I started this blog years ago, in response to my son's Declaration of Vegetarianism. It was just to post recipes/essays/music/pictures. In its new incarnation, it will be an odd conglomeration of political recipes, delicious essays, and links to home-cooked music.
George and Gladys Korber, my folks, on the courthouse steps in Reno, Nevada, right after their wedding on Nov. 5, 1942. The wedding had some urgency. 3 days later, Dad was on a ship heading for basic training at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. They did not see each other again for 3 years; when he returned, his black hair had gone gray. But there was peace in Europe and the Pacific, the troops finally came home, a tide of peace bringing George back to his Gladys.
Momma's Tau Taffy Fudge, a Christmas Candy:
2 cups sugar 1 cup evaporated milk 1/2 cup margarine 12 ounces chunky peanut butter 1 jar Krafts Marshmallow Creme 1 tsp vanilla
Combine sugar, milk and margarine. Bring to a rolling boil. Stir constantly, mixture scorches easily. Boil 12-15 minutes over medium heat, remove from heat. Stir in peanut butter, until melted. Add marshmallow cream and vanilla, beat until well blended. Pour into a greased 9 inch pan. Cool. Cut in squares.
I copied this recipe from a version in my mom's own hand, she had written it on a 3x5 card and tucked it in my recipe box many years ago. I copied it here, thinking of her on her birthday, Dec. 21, 2017.
99 years ago today, the winter's solstice 1918, my mom was born into
this world, entering into the grand adventure of being a human being via
a lonely patch of prairie on a homestead in Montana. She was born into a
night with a wild winter storm, Wind (screaming), Cold (bone-chilling),
and Snow (swirling into blindness) Montana-style. Her dad delivered
her, cut and tied her umbilical cord (he had delivered plenty a calf in
his day, how hard could it be! Result: an outie) and tucked mom into her
cradle behind the wood stove, the warmest place in their little cabin. I
don't know for sure if this part is true, but her momma, a German
immigrant, used to sing to her "Stille Nacht Heil'ge Nacht", so I like
to imagine that was her first lullaby that freezing night. I don't remember
ever seeing the homestead site, though I may have gone as a little girl.
When I was older, when we visited Pompeii's Pillar once, it was not so
far away, and so we drove out to a place where two ruts in the dirt
made a road-of-sorts that stretched straight out to distant northern
horizon. It reached out to a place where blue sky met grace and a
grass-rimmed world. I learned the homestead was "out there". (Mom's
family later moved to a ranch outside of Bozeman, an easier place to
Be.) So it was: "out there", 99 years ago in a long dark night, the
beginnings of a person of great heart, who loved life, loved people.
Sometimes, in the face of absurdity, she would laugh so hard and sweet,
that happy tears would roll down her cheeks. Everybody would laugh with
her, you couldn't help it. I really miss mom. She used to fuss about
her birthday being on the solstice, the shortest day of the year. My
dad, on cue, and about as risque as he ever got, would raise his
eyebrows, twinkle at her, and flirt "Yes, Gladys, but its the longest
_night_!" Missing dad too. Happy birthday momma's spirit, mom and dad,
rest in peace.
__________ At least after I came into the scene, Christmas-time always triggered a ceremonial Tau Taffy Fudge production -- the "stir constantly" part filled with tension, a frenzied "whupping" at the stove, and then all the fretting about whether it would set up properly when it cooled. But then, a miracle, it would set, just right, a perfect golden cube would be cut, and yum! It was no doubt at least in part the anticipation of sharing the next annual installment of Christmas Fudge that kept Mom and Dad's marriage steadfast for 50 years.
TALK for the March for Science,
Santa Fe, New Mexico April 22, 2017
With thanks to my friend
Elena Giorgi, who helped make it happen, and Josip Loncaric who took my picture, and A Bone Martinez, who kindly taped it -- see the link at the end if you are interested.
I’m going to start this talk
with some time travel. Many of you have embarked on time travel yourselves, by
exploring family trees, or by genetic testing to discover your roots in your
DNA, reaching back to try to imagine the world of your ancestors. But there is one
profound difference in their lives that is very hard us to imagine. And it is
not the lack of cell phones. It is this: throughout the arc of human history, people
were intimate with death in a way that we are not.
When a new baby is born into
our families, our expectation is that, of course, we will get to see that
little one grow up. That children will outlive their parents. This is not the way it’s always been. This is
a gift that science gave us.
So, our first stop in our
journey through time: Catalhoyuk, in present day Turkey. We will go back about
7,000 years, and stop there. (People were just beginning to figure out how to
brew beer, so let’s not go back any further.) 1000 years of burials in
Catalhoyuk tell this story to the scientists who can read the bones:
- 40% of babies died before the age of
5.
- Only 1/10 people made it to 40 years
old.
- Please raise your hands if you (like
me) are over 50 and willing to admit it.
We’re all right out – because nobody, nobody at all, lives to 50
years old.
OK, let’s fast forward to ~1730,
London. Now, not only is beer on tap,
but we can get a good cup of coffee and some lively political debate in the
local coffee house. A gentleman named John Marshell is busy compiling the Bills
of Mortality, he’s documenting the cause and age of every death in London,
death by death. 7000 years have come and gone, but surprisingly little has
changed:
- Things are worse for London’s babies,
~45% won’t make it to 5, nearly half die.
- If you do make it past childhood, the odds
are better: 20% make it to 50 years, a few people even make it to old age.
So what were all these young
Londoner’s dying of? If we peer over John Marshell’s shoulder, we’ll get a grim
glimpse: most often, it’s infectious disease. The Kings Evil (TB), worms, “the purple
and spotted fevers”, infected
teeth...Death
by infected teeth? I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to high tail it outta’
the 18th century.
So lets come home. Our time. Our
place. Our America, 2017. Age of miracles and wonder.
- Our babies almost always get to grow
up; only ~6 out of 1000 don’t make it.
- Heart attacks and cancer are the
leading killers, diseases of old age.95% of us live past 50. On average, we get 79 years of life.
What has changed?Clean water. Antibiotics. Vaccines.
But something more
subtle as well.
Louis Pasteur, the
man whose experiments led to the acceptance of the germ theory of disease said,
“Chance favors only the prepared mind”.
So another change in
our times: Through science, we collectively have a “prepared mind”. We discover
new disease outbreaks swiftly when they arise. And we have clarity of purpose
when we discover something new and dangerous. We isolate the bug that causes
the outbreak, figure out how it’s transmitted, how to treat it, and how to
vaccinate against it. Recent decades have brought us nightmares: Ebola, SARS, Zika,
HIV, drug resistant TB, and Hanta virus (in New Mexico). And we respond. Sometimes
the science is very difficult.Still, we
respond.Your tax dollars pay for
America’s response; I think it’s a good deal.
My life’s work focuses
on HIV vaccines. To this day, I’m motivated by witnessing first hand a turn
around in the expectation that children should get to outlive their parents. I
watched helpless as two dear friends of died of AIDS in the 1990s.They died in their 20s. One was my next-door
neighbor growing up, Kevin. The sweet little boy I had babysat had grown into a
fine, funny and generous man. HIV took him. The other was my housemate for 5 years,
Brian, one of the most extraordinary scientific minds I’ve ever encountered. AIDS kills in many ways. Brian’s beautiful
mind was lost to AIDS dementia; it was the one thing he feared the most. My
friends’ deaths were slow and hard.Their
brave moms were by their sides constantly to help them endure the pain of the
last months of their lives. These memories I hold in my heart: these wonderful
men, their beautiful families, what they suffered, what was lost.
AIDS was discovered
in 1981. It was 16 very long years before we figured out how to treat it with good
success. But still, even now, HIV infections are never cleared.Antiretroviral therapy is hope and life. But it is also
expensive and arduous: a lifetime of 3 drugs a day, drug resistance can evolve,
the drugs can have hard side effects, and too many people still don’t have
access to treatment.
The HIV pandemic is
not over, but is no longer news, so it falls away from our attention. The WHO
estimates 37 million people are living with HIV, that there are over 2 million
new infections, and over a million AIDS deaths, each year. The sorrow of
million deaths is impossible to comprehend. When I try to begin to understand
it, I remember that every one of them is someone’s Kevin, someone’s Brian. In
the US, the CDC estimates 1.2 million people are living with HIV. A working vaccine
would turn this epidemic around. How? Now, for some science.
Your immune system
has the remarkable ability to distinguish “self” (that would be you) from “non-self”
(that would incoming infections). When you get a new infection, your immune
system goes into battle, but it takes a while to ramp up. Meanwhile the new pathogen
begins to take hold, uses your body to copy itself, and as a conduit to infect
others.When you survive and clear an
infection, some of your immune response lingers, harbored as memory cells. These
memory cells are poised and waiting to protect you. If you’re ever exposed to
that same pathogen again, your immune response will be swift, potent and
precise.
The way a vaccine
works is by using an inactivated pathogen, or just a fragment, some bit, that doesn’t
get you sick, but can still trigger an immune response. Vaccines leave behind
the memory cells you need to protect yourself, should you later encounter the
real and dangerous pathogen.
We still don’t have
an HIV vaccine; it is a particularly difficult challenge. HIV infects the
immune system itself. It is highly variable, different in every single infected
individual. Still, we are making steady progress, and I’m hopeful about it.
Finally, some thoughts
about Trump’s proposed 20% cut to the NIH budget. Much of the human health
research done in our country is seeded through the NIH. It keeps us at the
cutting edge of medical advances. It is how we fuel innovation, and how we
train the next generation of scientists. A 20% cut will close the door on many promising
research directions that are currently underway. Momentum will be lost.
Remember the words of
Dr. Pasteur, “Chance favors only the prepared mind”. Our national science
programs are our collective “prepared mind”. We need to attend to the health of
our people, and the health of our planet; science enables that. Thank you all
for doing your part today, for Standing With Science. Never take your
citizenship for granted, learn about the issues, seek truth, and then VOTE!
________________________________________________
Time travel, courtesy
of Christopher Will in his book Yellow Fever, Black Goddess
AIDS stats were taken
from the WHO and CDC Websites, 2017
Safe Disposal of Prescription Drugs is the Best Medicine
Bette Korber
Opioid addiction in our country has become a serious
epidemic, with overdose the leading cause of death among Americans under 50, and
overdose deaths in our country are rapidly increasing (2016 exceeded
59,000).Friends whose lives have been
touched by this epidemic have left me grieving, and wishing I could help. I recently
discovered a way I could take a small step towards fighting back against this
epidemic, and simultaneously help with other public health and the environmental
problems -- it is proper disposal of unused medications. While some people
already know about this, many don’t, and I’m sharing it here hoping to spread
the word.
It turns out that in many communities it is easy to get rid
of old pills and tablets, as there are drop boxes available for unused prescription
medications. Three such drop-offs are available near where I live in New Mexico,
but there were obstacles for me regarding using them. The first obstacle was the
big one: I was clueless, and had to discover they existed. Next, I had to figure
out their locations.
Here is my story. I had hip surgery last spring, and had an
oxycodone prescription to ease the pain. A swift recovery left a near full
bottle of narcotic opioids sitting awkwardly in my medicine chest.I searched the web for tips about getting rid
of it, but didn’t key onto the right search terms. I asked many friends, and at
my doc’s office, but nobody knew.One
website suggested I flush the pills down the toilet, another to bundle them in
a bag of used cat litter and leave it in the trash. These strategies would have
gotten the drug out of my home, but I’m a biologist, and don’t sit well with
flushing bioactive agents out into the world. So my oxycodone got pushed back
into the shadowy netherworld of my medicine cabinet, onto a heap of not-quite-empty
expired prescription bottles.
This bugged me.There
are many good reasons why one shouldn’t leave old unused meds around the house.The
most compelling is that abused prescription drugs fuel the opioid epidemic. But
this is not the only issue. There is also accidental poisoning, and the fact
that a very common path to suicide is by raiding the medicine
cabinet.
But opioids are not the only issue. Misused antibiotics lead
to antibiotic resistant pathogens. People often stop taking antibiotics when
they start feeling better, before they’ve finished their prescribed course, and
they save leftover pills. Sometimes they share them later with friends or
family who are under-the-weather. As a scientist who has worked on the
emergence of drug resistant tuberculosis, I cannot say strongly enough what a
bad idea this is.Partial antibiotic
courses select for drug resistant bugs, and these are nightmares in the making.
But while everyone should always take
their full antibiotic course, the reality is sometimes people don’t, and so many
folks have some unused antibiotics tucked away on the shelf.Scientists are just beginning to explore the
impact of low amounts of antibiotics, levels found in nature due to our agricultural
and human waste, on selection for antibiotic resistant bacteria.
While the medications we take can (and do) make their way
into the world through our body’s waste, that no excuse for compounding the
problem by just tossing out unused medications.Our western rivers and streams have plenty to be anxious about, still we
shouldn’t be dosing them with our leftover Zoloft.
I finally thought to ask my pharmacist what to do about my
oxycodone – at last, someone who knew exactly what to do!It turns out that our local police station in
Los Alamos has a drop box for unused drugs. It is shaped like a mailbox, and
the tossed medications are retrieved and destroyed.It is available year round during regular
working hours. It’s a great service! Once I knew what I was looking for, I
learned nearby Santa Fe has two such drop boxes, at a police station and a fire
station.
Now, when I open my much cleaner medicine cabinet it is a
guilt-free experience.More people need
this pleasure.
Some simple steps to look into this issue locally:
1 1) There is a web tool to track down regional
disposal sights. It misses some, but it’s a start.Your pharmacist, doctor, or local police
office also might know. http://rxdrugdropbox.org/map-search/
2 2) If you find a drop site, gather up your old
bottles of prescription pills and tablets, black out your name for privacy, and
drop them! Learn how it works, and then tell your friends.
3 3) If the place that hosts the local drop box doesn’t
mind, make a flyer about the service, and ask local pharmacies to post it. Many
people don’t even know to ask, so I reckon strategically placed flyers could
enlighten. Police officers (particularly the police chief in Los Alamos, what a guy!) and pharmacies in my town were very supportive of
this. I am proud to say that there are now pictures of my messy medicine cabinet, in that flyer I enclosed in this post, on display around my towns of Los Alamos and Santa Fe. I was shy about asking at first, but everyone's been great.
4 4) If you do not have a drug drop box in your
community, and you’re motivated, you can help your town to get one.The boxes are expensive ($900), but the
National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators have a grant program, and
a local, top law enforcement official can apply for one for free.Alternatively, communities can raise the
funds for a box. If you think it’s important for your community, make a case
for it. http://rxdrugdropbox.org/about-naddi/
5 5) National Prescription Drug Take Back Day is
coming up, Oct. 28, 2017.Law
enforcement agencies across the country participate.This could particularly help in rural communities
with no drop boxes. https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drug_disposal/takeback/
