But for now, the physical therapy fairy’s magic still holds sway.

Elon's Fermi problem

Elon Musk posted a table on X claiming that enormous numbers of social security payments are being made fraudulently, as much as 83%. That seemed...excessive. I teach my students Enrico Fermi's technique for getting quick estimates, good enough numbers to help direct you toward a more accurate solution. Also great for detecting bullshit. Let's see how it works for Elon's claim!

One way to estimate roughly the number of social security recipients is to say everyone in the US over 65 collects it.  (Not true, but Fermi's approach says look at the big effects.)  In 2023 that was 59.2 million people. The Social Security Administration says that the average annual payment is $24,000. So that means we should pay out 59,200,000 x $24,000 a year. That's about $1.4 trillion. What did Social Security pay out in 2023? Its total budget was...wait for it..about $1.4 trillion. Just what you'd expect. So, BS, Elon.

This may be the biggest fraud ever, but I don't think the payments are the problem.

Reality check

I have an op-ed coming out in tomorrow's Philadelphia Inquirer that covers some of this ground. It's up online here.

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Last night I did something I hadn't done in almost two years. I made lasagna for dinner. I used the recipe I reverse engineered from my favorite restaurant in Albano Laziale.  That's nice, I hear you thinking, glad it is back in your rotation. What I want to say back is, "nice? nice? It's a miracle." 

The lasagna is that good? Well, it is, but it's the preparation that's the miracle, or rather that I can undertake it. 

I use a homemade tomato sauce, which requires dicing onions and mincing garlic and opening cans of San Marzano tomatoes. I brown Italian sausage. Grate Parmesan. Hand knead dough for fresh pasta. And make béchamel sauce, which means briskly stirring to emulsify the sauce. From start to sitting down at the table it takes about four and half hours.

But recently I couldn't: dice things, open those cans, break up the sausage in the pan, knead the dough or stir the sauce to emulsify it. Some tasks on that list were merely very difficult (dicing was glacially slow) and some were just impossible. Stirring that sauce.

It was a bit like the frog dropped in a pot of cold water, slowly being heated. Things almost imperceptibly got difficult. My handwriting got smaller. Writing on the blackboard for an hour got harder. Then it was a problem to get through an entire problem. It became tough to cut a sandwich in half. Folding my socks was a challenge. So was tying my shoes. And stirring. I couldn't make a quick pan sauce. (I know, I know, first world problems.) Then it was folding flour in to make a cake (more first world problems.) Then it was stirring my tea. That was a problem. I was in hot water.

Like that frog, for the longest while I kept adapting, or at least not noticing. Adapting my wardrobe, choosing blouses that did not need buttoning (or ironing, yep, I still iron stuff). Adapting my approach to research, dictating more, typing less. Not noticing that I wasn't making lasagna on a winter Sunday afternoon. Or choosing to have yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich. 

This is not a bid for sympathy. It's a grounding in reality, in what can be at stake in scientific research that on the surface seems quirky (lizard saliva or getting a tranquilized rabbit's ears to perk up) or esoteric (using singular value decomposition to help assign atomic charges to atoms in a molecule.²) Or that is supported by the government, or was done by someone in the US from another country. 

Some of that research can be life changing. (Both the lizard saliva and the pop-up bunny ears research was.¹) And some of it will not be. We try as researchers to follow trails that will be productive, but not every line will lead to immediate results, some will not lead to results at all. We are exploring the universe, not following well-trod paths to known destinations.  There will be dead-ends. This is not fraud or waste. It's how research works.

The drug I take, that allows me to dice onions and emulsify a sauce, that makes it possible to care for myself and continue to work was developed in part by a scientist here on a visa at the NIH. The reality is that without it, I would be disabled and unemployed. Thanks to NIH funding (and medical insurance), I have access to a life-altering therapy. It's not a cure, but it is a miracle. Other people deserve their miracles, too. 

But Trump and Musk cry, "Fraud! Waste!" and say the NIH is a disaster. Their cuts to indirect costs will save each household less than the cost of 2 months of Netflix (about $30), and cost some people their lives. 

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1. A study on lizard saliva led to Ozempic, the bunny ears to a Nobel prize. Rabbits that had had Parkinsonism induced chemically had their droopy ears almost instantly perk-up when L-DOPA was administered. L-DOPA is still the gold standard for relieving many of the motor symptoms of Parkinson's. And as miraculous as it is, it is not perfect, so I am still rather personally invested in ongoing research.

2. That bit about singular value decomposition and charges might seem esoteric, but is my work and is used today in in silico drug design, including therapies for Parkinson's. 

Photo is of an earlier lasagna, circa 2022.

O Cecilia!

 

I was working on a reflection for this coming November 22, the feast of St. Cecilia, for Give Us This Day. (I generally have my feet in two different parts of the liturgical year. Right now, it's Ordinary Time and Lent. Which sometimes gives me double vision.) 

As I do when I start these reflections, I noodled

around. I read the scriptures for the day (and for the days on either side). I read some commentary. And about Cecilia,"of whom almost nothing is known for certain" (according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Saints I pulled from the shelf).

There was poetry, there was polyphony (Arvo Pärt's lush Cecilia, vergine romana.) And there was Simon and Garfunkel.

Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please...

This last was an earworm (and might or might not have anything to do with St. Cecilia). Try as I might I could not banish it. Begging St. Cecilia for her intercession didn't work either. And surely this wasn't going to be a helpful earworm? Argh. I'm down on my knees...

Earworm or not, I needed to write. And write I did, Oh, Cecilia...

Simon and Garfunkel's ode to Cecilia (whoever she may be), opens with a thumping percussion. As I discovered when I was trying to figure out if the composition had anything to do with St. Cecilia, they were messing around one night and beat out this rhythm on a piano bench, recorded it and used the sample to open Cecilia. So perhaps that's where this line in the reflection came from? "I felt the pew shiver under my hands ..." God knows.

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The photo is of the mug of the day. St. Ignatius and his hot beverage hanging out on my bookshelf. Not shown, my Jerome commentary on the shelf below.

For the record, Cecilia is once again stuck in my head. Apologies if I have stuck it in yours.

Just google "ordo amoris"

 

"Just google 'ordo amoris'," suggested VP Vance on 30 January 2025, defending his remarks earlier about who we are obliged to help:

JD VANCE: There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world... 

Apparently Pope Francis did. Or rather he used his common sense and dug into the Gospels and the deposit of Catholic social teaching that draws upon them.

"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." — Pope Francis in a letter to the Bishops of the United States, 11 February 2025

The whole letter is here.