“I’m
really burned out on my research. Is
there something else I can work on for a while?” So began my conversation with Steve Schulman,
the professor with whom I was working while earning my Ph.D. in pharmaceutical
sciences from the University of Florida.
He grinned at me, spun his office chair around, grabbed several bottles
of obscure chemicals off a shelf behind his desk, handed them to me, and said,
“Study these.” After discussing a few
things with him I thought, “OK, this sounds better.” Each chemical was of questionable purity, and
so step one was to purify them. I
commenced with recrystallization and then moved on to preparative column
chromatography. When all was said and
done I had isolated beautiful crystals of each chemical, and my analysis of
them demonstrated that they were pure.
This was enjoyable and relaxing, and I commenced acquiring spectra of
them. I measured how much visible and
ultraviolet light each absorbed, and then measured their fluorescence
properties. By this point in my graduate
education I was pretty good at this kind of work, and our laboratory instruments
were working beautifully.
“This
is strange,” I thought as I looked at the fluorescence spectrum of
9-aminofluorene. There was an odd
feature that raised a red flag. “Is this
stuff really pure?” So I did some more
analysis. Trust me, it was pure, but we
had some work to do in order to explain why that unusual feature was there. Steve suggested that I repeat the
fluorescence measurements with 9-aminofluorene dissolved in different
solvents. That turned out to be a great
idea, and I observed that the wavelengths at which the anomalous feature
occurred varied regularly with the properties of the liquid that the chemical
was dissolved in. I won’t bore you with
all of the details, but ultimately we explained this discovery by proposing the
existence of an excited-state twisted intramolecular charge transfer conformer
and published the results in the journal Chemical
Physics Letters in June of 1982. This
about a year before I completed my graduate program. I felt rejuvenated, I went back to my main
research project, and we all lived happily ever after. In other words, we published a series of
articles dealing with my “real” research.
Consequently, my dissertation was pretty well bulletproof when I
defended it orally before the professors on my graduate committee. They still made me sweat out in the hall for what
seemed like an eternity (a whole 20 minutes), but then my professor came out and
congratulated me. Oh, the sweet taste of
victory!! My nightmares about graduate
school persisted for only a few more years; by then bad dreams about teaching
college chemistry had set in.
How
many kinds of scientific observations did I make during the “I need a break”
project? I visually observed each
chemical before purifying it, and there were telltale signs that impurities
were present. I also visually observed
multiple colored bands during the column chromatography experiments that
informed me about impurities. Analyzing
the absorption and emission of light by the purified 9-aminofluorene with
spectrometers told me things that humans can’t detect with their senses. Nevertheless, we still call these measurements
“observations.”
Every
observation we make is limited either by the ability of the observer or the
technology being used. In other words,
every observation has some uncertainty built into it. Scientists can estimate uncertainty using
statistical models. For example, when
determining how much ultraviolet light a chemical absorbs at a particular
wavelength we can estimate how well we can measure both the wavelength and the extent
of light absorption. Of course, the fact
that we can make such estimates does not mean that we understand everything
contributing to the uncertainty. Please
note that this is not the same thing as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but
I’ll leave that discussion to you and your local quantum theory scientist.
There
is also uncertainty in entire scientific theories. Scientists that develop a theory have
confidence that they are on the right track, but sometimes others disagree. Theories are not widely accepted unless they
explain a lot of observations. It’s easy
to understand why scientists that have invested their lives in developing a
theory aren’t easily won over to an alternative. In such cases it takes both evidence and a
better theory to convince them that they are wrong. Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does a fine job of
explaining how this process works. It
also demonstrates that sometimes scientists are very wrong about things that
they are very certain are very right.
Life’s
circumstances present us with uncertainties.
Here are a few examples:
·
When will that
noisy engine idler pulley seize up and have to be replaced? Will I get stranded in the parking garage at
school? Will it just die in traffic? Can it cause an accident? A good mechanic can fix this in a jiffy, and
then the uncertainty will evaporate.
·
When will I get a
job? Not so easy.
·
When I retire,
will I have enough money to pay for medical bills? Also not so easy.
And
then there are uncertainties in relationships:
·
What is she
thinking? Does she like me? Will I be able to see her again?
·
Why did he say
that? Why did he say it the way he did? Will he ever understand me?
How
do you cope with thoughts like this? In
almost 35 years of marriage to Carla I have found that she is very good at giving people the benefit
of the doubt. I like the way the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary defines it: “To believe something good about someone,
rather than something bad, when you have the possibility of doing either.” Several weeks ago I discussed a situation
with two people. John (not his real name)
immediately reacted very forcefully and emphatically stated (rather loudly), “What
Brian said is not right! It is…” and
gave his version of things. As it turned
out, he had more recent knowledge than I did, but I was still taken aback by
his reaction. Couldn’t he have explained it more nicely? I thought his reaction might have been influenced
by his circumstances. And I also
remembered that Carla has said, “Brian, sometimes you come across in ways that
you don’t realize.” Perhaps I came
across to John in some way that elicited his negative reaction. I chose to think these things about him rather
than, “John is a jerk.” The beautiful
thing about giving him the benefit of the doubt is that I was able to relax and
dismiss negative thoughts from my mind.
In
a few weeks I’m going to have pelvic and abdominal CT scans in order to see if
any lymph nodes look abnormal. If they
do, then I expect that Joe (Stephenson, my oncologist) and I will discuss
treatment options. If they don’t, then I
expect that we’ll continue watchful waiting.
I have no way of predicting what will happen. As I’ve shared before, it’s expected that my
follicular lymphoma will at some time become more aggressive and require
treatment. Timeframe: Unknown. None of us like these kinds of
uncertainties. Against this backdrop it
seems odd that Christ said this:
“Let not your hearts be troubled.”
(John 14:1)
This
puts some responsibility for my state of mind squarely into my court. As strange as it may sound to some, I
personally know God. Although I am
familiar with who he is and how he thinks, there are still times when he does
things that I don’t understand. Nevertheless,
he always has good reasons for what he does and what he allows to happen, even
if that includes my getting cancer. I’m
giving God the benefit of the doubt.
