Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (23 page)

The antigen presenting cells are tethered to the T-cells by this adapter protein that shouldn’t be there. Thus tethered, the antigen presenting cells give the T-cells permission to reproduce and to go crazy. The problem is the adapter protein itself.

Biochemists in 1998 know how to deal with proteins, just as the military knows how to deal with underground bunkers. All we have to do is come up with another protein or some other chemical that can take that mother out. And if there is anything that biochemists can do, that’s it. There are several possible ways to do it and probably any one of them will work.

So why isn’t IDDM already cured? The paper in
Cell
has been out for about a year. It is a matter of convincing people with
money
to pay people with
skills
to focus on this project. Because I am an older, more experienced biochemist, that job of organizing and promoting large-scale efforts falls on me. I’m not all that good at it. Being clever in the lab doesn’t make me clever in the boardroom. It’s the same in every technical profession. The older people who worked their way up being an
engineer or a scientist now have to try to organize people. It is not so hard for them to deal with the technical people under them; they were there once themselves. But they also have to interact with people out of their field of expertise—business and financial people, patent lawyers, public relations people, regulatory people, marketing experts, and so on. It’s a challenge.

Wish me luck.

I
WAS RIDING
my bicycle up Mount Soledad in La Jolla this morning, and I was huffing and puffing a little more than my fair share. I was giving off water vapor and carbon dioxide—both greenhouse gases—like an animal trying to escape a predator.

Greenhouse gas means that light streaming in from the sun—which is equivalent in intensity to the light from a 100-watt bulb sitting directly over every square foot of the Earth in the daytime—will pass right through water and carbon dioxide on the way down. That light hits the Earth and warms the ground. The ground, being warmed, tries to cool off by making another kind of light called infra-red. This is more like the light that comes from those red lightbulbs in hotel bathrooms. The infra-red coming off the warmed Earth radiates back toward space, but it doesn’t escape. It will not pass through water vapor or carbon dioxide. It gets absorbed, and that heats up the atmosphere. It is called the greenhouse effect and is why much of the Earth is warm enough for T-shirts and shorts. It’s also why a sweaty bicyclist sailing back down Mount Soledad, releasing water vapor into the air, would not attract polar bears.

I wondered on the way down whether the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was watching me from some satellite, recording my blatant and unnecessary contribution to Global Warming. With a budget of over $1 billion a year, who knows what those international bureaucratic bastards are up to?

Okay, maybe I am a little overzealous here about the IPCC. But they are causing us a lot of trouble and we are happily paying for it the same way we paid for the Inquisition some years ago, when another international bureaucracy called the Catholic Church got out of hand.

We have been had again, and grossly misinformed. And the more we pay these parasites, the longer they will be in business and the more damage they can do in the name of saving us from ourselves.

The Catholics and their associated henchmen, the revisionist Christians, fixed our dues at 10 percent of our income. The climate control cartel—which includes everybody who can charge us for measuring a climatic variable and claim that it is changing in any way, shape, or form—is now spending more of the world’s resources than we used to allocate to the much more realistic threat that someone might blow up the world without the threat of fierce retaliation by other concerned parties. It was mad, of course, and that’s what they called it—MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction.

But this business of intergovernmental panels on climate change is not just mad—it’s embarrassing. Furthermore, it smacks of what the Greeks used to call hubris when one of their number decided he, and not the gods, could control his own life, the weather, or something equally impossible to control.

If it were just the embarrassment or the mortal sin of hubris
involved, I don’t think I would get upset about it. Everybody needs a job. But people should only be paid for doing things that benefit the people paying them. No one has ever been able to predict long-term weather better than a tossed coin. Why do we continue to pay a vast cadre of scientists and bureaucrats who pretend to speak for the Planet?

They claim that we can change the world forever—and they are willing to tell us exactly how. The U.S. Weather Service has gotten a little more conservative about saying things about the future. They won’t even make ninety-day forecasts any more. They used to do that, but after 1988 they ceased the practice because they noticed that a coin flipped was cheaper than a cadre of computer scientists and just as accurate.

People are jerked about almost monthly by new announcements by spokesmen for various government agencies and research groups sponsored by government funds. They tell us that every time we start our cars we contribute to greenhouse gases. Every time we vent Freon from a refrigerator, air conditioner, or spray can into the atmosphere we are destroying the ozone layer and contributing to the worldwide incineration of all life. It makes no sense, in the light of the climatic history of the world, to talk about catastrophic changes in the weather being caused by human activities.

What happened in the 1980s? We have brought something down on ourselves as expensive, although not quite as brutal, as a world war. Did everybody forget that we were just big ants? Did somebody convince us that just because most of our religions had lost their appeal, we ourselves were suddenly gods? That we were now the masters of the planet and the guardians of the status quo? That the precise climatic conditions
that happen to exist on the Earth today in the Holy Twentieth Century, the Climatic Century of 001, the first year of human domination of all of Earth, should be here forever,
in secula seculorum? All the good species are here now
. None shall perish and no new ones are welcome. Biology is no longer allowed: the Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are now in charge.
Evolution is over
.

I recall a cartoon. A caveman is raging in front of his cave glaring up at a flash of lightning and pointing an accusing finger toward his mate and the fire burning in the mouth of the cave, “It didn’t used to do that before you started making those things.”

The future of the Earth has got nothing to do with the creatures that live clustered along the shores of its great bodies of water. We are just here for the ride. And the ride is not smooth. It never has been smooth.

The world that the Vikings sailed out into a thousand years ago was warmer by far than it is today. Since then it has gotten colder. It even got colder last century. It didn’t do so in response to the Viking ships or the Spanish horses dropping manure on the California poppies. It got colder all over the planet and drier on the West Coast of the United States for reasons that only the planets and the sun can be held accountable. It pissed off the Spanish who were trying to civilize the Indians in California as slaves, growing crops for the missions while having their souls saved. The Indians laughed that the white man’s god could not provide rain for the white man’s foolish crops. It got colder and drier because angles and distances of Earth and our major heat source changed—things
that neither the Vikings nor the Spanish could measure and surely did not affect.

When I start feeling a bit of a chill in my cabin in Mendocino, I don’t worry too much about greenhouse gases or ozone. I move toward the stove, and invariably I get warmer. We can’t position our planet relative to the sun just exactly to our liking. We can’t make sure that the average temperature in San Diego for the next thousand years will be a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenheit. But we can stop worrying about the minor things in the atmosphere that we don’t understand. We can stop worrying about whether we can control it because we don’t have anything to do with it. It just plain isn’t stable. It may get colder in the coming centuries—it may get hotter.

About 11,500 years ago the surface temperature of the Earth began to warm. The glacial period that had lasted for about 100,000 years was ending. It had been about 20 degrees Centigrade colder. For Fahrenheit people, that’s 36. The present interglacial period is a vacation for
Homo sapiens
. We can sit out on the front porch of the cave on a lawn chair and enjoy the sunset. We can even mow the lawn instead of shoveling snow.

There was another interglacial period, the Eemian, which ended about 120,000 years ago. From the tree ring data found and the ice cores they drill in Antarctica, that also seemed like a pretty nice break in the weather. Of course, I prefer to surf than ski. As we go into the next millennium, all the solid facts look like I’m out of luck. We are headed back into another glacial period, which is a more common climate on Earth than the relative warmth we are enjoying now. So who’s bitching about global warming? Is it the skiers? It’s not the surfers.

The global warmers—the climate simulation programmers, the so-called general circulation modelers, the computer jocks who hardly go outside even on nice days—write the programs for their bosses at IPCC. They predict that global warming is coming and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren’t worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It’s that simple.

If we had sailed into here in space ships and the physical history of the place was that the climate had always been the same, then we might reasonably think that there was an amazing delicate balance on the Earth that we should not upset, if for no other reason, just to show a little respect. Maybe we could justify hiring experts or priests to help us.

But that is not at all what happened. We evolved here, and we evolved in the midst of some pretty serious climatic changes. They were serious enough so that millions of years and extinctions later we can still see the effects of the changes and give names like “carboniferous” and “cretaceous” and “Eemian” to the very different climatic epochs because they were different. There is no reason to think things are going to stay the same now—with or without us.

The Earth is a massive thing sailing majestically around the solar system feeling the gravity of the sun and the planets and their moons, and the asteroids. It takes a hit now and then from strays like the Shoemaker-Levy vandals that Jupiter entertained last year. It submits to the gravitation of the Moon, and it answers with the tides. It bends its ionosphere to the solar wind and it feels the massive gravity of Jupiter pulling it slightly. But “Old Blue and Green” endures. It does not bow to humans or ants.

The temperature of the Earth is due to the size and shape of
the orbit that it follows around the sun, the angle that its rotational axis is tilted to its orbit, the length of its days, the radioactive decay and residual gravitational heat deep below the crust, and the elements that were here from the beginning, and God knows what else, but not us.

We are a thin layer of moss on a huge rock. We are a little biologic phenomenon that makes words and thoughts and babies, but we don’t even tickle the soles of the feet of our planet. We pick and dig around on the outer skin and mark it for ourselves in little squares. We look out at the stars and think they, too, are for us. In spite of the grandeur that we see, we still entertain the most unusual ideas about ourselves.

Is it because we are afraid of the dark or death that we have to puff ourselves up and be kings of creation, masters of everything, protectors of the planet? How can we pretend to be masters when our flashlights are always running out of batteries and leaving us in the dark? What about the fear that the sudden lack of human eyesight causes? Does that seem like something a planetary master would feel? If all the energy modes on the planet are summed, with all the information on each of them, most of it is still indecipherable to us and most of the energy modes over which it is conveyed are still invisible to us. There’s nothing significant missing when the flashlight goes out. If it’s dark without it, then it was dark with it. We are only watching a couple of channels. There are a million.

The vast majority of the world is invisible to our eyes regardless of the brightest of our lights, and we can’t hear more than a tiny bit of the sound of it with our ears, and we can’t feel the subtle textures of it with our fingers. Even with
all our instruments, long tubes on mountains, and a Hubble telescope in space, we are blind to the myriad of complex energies that are whirling and vibrating and clattering all around us day and night, year after year, millennium after millennium.

The appropriate demeanor for a human is to feel lucky that he is alive and to humble himself in the face of the immensity of things and have a beer. Relax. Welcome to Earth. It’s a little confusing at first. That’s why you have to come back over and over again before you learn to really enjoy yourself.

The sky is not falling.

I have always wanted to write books. I’ve tried before; they are always half finished or less.

After we had been together for some time and it was clear that I was a scientist, my third wife, Cynthia, confided to me that she had always wanted to marry a writer. She would read Agatha Christie to me at night, and I eventually dropped science for a while to write. The immediate result was a story, a payment to me of $120 from a magazine called
Medical Dimensions
, and a day job working at a restaurant. The final result was that I went back to work as a scientist and won the Nobel Prize.