I love my doctor

Just to be clear: I am not in love with my doctor. I don’t feel attracted to her. We are not friends. We don’t see each other a lot. I don’t even know her that well.
Come to think of it, she is not my doctor either, in the sense of “my personal doctor”. She’s a GP in the local health centre and I am assigned to her.
I guess “love” is too strong a word. It is. “Like” should suffice.
“I love my doctor.” Preposterous.
Yet on every rare occasion I pay her a call I feel like shouting that from the rooftops.
What I actually love is her attitude. Her consistency. Her reliability. Her professionalism, after all. You can trust her. I trust her.

“Look at that,” she says. (She is browsing the printout of my biochemical analysis results and reading some numbers aloud.) “Everything is normal, or better than normal. For your age. It’s like you were,” she does some mental arithmetics here, “ten years younger.”
This instantly makes me feel — well, ten years younger.
“Except for cholesterol, that is,” she adds quickly. “Nothing to worry about though. You’ve got slightly higher cholesterol. But it’s not bad. It’s what’s called ‘good cholesterol’, look here. Not the bad one. It’s totally not bad to have a little more of the good one, if you know what I mean.”
I nod enthusiastically. I appreciate it when people explain things well.
“Maybe you ate some hard cheese the night before you had the blood test,” she goes on. “I told you not to.”

I rarely go to the doctor’s. If there is any chance for my ailment to go away on its own, I’ll take it. It usually works.

She’s not the only GP there, but she’s the one I go to. Once she was away and I got directed to another doctor. I didn’t enjoy the experience. He listened carefully but was too vague when it came to the diagnosis part.
“There are a few possibilities,” he said. “You look tired. It could be a virus,” he suggested. “A common cold. Or even a coronavirus.” He winked at me and also at a nurse who happened to be there, as if it was a giggle. (To put things into context: in two months’ time we all were locked down and nobody was joking anymore.) “Don’t worry, take it easy, have a rest, come back to see me if the symptoms persist.”

I never saw him again.

No, my doctor knows her stuff. By now I also know what she is going to tell me. That’s the purpose of my visit: to hear what I need.

This time I turn up a bit early. Perhaps ten minutes earlier than my appointment. It’s the afternoon before a public holiday. I expect to see some people waiting, but today there is nobody. The door to her office is wide open. She sits, as usual, behind her desk, staring at the computer screen. I stop in front of the door and wave at her. She waves back.
“Can I come in?” I ask.
“In a minute!” she booms. “Take a seat, will you, I’ll call when it’s your turn.”
I sit down and take out a book. I always bring something to read with me. At times, you’ve got to wait. It’s OK. This health centre provides me with time and space to read.
“Enter!” the doctor yells as soon as I open the book. “Everybody wants to go home early.”
I get up and come in.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she asks without taking her eyes from the screen.
“Yes it’s me”, I reply, fighting the temptation to add, “How did you know?”.
One amazing thing about my doctor is her ability to read my thoughts.
“It’s here,” she points at the screen, “you’ve got an appointment, right now. What’s the problem?”
I explain. She absorbs.

Another of her superpowers is to reach a diagnosis on the basis of my explanation alone. Years ago, I volunteered to show her things: open my mouth, or take off a shirt, or some other clothing item.
“No, no, no, no,” she’d grumble from her behind-the-desk haven. “No need for that.”
So I stopped offering. With her X-ray vision she’d identify my illness all the same. Moreover, she knows what has provoked it and, by extension, my visit.

“You don’t smoke, don’t you?”
No, I don’t.
“You could have taken three cups of coffee that morning, and bam!”
She reconsiders: three cups could be too much.
“Or two.”
I shrug. I drink coffee every morning.
One more thing that’s great about her: she’s not afraid to offer alternative hypotheses.
“Or maybe you had another glass of wine in the evening.”
Sure, there are people in this country who don’t drink wine. I also heard about those who never have coffee. However, the number of people who consume neither of these beverages must be vanishingly small. At least among my doctor’s clients.
We look at each other understandingly. We don’t belong to that miserable minority.
On top of that, she smokes like a chimney.
“Here’s your prescription,” she sighs. “One pill, twice a day. Same as the last time,” she continues as if remembering the last time. (Of course, she could have just consulted her computer.)

In England, when I had a flu and my doctors — every one of them — prescribed amoxicillin and told me to take plenty of liquid, I thought them incompetent fools. Here, when my doctor tells me what I expect to hear and prescribes what I expect to be prescribed, I think she’s a genius. Because everything she promised so far turned out to be true. Don’t worry, it will go away in a week or two. And it went away.

How can she see the future? There has to be a rational explanation. Probably years and years of experience. Simple as that, although there’s nothing simple in years of experience.
“In my years of experience,” she’s doing her telepathy schtick again, “it goes away in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t, come back.”

I look at my doctor with admiration. She doesn’t really want to see me in two week’s time. This is not bloody America. The focus is on health, not on treatment. She wants me to go away and never return. For a clinician, that would be a triumph.
The feeling is obviously mutual. I don’t want to see her again either. Not in her office, anyway.

“Thanks, doctor,” I say. “Bye.”

I leave the health centre. It’s practically empty now. One unpleasant task out of the way, I feel like flying. I feel like, like —
(see the title).

Weierstrass meets Kovalevsky

From Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro:

Weierstrass had no more idea than his sisters of Sophia’s age or mission. He told her afterwards that he had thought her some misguided governess who wanted to use his name, claiming mathematics among her credentials. He was thinking that he must scold the maid, and his sisters, for letting her break in on him. But he was a courteous and kindly man, so instead of sending her away at once, he explained that he took only advances students, with recognized degrees, and that he had at the moment as many of those as he could handle. Then, as she remained standing — and trembling — in front of him, with that ridiculous hat shading her face and her hands clutching her shawl, he remembered the method, or trick, he had used once or twice before, to discourage an inadequate student.
“What I am able to do in your case,” he said, “is to set you a series of problems, and ask you to solve them and bring them back to me one week from today. If they are done to my satisfaction, we will talk again.”
A week from that day he had forgotten all about her. He had expected, of course, never to see her again. When she came into his study he did not recognize her, perhaps because she had cast off the cloak that had disguised her slender figure. She must have felt bolder, or perhaps the weather had changed. He had not remembered the hat — his sisters had — but he had not much of an eye for female accessories. But when she pulled the papers out of her bag and set them down on his desk, he remembered, and sighed, and put on his spectacles.

Great was his surprise — he told her this too at a later time — to see that every one of the problems had been solved, and sometimes in an entirely original way. But he suspected her still, thinking now that she must be presenting the work of someone else, perhaps a brother or lover who was in hiding for political reasons.
“Sit down,” he said. “And now explain to me each of these solutions, every step taken.”
She began to talk, leaning forward, and the floppy hat fell over her eyes, so she pulled it off and let it lie on the floor. Her curls were revealed, her bright eyes, her youth, and her shivering excitement.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He spoke with ponderous consideration, hiding as well as he could his astonishment, especially at the solutions whose method diverged most brilliantly from his own.
She was a shock to him in many ways. She was so slight and young and eager. He felt that he must soothe her, hold her carefully, let her learn how to manage the fireworks in her own brain.
All his life — he had difficulty saying this, as he admitted, being always wary of too much enthusiasm — all his life he had been waiting for such a student to come into this room. A student who would challenge him completely, who was not only capable of following the strivings of his own mind but perhaps of flying beyond them.

I wish I had made you angry earlier

From Missed opportunities in crystallography by Zbigniew Dauter and Mariusz Jaskolski:

The only method to avoid mistakes and errors is to do nothing. We have no intention whatsoever to criticize the founders of crystallography for their omissions or errors. On the contrary, the faults of some of them usually help to emphasize the achievements of others and, as a net total, illustrate the immense intellectual activity of our predecessors, even if it is measured by the inevitable fraction of lapses.

What Lindo Patterson overlooked initially was soon realized by David Harker. <...> Lindo Patterson later admitted: ‘I must say that I was very annoyed at myself for missing the beautiful extension of the method made by Harker’. The great man did not hold any grudges and wrote in a letter to Harker: ‘Mr Harker, I’m so glad you pointed this out to me. If I could only have thought a little more, I’d have seen this myself before you did. I could have kicked myself’.

It sounds like a joke of history that Pauling illustrated the α-helix (which is of course right-handed) with left-handed chirality, arbitrarily assuming the wrong configuration of the Cα atoms. Apparently, he did not pay much attention to the problem of absolute configuration, which is odd in view of his deep concern with stereochemistry.

When Perutz read the paper of Pauling and Corey about the α-helix, he instantly understood, with fury, his mistakes but also realized that there should be another strong meridional reflection at 1.5 Å, to represent the chemical repeat (a single amino acid residue) along the helix axis. Observation of this reflection (at relatively high resolution) required a special diffraction experiment, and he feverishly made it. The photograph confirmed the model of Pauling and Perutz’s own belated revelation. When W. L. Bragg asked Perutz what sparked his experiment, he said: anger about his earlier omission. The reply of Bragg was, ‘I wish I had made you angry earlier!’

woman, the scientist

From The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow:

We can be fairly certain there was no Neolithic equivalent of Edmund Cartwright or Thomas Edison, who came up with the conceptual breakthrough that set everything in motion. Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred. In fact, as we’ve seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.

Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation — recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically — and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other).

‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations — wheat, rice, corn — was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems.

this natural forest

From The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono:

En 1933, il reçut la visite d’un garde forestier éberlué. Ce fonctionnaire lui intima l’ordre de ne pas faire de feu dehors, de peur de mettre en danger la croissance de cette forêt naturelle. C’était la première fois, lui dit cet homme naïf, qu’on voyait une forêt pousser toute seule. En 1935, une véritable délégation administrative vint examiner la «forêt naturelle». Il y avait un grand personnage des Eaux et Forêts, un député, des techniciens. On prononça beaucoup de paroles inutiles. On décida de faire quelque chose et, heureusement, on ne fit rien, sinon la seule chose utile: mettre la forêt sous la sauvegarde de l’Etat et interdire qu’on vienne y charbonner.	En 1933 recibió la visita de un guarda forestal atónito. El funcionario le notificó la orden de no encender fuego al aire libre, con el fin de no poner en peligro el crecimiento del bosque natural. Era la primera vez, le dijo ese hombre ingenuo, que un bosque crecía por sí solo. En 1935, toda una delegación administrativa fue a examinar el bosque natural. Había un alto cargo de Aguas y Bosques, un diputado y varios técnicos. Pronunciaron muchas palabras inútiles. Decidieron hacer algo y, afortunadamente, no hicieron nada, salvo la única cosa útil que podían hacer: poner el bosque bajo la protección del Estado y prohibir que se cortara leña para convertirla en carbón.	In 1933 he received the visit of an astonished forest ranger. This functionary ordered him to cease building fires outdoors, for fear of endangering this natural forest. It was the first time, this naive man told him, that a forest had been observed to grow up entirely on its own. In 1935, a veritable administrative delegation went to examine this “natural forest”. There was an important personage from Waters and Forests, a deputy, and some technicians. Many useless words were spoken. It was decided to do something, but luckily nothing was done, except for one truly useful thing: placing the forest under the protection of the State and forbidding anyone from coming there to make charcoal.
L’homme qui plantait des arbres	El hombre que plantaba árboles (translated by Palmira Feixas)	The Man Who Planted Trees (translated by Peter Doyle)

In memoriam: A. M. Shkrob (1936 — 2007)

Как долго помнят о тех, кто никому не известен при жизни? Что значит — никому?

А. М. Шкроб, «Счастливые дни»

How long do they remember those who are known to no one during their lifetime? And what does it mean — “no one”?

A.M. Shkrob, Happy Days

What prompted me to look up his name after all these years, I can’t tell now. The top hit Mr Google brought me was an article in Russian Wikipedia from which I learned that the subject of my search, Alexander Moiseyevich Shkrob (Александр Моисеевич Шкроб), Ph.D., died almost 15 years ago, on 28 September 2007, under suspicious circumstances. At the same time, the article was marked for deletion. It was noted in the discussion that A.M. Shkrob does not satisfy Wikipedia’s notability criteria for scientists. What?

I felt compelled to fix this. One of such criteria is peer-reviewed publications in “leading research journals”, wherever they are supposed to “lead”. To compile a list of A.M.’s scientific papers was relatively straightforward. Far from being complete, it nevertheless gives an idea how broad his research interests were. I also included there the monograph «Мембрано-активные комплексоны» [3] which Shkrob coauthored with Yuri Ovchinnikov and Vadim Ivanov. (I used to have a physical copy of this book which I bought second-hand in the 1980s.) I’ve added the bibliography to the Wikipedia article; you can see it at the end of this post, just in case they mutilate or delete it.

While doing this, I found out something unexpected. In 1997, A.M. created the web site called Vivos voco!^* that is still online. Which in itself is a miracle, considering that it is a free — in many senses of this word, including advertisement-free — library. (For how long now, considering what is happening with the Internet in my fatherland?) Browsing this refreshingly simple, very 1990s-style site, I discovered the papers that A.M. wrote for popular science journals such as «Знание — сила» (Scientia potentia est) and «Химия и жизнь» (Chemistry and Life) in the ’80s and ’90s. I didn’t know this side of him — well, turns out I didn’t know many sides of him.

* * *

I first met A.M. in 1986. We happened to share the same lab space. For me, a third-year student just starting my first research-y project, he was an oldster; also, kind of a mad scientist. One afternoon he walked in the lab swirling some yellowish liquid in a small round-bottom flask and asked, “What do you think it is?” He had this manner to address everybody and nobody in particular at once. At that moment, I was the only other person present, so I assumed the question was directed to me.
“I’ve no idea”, I confessed.
“It’s veratryl alcohol,” he beamed. “Isn’t it great?”
“If you say so”, I wanted to respond but chose a nod instead. I used to be a polite boy.

Perhaps he felt I didn’t share his enthusiasm, so he left the room; I heard him attacking somebody else in the corridor with the same question.

A few years later, by then thoroughly forgotten (by me) veratryl alcohol would fall into place when A.M. gave a (brilliant) lecture on lignin and lignin peroxidase.

Pretty soon I moved to a different building. We kept overlapping now and then, for example, during the departmental seminars, but we never really worked together. I’ll never know if I missed much. I had an impression that A.M. was not the easiest person to work with. I can’t forget the hammering Shkrob, as a referee, gave to my former colleague during the latter’s Ph.D. pre-defence, to the degree that the poor guy had to completely rewrite his thesis and hold yet another pre-defence.

The things A.M. used to say could be illuminating, or funny, or irritating, or even arrogant, but never boring. His knowledge — of science, history, literature — was astounding. I wish I had listened more. I wish I asked him at least some questions. As it was, I didn’t.

I remember him mentioning an episode from his youth that he would include later in «Ничего особенного» (Nothing Special). At the end of the high school, in 1952, A.M. was advised^† to continue his education in the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology rather than, as he aspired, Moscow State University. He didn’t have to explain why he got that advice: at the height of the infamous anti-cosmopolitan campaign, it was next to impossible for Jews to enter the MSU. “Oh, I was walking home and crying”, he was reminiscing. “To my surprise, my mum was not upset at all. On the contrary. ‘What brilliant advice’, she said. ‘Do as you are told’. I did as I was told, and entered the Mendeleev’s without any trouble.”

A.M. was a self-confessed workaholic. Another thing is that he probably was not so sure about the direction of his work. Once he told me that he dedicated all his summer holidays to crack the internal language of Multi-Edit and wrote some sort of bibliographic database using that language. (Come on, give me a break, I thought to myself.) Back then, access to a personal computer was still a luxury. We had a number of XTs, ATs and even one i386 machine at the department but nobody had a PC at home. I was impressed, not with his software (which I never saw) but with the fact that he spent all summer at work. Not a small feat, considering that our department was situated just above a morgue. Alas, most likely the only user of that database was Shkrob himself.

In spite of, or maybe exactly thanks to, such workaholism, there was little recognition. I would imagine a scientist of his caliber leading a lab, or at the very least a research group, or being a professor at the university, or something. Reading his articles now, I understand that Shkrob, while being passionate about science, was indifferent to his career in science. Moreover, I think he was perfectly happy to be where he was, resisting promotions which would inevitably take away his freedom to actually do science. In the ’70s and ’80s, many Soviet research institutions provided safe harbours for intelligentsia’s “internal emigration”; the demise of the Soviet system heralded the end of these sanctuaries. From the ’90s on, it was not enough to work: the scientists were supposed to earn money. The era of state-sponsored curiosity was over. This could be one of the (many) reasons why A.M. did not appear to be ecstatic about catastroika^‡.

* * *

If there was one thing that I took in from A.M., it was this one: “The model shouldn’t be as complex as the real object”. I probably have to explain that this comment was made 30+ years ago in the context of molecular modelling of proteins. A.M. expanded on it later in The science of the black box [40]. It matters not that the hardware and software we used then would make you smile condescendingly. All the (undeniable) progress notwithstanding, the protein folding problem remains unsolved. At the time, however, Shkrob’s maxim did strike me as a general rule to follow, in both science and life.

Неужели и после меня останутся только оттиски забытых статей да папки с программами для допотопных машин — странные тексты, в которых запрятаны уже мне самому непонятные озарения.

«Счастливые дни»

Could it be that all that remains after me are reprints of long-forgotten articles and folders with programmes for antediluvian computers — strange texts that hide epiphanies already incomprehensible even to myself.

Happy Days

I believe that the legacy of A.M. is bigger than that. However, right now, for me, it is confined to what can be found on the web and to my own memory. In his 1992—1994 memoir Happy Days Shkrob promised to write about his grandfather, his mother and his uncle “in detail and without haste, if there’s time left”. Did he? I hope he did, and they’ll see the light of day eventually. In the meanwhile, I keep on reading.

__________________________________________________

*	The phrase “Vivos voco” («Зову живых» in Russian) was the motto of «Колокол» (Kolokol), the first Russian censorship-free weekly newspaper in Russian and French languages, published by Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Ogarev between 1857 and 1867. The motto comes from the Latin epigraph to Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke (Song of the Bell): “Vivos voco. Mortuos plango. Fulgura frango”.
†	By Dr. Emilia Georgievna Perevalova (1922—2012), Soviet organometallic chemist, then head of chemical club at the Moscow State University.
‡	The word “catastroika” (катастройка), invented by Alexander Zinoviev in the 1980s, is a blend of “catastrophe” and “perestroika”.

References

Scientific works in Russian

1. Шкроб, А.М. (1964) Реакция оксиацильного включения в пептидные системы. Диссертация на соискание ученой степени кандидата химических наук. Москва, Институт химии природных соединений АН СССР.
2. Либерман, Е.А., Топалы, В.П., Цофина, Л.М., Шкроб, А.М. (1969) Перенос ионов йода через искусственные фосфолипидные мембраны. Биофизика XIV, 56—61.
3. Овчинников, Ю.А., Иванов, В.Т., Шкроб, А.М. (1974) Мембрано-активные комплексоны. Москва, Наука.
4. Сумская, Л.В., Чехляева, Н.М., Барсуков, Л.И., Терехов, О.П., Демин, В.В., Шкроб, А.М., Иванов, В.Т., Овчинников, Ю.А. (1976) Функциональные производные валиномицина и энниатина B как комплексоны и ионофоры. Биоорганическая химия 2, 351—364.
5. Шкроб, А.М., Родионов, А.В., Овчинников, Ю.А. (1978) Обратимый фотоиндуцированный гидролиз альдимина ретиналя в солюбилизированном бактериородопсине. Биоорганическая химия 4, 354—359.
6. Шкроб, А.М., Родионов, А.В. (1978) Щелочная денатурация бактериородопсина в пурпурных мембранах. Биоорганическая химия 4, 360—368.
7. Шкроб, А.М., Родионов, А.В. (1978) Множественность форм релаксирующих молекул бактериородопсина. Биоорганическая химия 4, 500—513.
8. Родионов, А.В., Шкроб, А.М. (1979) Гидролиз альдимина ретиналя в бактериородопсине, индуцированный ионами серебра. Биоорганическая химия 5, 376—394.
9. Овчинников, Ю.А., Шкроб, А.М., Родионов, А.В. (1980) Спектральный переход бактериородопсина как индикатор его состояния в пурпурных мембранах. Биоорганическая химия 6, 1483—1504.
10. Шкроб, А.М., Родионов, А.В., Овчинников, Ю.А. (1981) Ароматические аналоги бактериородопсина. Биоорганическая химия 7, 1169—1194.
11. Родионов, А.В., Баирамашвили, Д.И., Куделин, А.Б., Фейгина, М.Ю., Шкроб, А.М., Овчинников, Ю.А. (1981) Акцепторный остаток лизина при фотоиндуцированной миграции ретиналя в бактериородопсине. Биоорганическая химия 7, 1328—1334.
12. Шкроб, А.М., Левит, М.Н., Арчаков, А.И. (1989) Модельные подходы к изучению механизма действия лигниназы. Чем отличается лигниназа от других пероксидаз? Биоорганическая химия 15, 53—69.
13. Левит, М.Н., Шкроб, А.М. (1992) Лигнин и лигниназа. Биоорганическая химия 18, 309—345.
14. Шкроб, А.М. (1994) Реакция окси- и аминоацильного включения. Биоорганическая химия 20, 100—113.

Scientific works in English

15. Shemyakin, M.M., Antonov, V.K., Shkrob, A.M., Sheinker, Yu.N. and Senyavina, L.B. (1962) Cyclol formation in peptide systems. Tautomerism of N-(α-hydroxyacyl)-amides. Tetrahedron Letters 3, 701—707.
16. Antonov, V.K., Shkrob, A.M. and Shemyakin, M.M. (1963) Cyclol formation in peptide systems. III. Rearrangement of N-(β-hydroxypropionyl)-piperidone into a 10-membered cyclodepsipeptide. Tetrahedron Letters 4, 439—443.
17. Antonov, V.K., Shkrob, A.M., Shchelokov, V.I. and Shemyakin, M.M. (1963) Cyclol formation in peptide systems. IV. Hydroxy acid incorporation into peptides. Tetrahedron Letters 4, 1353—1360.
18. Shemyakin, M.M., Ovchinnikov, Yu.A., Antonov, V.K., Kiryushkin, A.A., Ivanov, V.T., Shchelokov, V.I. and Shkrob, A.M. (1964) Total synthesis of serratomolide. I. Synthesis of O,O′-diacetylserratamolide. Tetrahedron Letters 5, 47—54.
19. Shemyakin, M.M., Antonov, V.K., Shkrob, A.M., Shchelokov, V.I. and Agadzhanyan, Z.E. (1965) Activation of the amide group by acylation: Hydroxy- and aminoacyl incorporation in peptide systems. Tetrahedron 21, 3537—3572.
20. Shkrob, A.M., Krylova, Yu.I., Antonov, V.K. and Shemyakin, M.M. (1967) A new approach to the synthesis of stable derivatives of azacyclols. Tetrahedron Letters 8, 2701—2706.
21. Shemyakin, M.M., Ovchinnikov, Yu.A., Ivanov, V.T., Antonov, V.K., Shkrob, A.M., Mikhaleva, I.I., Evstratov, A.V. and Malenkov, G.G. (1967) The physicochemical basis of the functioning of biological membranes: Conformational specificity of the interaction of cyclodepsipeptides with membranes and of their complexation with alkali metal ions. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 29, 834—841.
22. Liberman, E.A., Topaly, V.P., Tsofina, L.M. and Shkrob, A.M. (1969) Transfer of iodine ions across artificial phospholipid membranes. Biophysics 14, 55—61 [translation of 2].
23. Shemyakin, M.M., Ovchinnikov, Yu.A., Ivanov, V.T., Antonov, V.K., Vinogradova, E.I., Shkrob, A.M., Malenkov, G.G., Evstratov, A.V., Laine, I.A., Melnik, E.I. and Ryabova, I.D. (1969) Cyclodepsipeptides as chemical tools for studying ionic transport through membranes. The Journal of Membrane Biology 1, 402—430.
24. Ivanov, V.T. and Shkrob, A.M. (1970) The physicochemical basis of ion transport through biological membranes. Report of a Pre-symposium held in Riga, U.S.S.R. on June 19 and 20, 1970, within the scope of the VII. International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products. FEBS Letters 10, 285—291.
25. Shkrob, A.M. and Mel’nik, E.I. (1972) Transfer of protons across bilayer lipid membranes in the presence of dibasic phenol. Dependence of the mechanism of conductivity on the pH of aqueous solution. Biophysics 17, 743—746.
26. Barsukov, L.I , Shkrob, A.M. and Bergel’son, L.D. (1972) Effect of anions on the permeability of the liposomes induced by valinomycin. Biophysics 17, 1083—1088.
27. Shkrob, A.M., Mel’nik, E.I., Terekhov, O.P. and Ovchinnikov, Yu.A. (1973) Use of valinomycin as a probe for investigating the properties of the membranes. I. Non monotonic change in the properties of bilayer membranes of bovine brain lipids with increase in the ionic strength of the bathing solutions. Biophysics 18, 691—697.
28. Demin, V.V., Babakov, A.V., Shkrob, A.M. and Ovchinnikov, Yu.A. (1974) Conductivity of bilayer lipid membranes in the presence of valinomycin and lipophilic anions. Biophysics 19, 675—680.
29. Ovchinnikov, Yu.A., Ivanov, V.T. and Shkrob, A.M. (1974) Membrane-active complexones. Elsevier, Amsterdam [translation of 3].
30. Ovchinnikov, Yu.A., Shkrob, A.M., Rodionov, A.V. and Mitzner, B.I. (1979) An effective competitive inhibitor of bacterioopsin-retinal recombination. FEBS Letters 97, 15—19.
31. Voznesensky, A.I., Galanova, J.V., Shkrob, A.M., Mathanov, I.E. and Archakov, A.I. (1990) Conjugation of bleomycin with concanavalin A or immunoglobulin G increases its ability to destroy cell membranes. Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 283, 519—522.

Essays, memoirs, popular science (in Russian)

32. Шкроб, А.М. Первая книга Василия Петрова. Знание — сила, 1986, № 3, 39—41.
33. Шкроб, А.М. Не в службу... Знание — сила, 1994, № 8, 2—3.
34. Шкроб, А.М. Utility and progress. Знание — сила, 1995, № 12, 115—122.
35. Шкроб, А.М. Всему своё время.
    1. Цветной снимок. Химия и жизнь, 1995, № 9, 48—56.
    2. Воспитание чувств. Химия и жизнь, 1995, № 10—12, 62—70.
    3. Конгресс танцует. Химия и жизнь, 1996, № 1—3, 70—78.
    4. Осколки зеркала. Химия и жизнь, 1996, № 4—6, 40—48.
36. Шкроб, А.М. Время Шемякина. Знание — сила, 1996, № 2, 44—55.
37. Шкроб, А.М. Молекулы лечат: Двенадцать микробесед о лекарствах.
    • Часть I (1—4). Химия и жизнь — XXI век, 1998, № 1, 38—44.
    • Часть II (5—7). Химия и жизнь — XXI век, 1998, № 2, 40—46.
    • Часть III (8—12). Химия и жизнь — XXI век, 1998, № 3, 72—77.
38. Шкроб, А.М. Я не любитель, я другой... Компьютерра, 1998, № 252—253.
39. Шкроб, А.М. Tabulettae ex machina. Компьютерра, 2001, № 398.
40. Шкроб, А.М. Наука чёрного ящика. Домашний компьютер, 2001, № 9.
41. Шкроб, А.М. Интернет и образование. Электронные библиотеки, 2001, т. 4, № 6.
42. Шкроб, А.М. Статья о статьях. Природа 2007, № 11, 52—62.

playing the violin is easy

From The need for good nomenclature by Edward W. Godly:

[T]he IUPAC ‘Blue Book’ rules are something of a patchwork quilt. It is intended to cover the entire bed of Organic Chemistry although some parts are covered more than once.

Even if a beautifully simple and appealing new system were devised and promulgated now, it would not result in immediate abandonment of existing procedures nor even a gradual supplanting of them. An attempt was made to re-think the whole approach to systematic nomenclature following the discernment by the author of a lack of logicality in the patchwork of revision and extension to organic nomenclature over the past 200 years. This is the so-called HIRN system, the principles for which were published in 1984. Its author claims it to be simple, logically consistent and to use far fewer rules than those of IUPAC. So far, it has not won many converts and this characterizes the general attitude to chemical nomenclature, even among chemists, i.e. almost total lack of interest.

The mid-century devising of line notations was seen as a liberation from all the complexity of systematic naming. Unfortunately, the Wiswesser Line Notation — the one which most widely caught on — requires mastery of a set of encoding and decoding rules filling well over 200 pages of an instruction manual. The system is easy to apply in the sense that playing the violin is easy; in other words the required facility is achieved only by constant practice.

It probably comes as a shock to discover that the rules do not constitute a beginner’s instruction manual but are couched in terse language and require months if not years of study and practice before a fairly complicated molecule can be tackled with confidence. A commonplace reaction is to riffle through the Blue Book looking for an example that looks fairly close to the molecule in question and try to name it by analogy.

I tried to meet certain aspects of this demand by writing a stand-alone instruction manual on naming new organic compounds. <...> Initial trials on user panels gave promising results, the only failures being due to certain subjects inserting bits of their own knowledge instead of blindly following the instructions.

arrivederci, fed04.17

Se oggi la situazione è complessa, non c’è ragione di credere che invece fosse semplice nel passato.

So why Italian? Sure it’s a beautiful language but isn’t Mandarin (Arabic, French, or even German) more widely spoken and, therefore, more useful?

In my book, the beauty of Italian trumps the perceived usefulness of German. But, if it’s not enough, there are many more reasons to learn this language and its history. Look no further than this fantastic MOOC (or its little sister) to discover, indeed, why Italian. By a telling coincidence, I finished this course yesterday, just as Italy defeated England in the Euro 2020 finals.

L’italiano nel mondo is a complete opposite of Italian Language and Culture. No unconvincing skits with pretend students. No silly examples that nobody ever uses. And no English spoken whatsoever. This ten-week course is offered by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II (FedericaX) and presented by Nicola De Blasi, professor of Italian linguistics at the said university. Here’s the syllabus:

Lezione 1 — Italiano lingua internazionale Lezione 2 — Italiano nel cinema e nel teatro Lezione 3 — Italiano nel mondo contemporaneo Lezione 4 — Geografia dell’italiano Lezione 5 — Le origini dell’italiano Midterm Exam Lezione 6 — L’italiano ai tempi di Dante e di San Francesco Lezione 7 — L’italiano nuova lingua di cultura Lezione 8 — Italiano e dialetti Lezione 9 — Le innovazioni dell’italiano Lezione 10 — La continuità dell’italiano Final exam

Each lesson contains two short-ish (7—8 minutes) videolectures, each followed by a reading, and, starting from Lesson 3, very simple self-evaluation. For those who do this course “for real”, there are also midterm exam and final exam; not for freeloaders like me though.

The videolectures feature little more than a “talking head” of Prof. De Blasi. Most of the time, he is sitting in the nice surroundings, usually with bookshelves behind him, and uses no other props than (physical) books when he is talking. Kind of old school; I like it. (I also would like, one day, sit at the table like that, on my own, and lecture to the world; or maybe just sit at the table like that. Never mind.)

Curiously, up to the Week 6 all the videos have both Italian and English subtitles. Starting the Week 6, English subtitles have disappeared. Not that I needed them too much: I found that I understand about 70% of what De Blasi says without them, and then there is Italian transcript that I can use. Still, I duly informed the course staff about that and got a prompt response:

Hello,

thank you for your feedback. We try to make every course available in other languages as well, but this one is completely in Italian and we are working on the English translation that we hope we'll put up as soon as possible. Meanwhile you can find a shorter version in English at this link: https://www.edx.org/course/italian-language-around-the-world

Happy learning,

FedericaX Team

I followed the link and discovered that Italian Language around the world is a five-week course which, most likely, just uses the videos of the first five weeks of L’italiano nel mondo. Oh well.

The readings, also in Italian of course, build on the lectures and provide the visual support that, one may feel, is missing from the videos. For example:

The language, academic it may seem, is easy enough to understand. And if not, Google Translate is doing a decent job, apart from the moments where some examples of mediaeval Italian are given. On more than one occasion, Google Translate helpfully suggested to switch to Corsican.

ci vediamo, Italian1x

A few years ago, I started Italian Language and Culture: Beginner by WellesleyX only to abandon it after a week or so. This year, I decided to have another go at it.

This course is said to be “a new iteration of our course Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2019—2020)”. In reality, a lot of material dates from much earlier time.

this is the extent of serendipity

According to Wikipedia, Charles J. Pedersen (1904—1989) “is one of the few people to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences without having a PhD”. Pedersen received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987, twenty years after he published his classic paper on crown ethers [1].

Revisiting his work for Current Contents^® (remember them?), he wrote [2]:

In 1961, at age 57, I began to study the effects of uni- and multidentate phenolic ligands on the catalytic properties of the VO group. The desired ligands, up to and including the quadridentate, had been synthesized. Now, the quinquedentate ligand, bis[2-(o-hydroxyphenoxy)ethyl] ether, was to be prepared by reacting a catechol derivative containing a protected hydroxyl (contaminafed with 10 percent catechol) with bis(2-chloroethyl) ether. The expected quinquedentate ligand was obtained, but nature lent a hand to provide the hexadentate dibenzo-18-crown-6 in 0.4 percent yield. This is the extent of serendipity.

Other crown ethers were synthesized, and when their unique properties had been determined, an exhilarating period of research was inaugurated: every successful experiment produced a significantly novel result.

The crown ethers might have been stillborn in another environment. They were discovered in the Elastomer Chemicals Department of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, but what had they to do with elastomets? Moreover, the small amount of the byproduct might have been tossed out or disregarded as something other than the desired product. However, with the support of the top departmental management (C.J. Harrington, A.S. Carter, H.E. Schroeder, and R. Pariser), I worked independently with these compounds for nearly eight years. During the period leading to the paper, my sole coworker was T.T. Malinowski, a laboratory technician. I also had the resources of the analytical groups and the chance to consult with anyone on the technical staff of the company.

The editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Gates Marshall, wrote of the manuscript: “You are clearly reporting a monumental piece of work...” But he complained that the experimental section “...looked as though it had been copied verbatim from a laboratory notebook.” He contributed to the frequency of citation by allowing two unusual features in the paper: length (20 pages) and a new system of nomenclature (crown) for identifying compounds whose official names boggle the mind.

I don’t know about you but I find all this astounding. A guy sans Ph.D. is allowed to work for eight years on something that has nothing to do with his company’s products. Two years before his retirement, he publishes a single-author experimental paper on synthesis and characterisation of 33 cyclic polyethers, plus proposes the new nomenclature system for crown ethers that we still use today. It is as if the management knew he’s gonna win the Nobel and just let him work toward it.

References

1. Pedersen, C.J. (1967) Cyclic polyethers and their complexes with metal salts. Journal of the American Chemical Society 89, 7017—7036.
2. Pedersen, C.J. This Week’s Citation Classic. Current Contents^®, no. 32, August 12, 1985, p. 18.