Enemy of Science : Donald J. Trump

Scientific American (with its German 1:1 translated version "Spektrum der Wissenschaft") is one of the eldest science magazins in the world. For the first time in its 175 years old history, it now publicly and unaninomously gave an emotional vote for the new US president to be elected in November this year. It writes that "The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science." Firstly but not only has he shown his grave disrespect towards science in the way he handled the coronavirus pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its
greatest challenges.

 

Trump repeatedly lied to the public about the deadly threat of the disease, saying it was not a serious concern and “this is like a flu” when he knew it was more lethal and highly transmissible, according to his taped statements to journalist Bob Woodward. His lies encouraged people to engage in risky behavior,
spreading the virus further, and have driven wedges between Americans who take the threat seriously and those who believe Trump's falsehoods. The White House even produced a memo attacking the expertise of the nation's leading infectious disease physician, Anthony Fauci, in a despicable attempt to sow further distrust.

I feel pride to be part of the scientific community, and also feel vividely remember the times when I studied physics in East Germany. I always took the risk to be hunted by the security forces when I visitted the public library of the US embassy, only to read Scientific American. It was for me a voice of truth and honesty, and therefore represented one of the main principles in natural science and research: that we should be only led by truth, and not by wishful thinking. Since 2016, Donald Trump has shown how little respect he has for truth, and that his policy is completely based on lies. Therefore, he is indeed the worst enemy of all honest scientists.

Defending Blasphemy

 Yesterday, the French President Emmanuel Macron issued a clear and courageous statement for the freedom of thought and freedom of speech. He said

“In France there is a freedom to blasphemy which is attached to freedom of conscience, so from where I am I am there to protect all these freedoms, so I do not have to qualify the choice of journalists. can criticize a president, rulers, blaspheme, “. 

This was part of an interview he gave on the occasion of the opening of the court against the "Charly Hebdo" murderers and their support.

Also, Macron defended the right of blasphemy in view of islamic threads to a teenage girl, after she published an expletive-laden Instagram rant against Islam, saying blasphemy is "no crime".

Macron stressed that the right to blasphemy was enshrined in the French constitution.

I'd wish that more leaders of the free world would show this courage and stand against religious intollerance and indoctrination. The EU should make clear that this is part of the European values.

Collaborative Effort

Google today commemorates the 190th birthday of the German chemist J.L.Meyer. He studied the properties of all the (than) known chemical elements, and discovered a periodicity of them in relation to their atomic mass. For this, he coined the term "Periodensystem der Elemente (periodoc system of elements)". Well done, Julius Lothar, for this systematic and elaborative piece of work.  But another chemist, the Russian polymath Dmitri Mendeleev made the same discovery almost at the same time. He had his 186th birthday this year. We wrote down his conclusion about the periodicity of the elements atomic mass and chemical properties in 1867, in a two volume text-book "Principles of Chemistry". A few months later, Meyer published a paper with a revised version of his 1864 table, now including virtually all of the known elements at this time. This scheme was similar to the table published by Mendeleev. Meyer had developed his fuller periodic table independently, but he acknowledged Mendeleev's priority. Included in Meyer's paper was a line chart of atomic volumes as a function of atomic weights, showing graphically the periodicity of the elements (see below at Googles black board).

    Considering that both scientists came to the same conclusion independent from each other, the Royal Society in recognition of their work awared both of them the Davy Medal. 

Its good to know that in general, scientific research is still an area of life where people acknowledge the values of fruitfull colaboration, free exchange of knowledge and that finally the thruth will overcome all lies.

Working on stem cells and their role in regenerative medicine and therapy (for instance for MS, spinal cord injury, polyneuroptahies or arthritis), we try to find ways to genetically engineer MSCs derived from patients such that they can be used to treat the damaged organ and recover its physiological function. The picture below shows such cells under the microscope, after staining them for proteins involved in mesenchymal differentiation and in DNA repair.  Everyone in the group is doing what they can best. Jing did the iPS reprogramming, Sarah did the X-irradiation,  Bao is very good in immuno-fluorescence microscopy.  And me ??  O.k. , I tell them jokes the whole day through and at the end of experiments buy ice-cream as a gratification.

Of course, I than have to write the manuscripts for publication, and fight with the editors.

At least she is looking to the future ...

 

In about 10 min from now on the winner of the 100th Nobel Peace Prize will be announced live from Oslo, Norway.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist, is widely considered by bookmakers to be the favorite to win this prestigious award. 

If she succeeds, she will become its youngest ever recipient -- a year younger than Malala Yousafzai was when she shared the award in 2014. 

To be honest, I find her character and personality highly disturbing.  Watching her speeches at the UN or at the climat summit, I had to turn down the sound. And also, I still believe that she has been used by others as a vehicle.

But still, I believe that she should win the Peace Price or another highly recognized award.  And I also think that she should continue in her fight.  And I also think that her generation and also the elder ones (like me) should take her serious.  And this is why I think she is right:

Her anger about the slow political and economic changes away from the fossile energy sources is very rational, because it does not promote a move backward. She has no problems in promoting novel, innovative technologies. She even supported further usages of the (carbon saving) nuclear energy. 

She is not one of those eco-romantic who believe that we a life like in ancient times will be the future paradise. Greta is pro-technology, but she wants a faster usage of innovative technologies which are both make our lifes more convenient and the environment more clean. There are technologies like this, like the Maglev high-speed trains (abbandoned in Germany, but now re-developed in China), the HyperLoop (developed in California by Elon Musk) or synthetic, carbon neutral fuels (pioneered in Germany by Coren Technologies Inc.). 

The classical political greens, the organic and back-to-the-nature politicians, in contrast to Greta Thunberg, are sceptical about all modern technologies. And if they decide about our political agenda, we will really fall back and end in a deep recession.

In this sense, Mrs Thunberg is super-modern and super-realistic. And despite her strange character, she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Not least because Alfred Nobel himself demanded the prize winners to show a great dedication to human usage of technological innovations.

UPDATE:   11:12 pm, Greta Thunberg is not the winner, but the Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed for his effort to end the boarder conflict with Eritrea.  A could choise as well. And Greta will continue her climate campaign.

Germans and Austrians

Despite sharing a lot of its history with each other, vast cultural differences exist between Austrians and Germans. And a lot of them are reflected in a completely different meaning of certain words. A while ago, I received a written invitation from a local Tirolian-Austrian court, to report with them "to be executed". I replied that I have no intention and no time to be executed by them, due to private duties and an extraordinary big work load in our institute.
What was going on there at the Autrian court ?  Well, I had received a trafic ticket during a recent trip to Salzburg, and I failed to pay the fine. And when a sentence is administered in Austria, they call it "to execute". In Germany "to execute" means something like "to be put to death" (by hanging or electrich chair).

Another funny difference in using one and the same word is "Ausrasten".

This is how it looks when a German "ausrasted":

 (like "going crazy",  "Ausrasten" lieterally means "to unlatch")

 
And this is how it looks when an Austrian "ausrasted":

Here, "Ausrasten" is used in the sense of "having a good rest"

On the uselessness of prayers (Notre Dame burning down)

Since 5 hours now, a huge fire gormandizes its way through the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. And with each more wing of the building the fire engulfes, the more it gets hungry for more food.

An unsatiable fire gorges through Notre Dame

And also since 5 hours, thousands, meanwhile millions of faithful people in Paris and all over the world are praying in public to make the fire stop. 

And these prayers are doing absolutely nothing.

What a sad occasion to think about the uselessness of religious faith. 

I deeply regret the loss of many masterpieces of human craftswork and creativity that where lost by this fire. But I have little sympathy for the millions of mourning catholics today. They neither expressed any sympathy for the thousands of "heretics" who were burned alife over the centuries.

Wrong models and fake models

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some of them are useful.
(George E.P. Box, statistician).
And all fashion models are fake, but none of them are useful.
(me)

A Good and a Bad Example

Already some years ago, after my own first episodes of writing a blog, I tried to understand what makes a good blog, and what makes a bad one. I finally came to the conclusion, that publicity is a bad measure. I have seen blogs of so unbelievable triviality (covering cosmetics, cooking, TV series, tourism), which attracted hundreds or even thousands of followers. And on the other hand, I read blogs that are of highest literature quality and of a philisophical depth that one often wishes they were available as hard copy in a bookstore. But usually, they attract only very few readers that follow and occasionally write a response. The weirdest example was a regular blog (on blogspot.com) of the late Lars Gustafsson, the great cosmopolitan writer from Sweden, also philosopher and polymath, candidate for the Nobel prize, but ignored because his novels were too much fiction and psychology, and not politically explicit enough. Lars Gustafsson wrote his blog in English, and obviously he made little effort to increase in publicity, or pay for search engine optimization. I guess because of his fame in the international literature community, there must have been thousands of Google searches per day for his name, but obviously none of them found his privat blog. I think that including myself, there were lessless than 10 regular readers, obviously close friends of him, rather than book afficionados. Responses to his very long posts were rare, and I was perhaps the most frequent responder. So after a while, Gustafsson got used to start longer discussions with me, one of the readers of his blog whom he had never met in real life. During the 6 years that I followed his blog, his books were sold worldwide over several hundred thousand times, published in new translations, and awarded highest literature awards from different countries. But his personal blog remained a sort of secret jewel.

I neither did made much effort to change this, as one could have easily done by sending his blogs URL to literature critics, to his German publisher Hanser-Verlag, or posting it on Twitter. The last post Gustafsson wrote was in March 2016, about 3 weeks before his  death.

After this, nobody kept the blog alive, nobody wrote an orbituary. Since 3 years now, Lars Gustafssons blog is an orphan.

If I analyze the bloggers activities over the years (i.e. the frequency of posts that Gustafsson wrote per month), it is obvious that he enjoyed writing in this blogosphere, in an environment where he apparently felt less exposed to the literature world. From the year 2009 when he started his blog till the end in 2016, he used to write 2 - 3,  sometimes also 4 or 5 posts per month. This indicates that it was much more his personal satisfaction of being able to cover so many different topics in a none-curated manner on his blog, rather than a big audience, which motivated him to keep on writing there.

After my experience with a really exceptionally great blog - there are others, often by less famous writers - here is an examplean of how to write a bad blog.

A lady also writeswrites on www.blogger.com for 6 years, but all in all only 12 posts. Sometimes, she stopped writing for half a year, but she always had about 60+ followers, and to each post between 5 and 10 responses that praised her cooking skills, wishing good luck with the house refurbishment, or confirming that spring time is the nicest season of the year. I guess that she made publicity for her blog among relatives and members of her church, since the responses all looked very superficially positive.

But if you sat down and carefully red a single of her texts, immediately you noticed the problem. Here is one from 2014:

"....Few months post wedding, I had to give up my job and we (I and my husband) had to move abroad for his job purposes.We moved to a beautiful city that happens to be one of the best places to live. We breathe the freshest possible air, watch the starry (and pollution-free) sky. It is an ideal place for anyone who wishes to live and grow up in a healthy environment...."

The blog author in this case seem to be afraid of telling too much from his private life to the unknown audience. She seem to believe that the ~60 followers who were personally invited to the blog knew her beforeway, so they knew what was her job, knew her husband, knew to which country and which beautiful city they moved. But to the anonymous reader on the internet, the text reads like answers of a witness at a criminal court: Don't reveal to much, only the facts, and stay as general as possible.

• What was her job ?
• What was the husbands name ?
• To which country abroad they moved ?
• Does this beautiful city also had a name, maybe it was as trivial as Rom, Paris, or Granada ?
• Best place to live ?  By what measure, because it was clean as Singapure or cheap as Bazra  ?
• Ideal place for anyone who loves healthy environment ? Whats about the millions of us who desperately wanting to live in an unhealthy environment (like Delhi, Karatchi or Marseille) ?

This is an example how a blog can become pretty boring, if the posts are kept in a very superficial style. The blog author does not seemed to feel much satisfaction from her blog neither, despite the regular response from buddy readers (in a facebook style of just doing someone a favour). In 2014, after receiving more praises and explicite encouragements to keep on writing (in response to a post about how to cook a shepperds pie and how to buy the ingredients as cheep as possible), the blog fell into silence. I first thought that maybe (like the sad experience with Gustafssons blog), some health issue or life changing event made it impossible for the author to carry on. But last year, i.e. after 4 years silence, a new post was written. This time it was about a trip to a nearby national park. Well, travelling can be at least as boring to write about as is cooking. So there is no danger if I un-follow this blog that I might miss anything exciting.