Reflections on knowledge and love

I have reflected often on portions of this passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.....

Also:

.....Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

We come to the eventual understanding that secular knowledge (not relating to the spiritual world) is infinite, that we will never learn all there is to learn. The pursuit of new and greater knowledge will be the task of each new generation. We have come very far since our early days on earth in terms of the accumulation of secular knowledge. History is full of the stories of vast empires, overwhelming defeats, plagues, holy wars and wars in general, colonization, slavery and renaissance periods that moved humankind forward in great strides. Over the many centuries, humankind has become more civilized. Technological advances just within the past thirty years have changed our lives forever--personal computers, cell phones, the digital age. Accumulated earthly knowledge is at our fingertips for the most part; we need only do online searches to find what we are looking for. That was not the case thirty years ago, a century ago, a millennium ago. We keep up with all the new changes and innovations. We have to, since we belong to this generation. 

What I mostly wonder about is the pursuit of secular knowledge. We are told as children that education is very important for getting the right kind of job or career. But education in and of itself is not knowledge. It is the impartment of knowledge, but it is up to each individual to receive and accept that knowledge. A degree in a specific subject does not necessarily imply that the recipient is knowledgeable; it merely states that the recipient has fulfilled the requirements for a particular degree. The person may have cheated or obtained the degree unethically. There is no guarantee that education will produce knowledgeable individuals. But generally speaking, it does to a point. However, that knowledge is limited. There are people with advanced degrees who can tell you everything you'd like to know about a very specialized subject. They have a wealth of limited secular knowledge that they can impart to others if others wish. But they cannot necessarily impart knowledge in other areas, and if they try to do so, they can be criticized for doing so. 

However, let us imagine that such people had learned all that it was possible to learn in this life. Do they eventually come to the realization that the accumulation of secular knowledge will never cease? As long as humankind continues to exist, knowledge will change, grow and evolve. Current secular knowledge will pass away in the sense that the possessor of that knowledge passes away, but secular knowledge in and of itself does not cease to exist. Future secular knowledge will build upon it, just that it has yet to be discovered. Secular knowledge is infinite in its scope, even though we cannot imagine what the future will bring. It will always be in front of humankind, an aim, a challenge. It's tiring in some respects to realize this. Perhaps it is at this point that individuals realize that the accumulation of more and more secular knowledge isn't of paramount importance. Letting go of the quest for the incessant accumulation of such knowledge may be the right path for many people who have realized that no matter how much they learn, it will never be enough. Their current knowledge will eventually become passé, it will pass away as will they. We learn as we grow older that we are replaceable and that we will be replaced. Others will be younger, smarter, better equipped for the new world that awaits. That is the way of the world. We don't think about this when we are young. And that is also the way of the world. 

We will never have perfect or total secular knowledge as humans; that would be an existence in a realm outside of earth's. Corinthians is not saying that there is something wrong with pursuing secular knowledge, just that we need to be aware of its transience. Spiritual knowledge and learning to love are of equal importance. I don't think secular knowledge and spiritual knowledge are mutually exclusive; they are connected. We need to learn how to love and to recognize the divine, and that requires the impartment of a body of knowledge having to do with both. We will never have perfect human love, just as we will never have perfect secular knowledge. But God's love will always be there, it never fails. It underlies all that we do in our human lives. We learn by doing, by practicing the commandments, but we also learn by reading spiritual literature. We learn by adopting a mindset open to the spiritual. There ought to be more emphasis on imparting this kind of knowledge in the world. There are parents who take on this task; they are spiritual guides or at least they ought to be, but not all parents can open the non-secular world of knowledge for their children because they are not aware of it themselves. It's often left to religious schooling to do that, e.g. Catholic schools. My parents were my first spiritual teachers, and I'm grateful for the knowledge they imparted to me. They did the best they could. I'm also grateful to Catholic grammar school for the same thing. 

Education and Indoctrination---what Doris Lessing thought about them

Very interesting viewpoints from Doris Lessing, who passed away yesterday at the age of 94. Nobel Prize-winning novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright. Her 1988 book, The Fifth Child, was an unforgettable portrait of a family that ends up having to deal with a very unpleasant fifth child. It's a book that will stay with you for a long time afterward. 

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Third-graders and science

I recently agreed to answer questions from third-graders about what it means to be a scientist, what a scientist does, and so forth, as part of a project to get students interested in science. My friend teaches third-graders in a Long Island, NY, elementary school, and it is her class that I agreed to 'talk to'. I cannot do so in person, so we agreed that her students would write letters to me with their questions. Today when I got home from work, there was an envelope waiting for me. Inside were personal letters written to me by hand from about twenty students. I had a long day in the lab, so when I got home I was pretty exhausted. But after reading these letters, I perked up again. They are just so sweet and unusual and interesting. It will be fun to answer their questions and to see what I can come up with in the way of photos and other items that will allow them to 'see' what it is I do everyday. I thought I would post some of their questions here over the next month or so, anonymously of course. But it will give you an idea of what third-graders think about when they think about science. Stay tuned.

Experimenting with the workplace

I have written a lot of posts about the modern-day workplace over the past year and a half in an attempt to understand my own workplace and all the changes that have occurred there during this period of time. I follow the news in both the USA and Norway and whenever there is news about what is going on in modern workplaces, I sit up and take notice. It interests me almost as much as science news. I’m not necessarily talking about business news in general; more about organizational behavior in businesses. Why do companies behave as they do toward their employees? What are the different management philosophies that dominate workplaces and how do they affect employees? Why did they arise in the first place? Who is responsible for their implementation in the workplace? When did modern workplaces become research laboratories? By that I mean, when did it become kosher to ‘experiment’ on employees by foisting different trendy management philosophies on them? Because it is an experiment to do this to a workplace—to force a workplace to adopt new strategies and ways of managing people in the name of cost-effectiveness, productivity and innovation. And before one experiment is finished, before data can be analyzed and conclusions drawn, another experiment is undertaken in the name of some other wonderful ideal that is usually impossible to live up to. It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever without careful study and analysis of data that has been carefully collected from carefully-designed experiments. Do any of the workplace experiments meet the stringent criteria required for performing such experiments? I sincerely doubt it, based on what I have been witness to in my own workplace.

I get the impression that this type of ‘experimental’ approach occurs in the classroom as well. Education seems to have been invaded by the same types of people who are responsible for the major changes in the workplace. There seems to be an inordinate amount of experimentation in the classroom, whether in grammar schools or high schools. I don’t get it. What are the experiments trying to prove? I have listened to frustrated parents talk about their children, who are now young adults and who are struggling to find meaning in their lives. These are children who grew up in the 1990s and during the early part of this century, who were told that they could plan their own curriculum in schools, choose their own course of study, and so forth. What they weren’t told was how they were to follow that self-chosen road to its end. They weren’t taught discipline and focus and the value of hard work and homework; they weren’t told about failing and rising again after failing. They were only told to believe in themselves. Some of them do, but many of them don’t. It’s a vague concept for a child to ‘believe’ in himself or herself. When you’re young, you don’t think that way. You think rather—‘I’m scared to give this talk in front of the class. I don’t want to be the center of attention or the butt of the jokes or the nerd’. But there’s often no one to talk to about these things. And you would much rather get concrete help on how to talk in front of the class than hear an adult tell you to ‘just believe in yourself and it will all work out’. That may be true, that it usually does work out. But as adults, we are responsible for training the young, not leaving them to their own devices. I find it ironic that adult workplaces are micromanaged to the n^th degree, whereas children’s (public) schools are not, or haven’t been up to this point. The teachers may be micromanaged, yes, and forced to fill out a myriad of reports; the children are given a lot of ‘freedom’. Discipline is discouraged, homework likewise; teachers who come down hard on students are reprimanded. It’s a very different world than the one I grew up in, and I don’t really understand it. The same is true about the modern workplace—it is not the workplace I cut my teeth on, and I am spending a fair amount of time trying to figure out when the paradigm shift occurred, when the rug got pulled out from under our feet, and how it all changed when no one was looking. The values and ethics I grew up with that I expected would be valued in the workplace, are not necessarily valued as much as I thought they would be. Loyalty, discipline, structure, focus, hard work—I know they are appreciated, but not in the same way as in my parents’ generation. But when I started out in the work world over thirty years ago, they were still highly appreciated. It is amazing how much can change in the space of ten or twenty years. I suppose when I look at it all objectively, I cannot really be surprised. Change is part and parcel of life, including work life. Perhaps it has been rather naive to expect it to remain the same, especially when everything else around us changes continually. 

School days and a lifetime of learning

The autumn season is always a nice reminder of my school and college years. I can honestly say that I looked forward to going back to school each year, even though I always enjoyed having the summers off. Autumn is the start of a new school season, with all the hype, expectations and focus that a new start entails. That feeling of starting a new school year has never left me, even though I am far removed from my school days; I always have a bit of it when I go back to work after a long summer vacation. But now that I do consulting work for the university, I feel that sense of ‘new school year’ excitement when I walk past groups of students gathered nervously together on campus—that sense of anticipation about new courses, new books, new teachers, new social experiences, and a lot of studying. I’m glad I’m finished with all that, but it’s interesting to be back on campus as an adult doing an adult job. I enjoy seeing the students and remembering back to my own college days at Fordham University. Those years were something special, and I knew that already at college age. I knew that such an opportunity to be able to focus and to study uninterruptedly for four years would never come again. And it’s true, it never did. But those four years were a wonderful immersion in biology, literature, Spanish, organic chemistry and history, on a lovely campus in the middle of the Bronx.

I went to work full-time right after college, halfway through my master’s degree in cell biology that I ended up finishing at night. I was offered the chance to do a PhD by professor Loren Day, my biophysicist boss at my first job, but I turned down the offer so that I could work for some years while I figured out in what field I wanted to do doctoral work. I knew it would not be biophysics (my first working lab experience—isolating and purifying bacteriophage DNA in order to study its helical structure). Although the technology we used at that time was fascinating, I was more fascinated by the use of computers in the lab—the early computers that let us feed DNA sequences into crude programs in order to get back protein sequences, for example. The computers that were programmed to tell us “Cool your jets, I’m adding up the sites” while we waited for the output. They were being funny with us, of course programmed to be so by the offbeat programmers who had offbeat senses of humor. I became friends with Roy, our resident computer programmer, who showed me how computer circuit boards were designed, and who was patient enough to explain the chemistry involved in their manufacture. He taught me the rudiments of the programming language UNIX, and got me interested in the first small personal computers. My interest in computers led to my taking a course in FORTRAN and in machine language at New York University, courses that I have never regretted taking. I hit the wall countless times, but I managed to pass both courses and I learned some really cool things in the process, like how to move 0’s and 1’s around in the data and address registers that make up the CPU. This binary language is the language needed to talk to the guts of the computer; the executable programs that are written in higher level languages like FORTRAN in the early days and in C++ nowadays are translated to executable machine (binary) code by a compiler and linker. So I waded carefully into the programming waters, but I was not clever enough to continue in this field even though it interested me tremendously. I don’t regret this decision, because biology was and still is the field of study that interests me the most, with literature a close second. The exposure to computers and to complex instrumentation in my first job laid the groundwork for my next job, which was to be the daily leader of a flow cytometry core facility at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Laser flow cytometers/sorters were used to analyze different cellular parameters and to physically sort different cell types from each other; most of them were coupled to computers that were programmed to run these instruments and to perform the complex analyses involved. When I look back to that time, the 1980s, I remember it as a phenomenal time in terms of learning. The use of flow cytometry in biological and cancer research was just taking off, and it was fun to be a part of it, attending courses in Boston (sponsored by Ortho Diagnostic Systems) to learn how to run these complicated instruments, as well as a course in Los Alamos, New Mexico at the government lab there to learn how high-speed flow sorters were being used to sort chromosomes and to make chromosome libraries, among other important things. We learned how to do some pretty novel stuff at that course, and got a chance to see a lot of New Mexico in the process. I joined the Society for Analytical Cytology (SAC) that later became the International Society for Analytical Cytometry (ISAC); I have attended countless conferences in different countries since 1985, but the conference that stands out is the one at Cambridge University in England in August 1987. It was here that I met Trond, the Norwegian man who became my husband. It was also my first trip to Europe alone; my lodging was a student dormitory room not far from the building where the conference was held. All conference attendees lived in this way for the week we were there. I loved the feeling of living in the dorm; it was a monastic room, simple, small, with very little furniture save the bed and a desk. But it gave me a real feeling of what it must have been like to study at Cambridge, and the city itself was attractive with its many bookstores and music stores. All I know is that one day I hope to really study there—to take a literature course of some sort during the summer months. It’s on my bucket list.  

Maybe it’s not so strange that I ended up in academia. I don’t teach, even though I have achieved the level of professor competence. I prefer to mentor students on a one-to-one basis or in small groups, and I still like being in the lab from time to time. I don’t like bureaucracy, power politics, or the ‘publish or perish’ mentality of academia. What I do like is the ability and privilege that we have to immerse ourselves in lifelong learning if we want to, and I try to take advantage of this as much as possible. Because life is short, but also because society is changing at a rapid rate, and has changed immensely within the last thirty years. Being able to keep up with the rapid change is important, and the only way we can do that is to remain open to learning for the rest of our lives.