Ups and downs at Harvard University

A couple of interesting items concerning Harvard University have emerged in the last week or so. In Saturday's Boston Globe, a headline proclaims "Harvard admits to $1.8b gaffe in cash holdings." Has the world gone completely mad? Or just the people at the Globe and Harvard. How can losing $1.8b be considered a gaffe? Note that this wasn't money they lost from their vast endowment. This was money in the current account, that's to say money they use to run the University day-to-day.

And, on a happier note, Harvard Prof. Jack Szostak shared the Nobel prize for Medicine this year. A Boston Globe article gives a brief description of his work and mentions how his colleagues helped him celebrate.

I went back to Matt Ridley's excellent book Genome and found the section that discusses telomeres – the ends of chromosomes – and likens them to aglets on shoe laces. [As I type this, my computer shows its ignorance by not recognizing the word "aglets", but I'm sure you won't need it explained to you]. Apparently, there is a flaw in the mechanism that copies DNA. It always skips the first (and maybe the last) gene of a chromosome. Too many reproductions will fray the ends (to continue the shoe-lace analogy) and problems will occur. This is where telomerase (the subject of the Nobel Prize) comes to the rescue. It repairs the frayed ends and all is well. Evolution has provided us with multiple copies of the base sequence TTAGGG so that we can also stand copying DNA even when the repair operation doesn't apply (i.e. in some or all of the somatic cell divisions, as opposed to the germ-line cell division where the repair is absolutely necessary). Incidentally, all animals have the same telomere sequence, but plants have an extra "T". We have to go a very long way back to find ancestors with different telomeric sequences.

The reason all this is so important is that sometimes telomerase gets switched on for somatic cells that shouldn't have it. This means that they can keep on dividing without any problems. While this sounds at first like a good thing, it isn't of course – it's called cancer.

Well, that's my garbled take on all this but it is interesting. For more detail, see Telomere.

Happy Birthday, M

My mother's birthday today and we had a nice chat by phone this afternoon. Will had the day off today and so came over – so he got to talk to Granny too. After dinner he and I went to see the new Michael Moore movie: Capitalism. We thought it was excellent, especially putting up crime scene tape around the NYSE and trying to make a citizens' arrest of bank executives.

After not playing all that well at bridge yesterday with Kim, I had a good game with Len, beating out Sheila and Lew (always an accomplishment) at the club today. Daytime bridge is a little different though – there are a lot more gifts being handed out than in the evening games that I usually play in.

The weather is turning a little cold – light frosts in the mornings lately – and it's feeling a lot more like winter is just around the corner. The leaves are still looking good though.

Finally, a comment on The House on the Strand, which I'm re-reading (or rather re-hearing) at present, with Michael Maloney as the reader, who is excellent. It is so good. The writing is almost like poetry –the words just flow so well. And the story, written in the first person as a man, is so personal and vivid that you just can't put it down (or switch it off). Apparently, Daphne du Maurier was an Ac/Dc type and felt that the male side of her persona was the creative force behind the writing. I can understand that totally.

Darwin and newts

We had planned to take an easy hike to round out our summer during the foliage season in New Hampshire's largest state park, viz. Pisgah State Park. It's 20 square miles and parts of it are truly a wilderness. They do allow ATVs in certain areas in summer, and snowmobiles throughout in winter, but it really is a magical place. We found two beautiful lakes: Lily Pond and North Round Pond. After we left the main trail, we never saw another soul, human that is.
What we did see were a couple of newts (not together). One was kind of greenish on top and yellowish underneath (or maybe the other way around) and about 3" long. The other was the same length but reddish. According to my sources, and assuming that I'm reading it correctly, the former was an adult Eastern newt, while the latter was an eft, the stage between larva and adult.

Meanwhile, I have finally released version 2 of my Darwin project: a Java framework for evolutionary computation. That feels good!