Gotta Drown Out The Noise -- T+45 -- September 27, 2018

Just call me angel of the morning, came out in 1968 ---

Just Call Me Angel Of The Morning, Merrilee Rush

And the last one for the day, the girl with the dragon tattoo ...

The Immigrant Song, Karen O, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
And now I forget what I was going to post? Oh, yes, this one. No hurricanes this summer. Florence was a tropical storm by the time it hit landfall -- earliest hurricane now projected no sooner than October 15, and the season ends sometime in November....

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The Quota Page

Lessons From The Lobster: Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience, Charlotte Nassim, c. 2018.

From page 12:

In autumn 1965, Eve went to college intending to become a civil rights lawyer. Her mother, Dorothy Marder, had become a well-known photographer, chronicling the social activism of the late 1960s to the 1980s, such as the anti-nuclear and anti-Vietnam movements. Eve didn't even consider science, although as a little kid when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she used to say "a scientist" because the first time she said it she got praise and attention. Eve wanted to go to a West Coast college, but her parents vetoed that idea.

Instead, she went to Brandeis, then a young university, still small but with a growing reputation. It had been founded in 1948 at a time when Harvard and Yale ran quotas to limit the number of Jewish students and faculty.

It never quits. Yale University is now under investigation for discriminating against Asian students.

A most famous Yale alumnus "testifies" today in the US Senate chambers.

Back to Eve Marder. Slightly younger, but a contemporary of Lynn Margulis. Eve was quite a bit younger than James Watson; his book came out in 1953. Marder was born 1948.

This is an incredibly difficult book to read, once one gets into the "science" part of the book. I've read much of the book, but I started by reading chapter 3 and then part of chapter 4 before it got too depressing. Then back to the introduction.

Now I'm reading chapter one, her college years. Wow! It brings back incredible memories. The late 60's. I missed the social unrest of the early 60's -- two reasons: a) geographical; and, b) timing. I missed it by two or three years if one uses the Common Era calendar. But graduating from high school in 1969 fifty miles from Tioga, ND , I was twenty years behind what was going on in Massachusetts or Berkeley.  Or the rest of the world, for that matter.

But, wow, I wish I could post the five or six pages that Charlotte Nassim writes about Eve Marder's college years.

1967: she is beginning her junior year; switches abruptly from politics to biology. To switch to biology, she had to have completed a course in organic chemistry. Her only option: a summer course at Harvard. She struggles but gets the necessary "B" to have the credit transferred to Brandeis.

Brand new: the word "neuroscience" was first used in 1964. And that was where, in 1967, Eve Marder was headed.

In 1967, when Eve wrote her first "real" college biology paper, inhibitory transmission in the brain had not been described. That would become Eve's focus: neuronal inhibition.

Eve's first real research experience began -- as luck would have it -- in Albert Szent-Györgyi's laboratory at Brandeis. From wiki:

Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrápolt September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986) was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with first isolating vitamin C and discovering the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II and entered Hungarian politics after the war. 

From wiki:

Brandeis University is an American private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts, 9 miles west of Boston. 

Founded in 1948 as a non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jewish community, Brandeis was established on the site of the former Middlesex University. The university is named after Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Justice of the U.S Supreme Court. In 2015, it had a total enrollment of 5,532 students on its suburban campus spanning over 235 acres. The institution offers more than 43 majors and 46 minors, and two thirds of the undergraduate classes have 20 students or fewer. It is a member of Association of American Universities since 1985 and the Boston Consortium which allows students to cross-register to attend courses at other institutions including Boston College, Boston University and Tufts University.

The university has a strong liberal arts focus, and is known to attract a geographically and economically diverse student body, with 72% of its non-international undergraduates being out state, 50% of full-time undergraduates receiving need-based financial aid, 13.5% being recipients of the federal Pell Grant, and having the 8th largest international student population of any university in the United States.

And I'll end with this, from page 16:

In the academic year 1968 to 1969, students all over the country were protesting against the Vietnam War. The Brandeis campus boiled over with sit-ins and strikes. Even couldn't possibly be a scab. Her way out was to work in the lab in the evenings and on weekends, having convinced herself that htese hours didn't count: if she worked in her own time, she wasn't breaking the strike.

Szent-Gyorgyi had a different and much more serious attitude toward politics and political engagement, shaped in Hungary. He laughed, or perhaps scoffed, at the ruse, but he strongly advised her not to go to Berkeley for graduate school because of the danger of being caught up in politics.

I graduated from high school in 1969. The love of my life in the early 1970's was two years ahead of me; she would have been caught up in those same sit-ins at Rutgers.