The cartoonist Gary Larson had many insights, and among them was his cartoon of two fellows standing beside the base of an enormous tree they felled. A tree saw lies on the ground behind them, and one points to the tree rings in explanation: “And see this ring right here, Jimmy?...That’s another time when the old fellow miraculously survived some big forest fire.”*
It’s true, isn’t it? We can see a tree’s history in its rings, but without a harmless tree corer at our disposal, the only way to see those rings is by cutting down the tree, learning, so to speak, by destruction. And it’s not just trees. Lots of white mice have been the “trees” in biolabs. We have the medicines because we studied their “rings.” Now, there’s a new kind of destructive learning, one that occurs on scales that are many orders of magnitude smaller than trees and mice.
But before I mention the method, let me remind you that you, like so many others, have taken apart something to see its insides, its structure, its inner workings. Maybe you did that mostly in your early childhood, but somewhere along the line of life, you destroyed to learn. Cracked an egg? Opened a box? Ripped wrapping paper?
That new method? It’s firing a pulsed X-ray laser at some tiny biomolecule, in the process destroying the molecule while learning about its structure. In the first instance, an enzyme. A group of scientists really cracked an egg, revealing the structure of the enzyme lysozyme of egg white. A stream of biomolecules was fed into the path of the pulsed X-rays. Each biomolecule was destroyed in the process, but a stream of them produced collectively the X-ray diffraction image of the enzyme’s basic structure.*
The next time you see a child take something apart out of curiosity, recognize that even as adults, we sometimes destroy to learn. Unfortunately, for trees and eggs, our gain is their loss.
*https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=gary+larson+cartoon+about+the+felled+tree&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg#id=0&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg&action=click
**Wiedorn, Max O., et al., Megahertz serial crystallography, Nature Communications . (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06156-7. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-x-ray-laser-reveal-unknown-antibiotics.html The experiment was run at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron at the European XFEL. The system called the Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector records in each second the information equivalent to a data stream that would fill two DVDs.
It’s true, isn’t it? We can see a tree’s history in its rings, but without a harmless tree corer at our disposal, the only way to see those rings is by cutting down the tree, learning, so to speak, by destruction. And it’s not just trees. Lots of white mice have been the “trees” in biolabs. We have the medicines because we studied their “rings.” Now, there’s a new kind of destructive learning, one that occurs on scales that are many orders of magnitude smaller than trees and mice.
But before I mention the method, let me remind you that you, like so many others, have taken apart something to see its insides, its structure, its inner workings. Maybe you did that mostly in your early childhood, but somewhere along the line of life, you destroyed to learn. Cracked an egg? Opened a box? Ripped wrapping paper?
That new method? It’s firing a pulsed X-ray laser at some tiny biomolecule, in the process destroying the molecule while learning about its structure. In the first instance, an enzyme. A group of scientists really cracked an egg, revealing the structure of the enzyme lysozyme of egg white. A stream of biomolecules was fed into the path of the pulsed X-rays. Each biomolecule was destroyed in the process, but a stream of them produced collectively the X-ray diffraction image of the enzyme’s basic structure.*
The next time you see a child take something apart out of curiosity, recognize that even as adults, we sometimes destroy to learn. Unfortunately, for trees and eggs, our gain is their loss.
*https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=gary+larson+cartoon+about+the+felled+tree&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg#id=0&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg&action=click
**Wiedorn, Max O., et al., Megahertz serial crystallography, Nature Communications . (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06156-7. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-x-ray-laser-reveal-unknown-antibiotics.html The experiment was run at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron at the European XFEL. The system called the Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector records in each second the information equivalent to a data stream that would fill two DVDs.
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