The Secret Life of Scientists: Pea is for Peer Review

The American Institute of Biological Sciences is a small, peer-review group. We're biologists - we know about birds, cows, soil, traumatic brain injury, and wolves. Many of us can perform autopsies if given something sharp. While tongues and pencils are often the sharpest and easiest to hand, on warm afternoons in early spring, we plant peas.

Small Biological Sciences NonProfit Linked to Mysterious Global Movement

Last week, the Director of AIBS, Dr. O'Grady, sent us the following, seemingly light-hearted email that said,

"Because when all of sudden there are no more olympic highlights on TV in the evening, you have to do something:

And the following message.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6212445/"

We thought nothing of it.

Until this report on NPR:


"This spring, in a tremendous cult-of-personality wave surrounding a pleasantly professorial avatar with Stephen Hawking's voice, ET's head, and the fashion sense of an Oxford don, named, it is rumored, "Vavilov," or just "V," people all over the planet are adopting ranunculus-yellow bow ties, loam-brown suits, enormous Petri-dish glasses, and polishing their foreheads to a lunar gleam.

Sending a message of "simply doing good in this world," "facilitaing peer review," with the mantra: "We Press on Together," V is thought in reality to be the nom de guerre of Gregor O'Grady, a reclusive author, political poet, adroit humorist, and an outspoken opponent of the balkanization of the world's scientists. But V's true identity remains tantalizingly unknown. Tracking O'Grady to a canopy zip-line in a Costa Rican rainforest as he collected bromeliad demographics, reporters, clamouring in the under story, falling down, getting muddy, and scaring some tapirs, called up to him, "Is V with you now?" O'Grady yelled down "Yes!"

In fact, V seems as ubiquitous as mycelium in an aspen grove. His name has been linked to Jennifer Aniston; Neytiri, with becomingly downcast eyes, says they're "just friends"; and Colbie Caillat says she likes him to wash her hair. Folk rock harpist Joanna Newsom's song, "You have Long Fingers. I Like That," and Patty Griffith's 'Messenger Salamander' are said to be dedicated to him. John Meyer and Alec Baldwin are sporting V-tribute comb-overs. iPhone is launching an app. Congress, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and the eight most powerful nations, now called the "V8," are opening their sessions with a gavel-hammer and the shout "So, how about it?!"

Looking back, there were hints of him throughout the winter, like a secret handshake in a dangerous place, like a swelling bud under ice. A lift of a brow that could be a flirt, a crazy graffiti tag that wasn't there last night, a lunatic-poet's street corner howl, murmurs from the coffee shop girl touching your finger hard as she gives you your cup, or that lady on the bus. Were they saying, "I see you"? No. All along, they were saying, "I V U."

What a relief. And it's spring.

Beauty, Tin Snips, and Heart-Broken Me

Running to work on the beautiful W & OD. At last, with fists of fern and sumac and a tuft of the Japanese knotweed with its navy blue berries and its stem full of backward teeth sawing my palm, I got to work in Reston and had a reborrative sluice in our building's clean and roomy and biker-friendly shower, with its little fold-down wooden slat seat like a sauna for all your bottles and balms, and was drying my hair - my old, spidery, webby, haunted, hemp-hank Bedraggle ...sigh...Poor, old, Hemp-Hank...when...

There I am. All adrip and I fire up the Travel Air 1800, and am fluffing and poofing gamely, and curling with an Encouraging Lift for a Youthful and Flirty Wave - all of which is akin to yanking on the armrests to keep the 747 in the air, but I'm beaming bravely and exclaiming heartening things like, "Wow! Burt's Bees Organic Green Tea and Fennel Seed Shampoo! We are glossy, richly foaming, and we smell great!"

So the first floor Ladies's Room at 1900 Campus Commons is drenched in fennel steam and all the while am whipping around with my little blue fanny-packable hairbrush....

But the Serpent was indeed among us. And lull me she did, that pretty blue brush, and wrapped me in clouds of Green Tea and Fennel Seed making me beam like an idiot as we merrilied along - the Travel Air 1800 roaring like a Harley on a mountain curve, buffeting me with a blast like the ginger and nutmeg-scented winds baked out of the hill grasses above Santa Barbara, and I'm singing a Camera Obscura .

"Hey! Lloyd...I'm ready to be heartbroken..." I croon (pretty loud, really) through the roar, sweeping up a magnificent Farrah-y hanks, swathed in scarves of black currant and jewel weed extract, and I switch 'er on High and I'm really singing now: "Cuz I can't see further than my own nose at the moment!.." And Lloyd and I are loping in long, tress-swinging, brown-legged lopes over sand that glitters like sugar - just like me - or smashed glass. Glittering like Me and Santa Barbara. And we are both the color of Demerara sugar.

So, all of us are swinging and loping and gleaming and we smell delicious and we're ready to be heart-broken, when goddammit that vicious little blue hair brush whips around and cleaves itself to the side of my head like a lamprey with its rasp-toothed suckering mouth parts, and would not come loose.

And I had to put on a shirt with one hand and go across the hall to the HV/AC guy who cut it out with tin snips. Now, when I see him in the hall, he pretends it never happened.

Car-Free is Care Free on an Autumnal W & OD

It's the Autumnal Equinox and Car-Free Day. This morning, I ran to work along W & OD Trail (http://www.wodfriends.org/), cool and damp both me and it. The picture above is not me very much at all, but Abiyot Abebe, who, not touching the ground, won the 2009 W&OD 10K in August 2009.

Steamy as it was then, it was chill this morning, and a canyon like running down a gully sluiced with a big autumn buffet full of wines and cheddars and mustards. In the stream valley below the path, white tail deer were out in the flood plain, lifting their pretty knees and plunging them down again into the mounds of fescue and sedge tussocks, and vetch, like they were spearing fish from a canoe. They stomped delicately through ripe poke and barged through wingstem tall as they were like breasting waves. They're taupe now, autumn deer are.

The W & OD is an old railroad bed, the steep banks are tumbling over with dogwood and fern and blooming golden rod dusty as bees, and dunes of smashed bracken, the color of deer, and fern in lime greens and chocolate, and sumac the color of bruised cardinals. I found a tiny, wild persimmon in the gravel the size of a thumb nail and perfectly formed with its four leaves unfurled like the crest of ancient family line.