“Behold!  human beings living in a sort of underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all across the den; they have been here from their childhood, and have their legs and neck chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them; for the chains are arranged in such a manner as to prevent them from turning round their heads. At a distance above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, and between the fire in the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have before them, over which they show the puppets.

I see, he said.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying vessels, which appear over the wall; also figures of men and animals, made of wood and stone and various materials; as of the prisoners, as you would expect, are talking, and some of them are silent?

This is a strange image, he said, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the buyer throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said: how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would see only the shadows?

Yes he said.

And if they were able to talk with one another, with enough suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?”

The Republic of Plato, Book Seven

Continue reading “The Cave Allegory” →

My mother and father were raised on farms. On Mom’s side, there were seven daughters doing what I presume to be sharecropping (a word Mom never used) near Greenbush, Wisconsin. When the farmhouse burned down, 1928 or so as near as I can tell, none were harmed but they were homeless. My grandfather, George Leonard, contacted his brother Mike, who was dryland farming near Ekalaka, Montana. Mike, of course, offered to have him come out and work the farm. As the story goes, George did not tell Mike he was bringing his wife and seven daughters. Mike had a three-room house with an outdoor privy. Mom said Mike was usually in a bad mood, and reflectively said she could see why, having nine people move in on you. Mom said that when Grandma got off the train onto the platform after the long journey, she said “This is it?”

That lasted for a couple of years, I gather, before George and Marie moved their family to nearby Baker, to the spacious house, the front porch of which is seen above. That’s my two older brothers, and in case you lack detective skills I will tell you the day of the week … Saturday. The following day all would ride off to church. Saturday was bath day. (Thanks to my cousin, Eileen, who took photo negatives we found in Mom and Dad’s house after they moved to assisted living, and developed them. My towhead brother Steve has no genitals, so I can run this photo. Early Photoshop, that is.)

Continue reading “Ancestry dot com” →

Case study 1: William Summerlin

In 1974, William Summerlin was conducting research in transplantation immunology in the laboratory of Robert Good at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The research dermatologist had reported successfully transplanting skin between genetically unrelated animals by culturing the skin in a special laboratory medium. The research had major implications for the field of tissue transplantation, but neither he nor other scientists had been able to reproduce his original results.

When Summerlin used a black pen to alter a patch of black mouse skin transplanted onto a white mouse, animal care technicians quickly discovered the fraud. Subsequent investigation by Memorial Sloan-Kettering revealed poorly conducted experiments and misleading statements about research results made by Summerlin in reports and to colleagues. All of his work was discredited, but the 1973 article in Transplantation Proceedings was never retracted.

Oh, if only such research fraud was so easily uncovered. The book I took this from, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, noted that “the most lasting contribution of Summerlin’s career seems to be that the term “painting mice” is still used to describe fraud and deception in research. As the footnote to this paragraph says, however, “Most scientists who use this term don’t even know where it comes from.”

Continue reading “Michael Mann … painting mice?” →