Escape fantasies

From The Good Companions, by J.B. Priestley, 1929

He had been dozing a little but was roused by the lorry slowing down, sounding its horn, then swinging round into a road that was different from any they had been on so far. It was as smooth and straight as a chisel, and passing lights showed him huge double telegraph posts and a surface that seemed to slip away from them like dark water. Other cars shot past, came with a blare and a hoot and were suddenly gone, but the lorry itself was now travelling faster than he thought any lorry had a right to travel. But at one place they had to slow down a little, and then Mr. Oakroyd read the words painted in large black letters on a whitewashed wall. The Great North Road. They were actually going down the Great North Road. He could have shouted. He didn’t care what happened after this. He could hear himself telling somebody [...] all about it. '‘Middle o’ t’night,” he was saying, “we got on t’Great North Road.” Here was another town, and the road was cutting through it like a knife through cheese, Doncaster, it was. No trams now; everybody gone to bed, except the lucky ones going down South on the Great North Road. 

I have always had a liking for stories about people who leave home in order to start afresh: The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells, Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene, I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee ... 

The Good Companions, presumably a copy belonging to one of my parents, was the first adult novel I ever read — from cover to cover, shining a torch on the pages under the bedclothes when I was supposed to be asleep. Its descriptions grabbed my 12-year-old imagination, particularly the passage quoted above which I remember being thrilled by. Living in the north of England, I knew about the Great North Road. Sometimes we used to travel up and down it by coach, which wasn't half as romantic as the lorry ride in that book.

From an email sent to our children this week, by my husband:

When lying in bed, falling asleep, Alison imagines that she's at home, but is looking forward to a trip away. I imagine that I'm in a bed in an alien hotel, but will be going home tomorrow. Total incompatibility.

He got one thing wrong there. In my half-awake state I'm not merely "looking forward" to setting off somewhere (often clandestinely like Mr. Oakroyd) but am actually on my way, boarding pass in hand, or at least fully packed (sometimes I drift off to sleep before I've finished imagining what I would or would not take with me) and ready to step out of the door, the door being in Canada these days, though a few decades ago it used to be in Yorkshire. Or I am already on some means of wheeled transport that's rattling along, or on a rocking boat or a rising aircraft. Or I am taking shelter in some hut / barn / rocky overhang during a getaway on foot. 

The Swedish novel, Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann, by Jonas Jonasson, 2009, also known as The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, was a book I picked up at the airport once, in the English translation — for me, that was an irresistible title. I'm sure that when I'm an old woman in a care home I shall be forever plotting my escape.

A potential cure for Type 1 diabetes

A caveat: 

Please check the facts in this post. I am not a scientist by any means and may have made mistakes in my note-taking at the talk I heard, given by Priye Iworima, and hosted by the Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) of which I'm a member.

 

  

 

The Toronto University doctors who discovered insulin were Drs. Banting, MacLeod, Best and Collip. Realising the importance of this, they sold the patent for just $1; Banting said: “Insulin belongs to the world, not to me.” There's a museum in London, Ontario, Banting House, that commemorates the discovery. We intend to visit it during our grandson Alexander's next visit to Canada since he was diagnosed as having Type 1 diabetes at the age of 10.

Priye's family

On Saturday morning I attended a talk by Priye Iworima, from Nigeria. She moved to Canada as an ambitious teenager, adept at track and field sports, trumpet playing, singing and art (she likes to copy portraits) to whom the small town of Grand Prairie in Alberta, came as rather a shock. She attained a BSc in Science from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, specialising in neurobiology, and these days, supported by a grant from the CFUW, she is working at the University of British Columbia on a PhD thesis on "Optimizing scale-up parameters that would facilitate the product of a large number of cells that could be used in a clinical setting." The cells in question are "islets," clusters of insulin-producing beta cells, that could potentially bring about a dramatic improvement in the lives of people like my grandson. According to the WHO, there are more than 400-million diabetics in today's world. Bio-engineering with islets has the potential to reverse the disease. 

Have you heard of the Edmonton Protocol procedure? In the year 2000...

a small team of University of Alberta researchers had done what until then had been impossible, helping patients with Type 1 diabetes become insulin-independent at an unprecedented success rate of 100 per cent.

The story is exciting but the lasting effects of the treatment are still problematic. Furthermore, there are insufficient donor islets available; after isolation their quality deteriorates, and recipients need to keep taking immunosuppression drugs to prevent their bodies from rejecting the transplanted cells.

The research replicates "cadaveric islets" extracted from a donor's pancreas; Priye is studying the growth of new cells that mimic these healthy beta cells which are "cooked" in the lab in something that looks like a food processor, a bioreactor that keeps them at body temperature. It requires two donor pancreases to create one dose! A "teaspoon" of cells, protected within a sort of teabag with a very thin membrane that keeps out immune cells, can be infused into a recipient's bloodstream, where the hope is that they generate other cells to start producing the insulin that a diabetic's pancreas fails to produce. By experimenting on animals (Priye didn't tell us which animals, and we ran out of time before she could answer my question about this) it has been discovered that their blood sugar stabilizes at normal levels within 140 days of receiving the new cells. 

"Stage 4" cells take four months to develop, apparently maturing faster in females than in males (she didn't indicate why). The scientists are also looking at Stage 6, Stage 7 and Stage 8 cells. Transplanting the more mature cells seems to reverse diabetes more quickly, apparently. Priye analyses the cells being produced in the lab, by means of a chemical called dithizone, that turns them a brick red colour when insulin is detected (see one of the pictures below). The cells develop into clusters and it seems that the size of the clusters can be controlled by being kept "in the same pot."

It's a complex process; is it efficient and scalable? Can an unlimited source of beta cells for transplant be identified? These questions have not yet been answered, although clinical trials have been carried out since 2014. The transplantation of stem cells has proven to be the most effective therapy for diabetes, better than the "crude" injection of insulin that most diabetics are used to. However, a widespread adoption of the new therapy has limited potential for now. Most patients on whom this has been tried have needed two or more transplants and a serviceable device for the implantation of these cells has not yet been created. The future costs are unknown. It might cost a patient $50,000 or $500,000 to undergo the treatment; when asked, Priye wasn't willing to commit herself to a more exact figure.

Priye says that she is cautiously optimistic about the outcome of her work and concluded by saying, "If I can influence one person's life, that would be an amazing privilege!"

Her Twitter account lists several hashtags after her name: #blacklivesmatter, #Stemcells, #diabetes, #BiomedicalEngineer,  #NSERC AlexanderGrahamBellScholar, #womeninSTEM,  #blackandSTEM

I include some screenshots of her presentation slides below:

One third, two-thirds

The world is perceptively changing, now that we have been through the pandemic and are starting to emerge from it. I've heard from more than one source that a third of the people who have been forced to work from home are deciding to keep things that way and have no intention of going back. Our friend John in Arizona is one of these. Three of Chris' close colleagues have stopped going to work altogether, having handed in their notice. 

I'm hopeful that the roads will be less busy than they used to be during commuting hours.

My husband and my daughter in their respective jobs can't wait to be back on the work premises, because the home environment is so tiring / distracting, but I imagine that when they return they'll find it disturbingly different from what it used to be at the start of 2020. With a third of their colleagues missing from their desks, the offices will seem emptier, or may be filled with monitors showing the faces (or just the names) of those working from home. Chris never did like video conferences; he thinks they don't work. Our son George doesn't like working online either. He's at a virtual international conference this week with meetings to attend at 7 a.m., mid-day and in the middle of the night, in his time zone. That's tough. My friend Elva, also coordinating people right round the world and right round the clock these days, seems to have got used to it. She snatches moments of sleep when she can.

The experience of having to communicate online has affected clubs and volunteer organisations as well. Our CFUW-Ottawa Club is choosing to continue to use video technology for many of its meetings next season; our use of social media and (heaven help us) email has greatly increased too. Being the new "VP Communications" means I'm responsible for most of the Club's announcements and news updates from now on, so last week I spent time getting used to the log-on process and other protocol for our various communications tools: three Facebook pages, the Twitter feed, the admin pages of the Club's website (using Wild Apricot templates), with a different password and user name for each. I have been asked to learn about the use of hashtags and hyperlinked logos. We're also wondering about the potential of a LinkedIn account and I may experiment with a new blog or two.

This week I have spent far too many hours on these things. My German-speaking friends have their own Facebook page, as does the Environment Action group; being in charge of both groups, I feel obliged to keep up with those posts as well. Sometimes there are gratifying rewards, as last night, when Heidi, who used to be in our conversation group in when she lived in Ottawa 14 or so years ago, sent me a message out of the blue saying "I found you on Facebook..." I invited her to join our online Konversationsgruppe, and she responded: Gerne kannst Du mich in Eure Facebook-Gruppe aufnehmen. 

This morning our daughter was a panelist and EURAMET delegate at a conference on Metrology for a Globalised, Digital and Green Society. I didn't log on to hear her speak because that would have been at 5a.m. where I live. Apparently her message (as she joined in from her NPL office) was this:

We need an observation-based feedback loop as we respond to the challenges of climate change and that feedback loop relies on the quality of the observations. And we need to get that message to elected and unelected “policy makers” everywhere.

New car, and some trees

To replace the 'Volt' we were driving before, we took the plunge and bought a Chevy 'Bolt' this week, finally going all-electric. This one plugs in at the same charger in our garage but the charge promises to take us 400 km (in good weather conditions) rather than 70 km or thereabouts, our previous limit (after which the Volt began to drain its petrol tank). We are unlikely to attempt a long journey without recharging, but we shall soon see how it does on short stretches. 

We both had a go at driving the new car this evening and enjoyed the better visibility from its front seats and through the rear view mirror. The manual has some 300 pages of explanations and instructions, so we haven't yet got the hang of all of the new features, probably never shall. The software in the Bolt's "Infotainment" operating system was apparently created by Chris' company, QNX (maybe some of it by Chris himself) ... a considerable time ago and we seem to have bought a package that includes access to SiriusXM channels, hardly any of which offer the sort of music we want to listen to while driving although we can hear the BBC World Service news broadcasts. Smart phones and iPods are compatible with this system but not CDs.

Anyhow the ride took us along the eastern parkway to a spot where we could get out and wander down to the river which looked beautiful this evening, with masses of wild flowers beside the trail. I saw an oriole hopping around, orange and black, a lovely bird. For me that was as much of a thrill as the car. Another sight to be recorded today is the catalpa tree that's in full bloom by the Minto Bridges, one of Ottawa's "Remarkable Trees" with a plaque to say so. 

If you ask me, all trees are remarkable. I picked up three baby blue spruces at one of Ecology Ottawa's free giveaway events last weekend; their intention is to distribute 15,000 trees to local people this summer. If one of my spruces, currently about 10 cm high, is fortunate enough to grow to maturity, it could be 40 metres high. That's a tall tree.

At last our regional COVID-19 lock-down restrictions are beginning to come to an end. We'll be allowed into Quebec for inessential purposes (such as a stroll around Wakefield) by the end of this week for the first time in months, what excitement! So we're beginning to dare to dream of outings again. Chris and I are due to get our second shots of the COVID vaccination in three weeks from now.

WHAM!

Last November my Environment Action group heard a talk by Elizabeth Logue from the Ottawa Riverkeeper (she has left the post since then, to work on Indigenous issues). This lunch hour, other representatives of the Riverkeeper organization gave a public ZOOM presentation about community-based monitoring of the local environment, encouraging people to get involved with Watershed Health Assessment Monitoring (WHAM). 

Katy Alambo, one of the Ottawa Riverkeeper presenters

A major part of the Riverkeepers' work is to monitor the "Indicators" (of which there are 14) of the health of the water, with complex interactions between them. In no particular order, these are fish diversity, mercury in the water, dissolved oxygen, ice-on / ice-off (see below), flow, changes in land use, riparian connectivity, invasive species, water temperature, cholophyll-A, algal blooms, total phosphorus, sewer overflows and benthic invertibrates.

There are big gaps in the data collected so far. The scientists want more data to monitor trends and to fill in the gaps in their observations, and decisions made about water protection ought to be based on science, so this work is important. At only five locations in the extensive Ottawa River watershed, for example, is water temperature measured, and even then not always in the all-important summer months when it is at its warmest. Anyhow, even though we can't go back in time to add better historical observations, we citizens can help to fill the gaps in today's records.

Ottawa Riverkeeper has created its own data portals (such as this one) and their monitoring programs rely on contributions from the community. We can send in reports of the start and finish of freeze-thaw cycles in winter (Ice-On and Ice-Off Monitoring), of road salt and phosphorus contamination and of land use in the region.

Something we could do as a contribution is to take photos of any algal bloom that we notice in lakes and bays near Ottawa and send these pictures to Ottawa Riverkeeper or to Water Rangers (you may download this citizen science app to your phone). Be careful not to enter water with blue-green algae in it, because this can be very toxic, even at low concentrations, but its location needs reporting. Algae growth, linked to rising temperatures and the "nutrients" it gets from the water, is referred to as a "nuisance bloom" and it causes multiple threats to the ecosystem: it shades submerged species from the light they need; it depletes the oxygen in the water and kills the fish; it has an unpleasant smell. Tree pollen that settles on the water is not to be confused with algae, nor is common duckweed.

Another suggestion was to contribute to Invasive Species Monitoring. 

Invasive species in our part of Ontario / Quebec are Eurasian milfoil, rusty crayfish, zebra mussels, purple loosestrife, the round goby, phragmites (a kind of reed that grows five metres tall), Japanese knotweed, and, to my surprise, the yellow iris. I'm now feeling guilty about the fact that I grow purple loosestrife in my garden.

Yellow iris by the river near our house

Road salt monitoring will be resumed next winter, and its concentration in the water after a "trigger event" such as a snow- or rain-storm, or a sudden thaw, is assessed by means of a gadget that measures the conductivity of a water sample. >120 milligrams of salt per litre is harmful. Last winter the average reading in our area was 1062 milligrams per litre. Not good.

Home-style grow op, continued

My indoor kitchen garden mentioned a couple of weeks ago outgrew its space and sucked up nearly all the water in the Vegehome, so I have transferred the seedlings outside. The bok choy and mustard greens are big enough to eat now; I included some leaves in this evening's supper, chicken soup. They can feature in stir fries as well, soon.

I can start again with fresh seeds for the indoor germinator.

The weather finally turned wetter this weekend, which means that I don't have to worry about keeping my plants watered as they acclimatize themselves to the outdoors. Farmers locally have been very worried about the drought throughout May, the driest month on record here (records have been kept for 75 years). Water levels across the Rideau Valley watershed have been well below normal for the time of the year.

Today I submitted the third article of a series on environmental topics to the Lowertown Echo editor. This latest one, regurgitating some of the knowledge I acquired at our meeting with Natasha Jovanovic of Ecology Ottawa, is about eco-friendly gardens.

A final dissolution

I am reading John Banville's novel, The Sea, and came across a passage about the impossibility of immortality:

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. I remember Anna, our daughter Claire will remember Anna and remember me, then Claire will be gone and there will be those who remember her but not us, and that will be our final dissolution. True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, a sprinkling of atoms in the air of the room where we breathed our last, yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead.

The wife of the narrator in this book is Anna, dead of cancer. I don't know whether or not the author had a similar experience. Probably. The older one gets, the more one is bound to think about mortality; Banville is five years older than I am.