The NAW

How We Got here 

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High School Biology 

 

I know when things went wrong, I was right. I was sitting in my high school Biology class, and Mr. Wray said that life was highly improbable. I raised my hand. Mr. Wray said, "Scott?". I asked, "How can life be highly improbable when you can look out the window and see all those different life forms out there?". Mr. Wray said, "IT WAS HIGHLY IMPROBABLE WHEN IT FIRST OCCURRED."  I took it with a grain of salt, and wondered, what makes life a mathematical certainty? 

 

The situation in the room had been kind of amusing. The school had the design of many schools in the 60's, where the school runs north-south, and the classrooms have windows that run from cinder block to cinder block and from about 3 feet to the ceiling. The classroom faced west, and you could see The Bellows Farm on the next rise. The class was seated in alphabetical order, and my name being Scott Tackett, I was seated in the last row, and the seat closest to the center hall. Mr. Wray had wandered to the northwest corner of the classroom, so we were speaking across the class. 

 

Mr. Wray may have taken a personal pride in our textbook. After Sputnik went up, the United States was worried that we were lagging behind the USSR. The textbook company gathered 180 Biology teachers to write a new (definitive) Biology textbook. The teachers came up with 3 different textbooks. We got the green edition (ecology?). Mr. Wray at some point had even shown photos to the class of being out there in Colorado Springs with the other teachers. 

 

As it turned out, I did something right without knowing what I was doing. I had asked a reductio ad absurdum question without knowing what a reductio ad absurdum question was. The problem with doing something correctly the first time without knowing what you did, is that you may not do it the same way the next time you are in a similar situation. 

 

Another point about the windows, I went to my 40th class reunion, and the windows now have about 1/5th of the area that they previously had. The school had been given a grant to improve energy efficiency. There was something almost symbolic in the change. I had lived in the window of opportunity to make the change in our perception of DNA. For all intents and purposes, the window is closed. 

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College 

 

I told my guidance counselor that I was going to drop all the high school classes I was taking, aside from the ones I need to graduate from high school, at mid-year and start taking college courses. Two days later, the school board met and came up with a policy for all students going to both high school and college. Among other things, I was required to pass all of my college classes (without changing or dropping them), and all of my high school classes to graduate from high school. 

 

In the fall of what should have been my first year of college, I took the three college schedules (fall, summer, spring), the college handbook, and a pad of paper, and wrote down what classes and when I would have to take them to graduate in two years. 

 

I took Mycology in the fall of my second year, collecting samples that might have fungi. In the spring of my second year, I took Advanced Microbiology and was required to run an experiment. I looked for the simplest experiment I could find. There was about a half a page description of how to isolate a yeast out of nature. I isolated a yeast out of nature from a peach pit I had picked up for my Mycology class. 

 

In the summer of my second year, I tried to get the yeast I had isolated to break down cellulose. This was the same summer I was taking Intro to Biochemistry. Had I known more about biochemistry, I would not have tried to get the yeast to break down cellulose. As it turns out, I was able to get the yeast to break down cellobiose. It took weeks to get the yeast to be able to break down the cellobiose. I was thinking that chemical reactions are supposed to happen in a fraction of a second. I wondered why it had taken so long to get the yeast to be able to break down the cellobiose. I decided that I should look into how does DNA add to DNA. 

 

I told my professors that I wanted to do my Master’s research on: “How Does DNA add to DNA”. They told me the research could not be done at NWMSU. After a year, my father, who was on the faculty, happened to drop dead outside the Garrett-Strong Science building. At the beginning of the fall semester, I was called in and asked what I wanted to do my research on. I said that I still wanted to do research on “How Does DNA add to DNA”. They told me the research could not be done at NWMSU, and I said I could start. They told me they would not be able to help me. I told them that wasn’t a problem. I was allowed to do the research. 

 

No one ever tries to do the impossible, because it’s impossible. The first experiment I ran once I was allowed in the laboratory, was to make up 300ml of each of the commercially available agar media. I then poured plates and streaked the plates with the yeast I had isolated from nature, and the auxotroph I was given by Dr. Lucido. One of the media was called DNAse agar. Had I read the ingredients in DNAse agar, I would have anticipated that the auxotroph would not be able to grow. The auxotroph had no source of the amino acid in the DNAse agar. This is basically the "Lysine Contingency". {In Jurassic Park, 'The Lysine Contingency' is a genetic alteration that fictional geneticist Dr. Henry Wu created in the dinosaur genome that prevents the dinosaurs from producing the amino acid lysine (ctsciencecenter.org)}. I went ahead and streak plated the auxotroph on the plates with DNAse agar. Instead of getting no growth, as one might have anticipated if one had read the contents of the media, the plates had 4 or 5 different morphologies. 

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In a Biosystematics class, Dr. Billy David Scott required us to design and run an experiment. I had 3 flasks that had been on the shaker for about 16 months. I isolated 16 colonies of yeast from each flask, and then used each colony to inoculate a tube of phenol red dextrose. After a week I measured the pH of each tube and calculated the standard deviation of each of the flasks. All 3 flasks came out different. After 4 weeks I ran a different experiment. I isolated 1 colony from each flask, and used 1 colony to inoculate 16 tubes of phenol red dextrose. I again calculated the standard deviation of the tubes from each flask. The standard deviation again came out differently for all 3 flasks. However, if you multiply the standard deviation of the first experiment by the standard deviation of the second experiment for each flask, 2 of the values came out almost the same and the 3rd value was 97%. It appeared that the variance was being regrouped in the flasks. The obvious (to me) thing to do was to run analysis of variance statistics on 9x9 grids of test tubes measuring pH. Further testing showed significance at times in the variance of row. In Biometrics class, Dr. Richard Hart stated that if the variance of row was significant, it meant that you had screwed up, and treated the first sample differently than the last. The thing of it is, you are treating the first sample differently than the last. However, the variance of row was not significant in the control. The treatment had induced hypersensitivity. This is where the "House of Cards" experiment came from. 

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Where We're Going

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Problems That Need to be Addressed: 

   ( Modern Science Problems: )

• Slow 

• Not easily corrected 

• New structure - We need Science based on truth, where 1=1 

• Logic is incomplete 

• Number of errors 

• Information has been lost 

• Necessity for better public access 

• It's hard to be unbiased when you're picking up billions in grant money

• A tendency to conserve the status quo 

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   (Peer Review Problems:  )

• Errors can creep in over time

• Group Guess 

• Can be used for censorship

• The reviewers may not be aware of significant assumptions at their level of understanding 

• A tendency to conserve the status quo 

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