Blog on the Lillypad
Saturday, October 02, 2004
 | Lunch With the Doctors
No, not that Doctor! I attend yoga class with a man named Richard and his wife Sandy. Sandy has her doctorate in Mathematics (actually, it may be a more specific discipline than that), and Richard has his in Chemistry. He works for the US military in research and development. Of course he barely got the words out of his mouth when I told him that I write Doctor Who stories on the web, and would he mind if I asked him a few questions? |
He said no, he did not mind, and he discussed with me the type of research he does (alternative fuels and power sources, specifically for individuals on the move). He even went one better and invited me to join him nd a group of his colleagues for lunch at a nearby restaurant.
You know, you can only ever be yourself, even when you're sitting down with the greats. I met Richard and his colleagues, Sherri and Mimi and Bob for lunch this past Friday. Each has his or her own specialized field of research. They are all brilliant. What amazed me most was how kind they are, and how comfortable with talking to a non-scientist about science. They fell right into my enthusiasm for writing Doctor Who and made several suggestions.
The usual problems were in place, of course. What is quite clear to them is not so clear to me. As Mimi talked about prions as a type of life that propagates quite differently than the way we do, I had to ask her and the others to go over it a few times. I have only ever thought of prions as proteins gone bad. Yet, as Mimi and Sherry both pointed out, they propagate and sustain themselves. Sherry branched from that to explaining how some infectious agents can actually communicate and, when there is a large enough "head count" of their number in a host's system, they launch their invasion.
Bob, a geneticist, suggested a line of thought about silicon-based life. Life that looks like a rock. And Richard commented that some researchers have developed proteins that act on silicon to change it to a more crystaline structure (quartz), this degrading its integrity. Let them loose on a civilization and watch the structures start to collapse.
I hope to meet with them again in a few weeks. Like I said, what struck me most is that these are people of great accomplishment, and they are extremely kind. I rememebr meeting people like that in martial arts. They could whup up on men half their age, fight two or three young men at once, and then after class take meticulous care to make sure every body down to the newest students was personally included in the invitation to go out to eat afterward.
