20 ... 21 ... 22

As we continue to live in interesting times, here are some of my highlights of 2021. Most of them I have raved about already, so I'll just do a list with links.

• The third edition of Astrobiology came out in August, it is no longer a brief introduction, just an introduction. This reflects the fact that the book now has more than 400 pages.
• I've completed a 60k words draft of the biography of Heinrich our family cello, which is also a family history of sorts, and a memoir, and a rant about various issues from education through to plague policies.
• In the course of my research for the musical memoir, I have had a closer look at some of the old photos I have and started turning them into a blog series called "Every picture tells a story." The 18th instalment went live yesterday, another seven are currently in the queue for publication. This twitter thread offers a table of contents for quick access to specific episodes. I was amazed to discover how much more I can find out about these pictures if I don't just look at the faces and go "ok, this is Aunt Such and Uncle So", but think about what makes it special and why it might be interesting for people who don't even know the persons in the picture. Some of the stories the pictures tell were new to me even though I had known the photos for many years. For the time being, I am limiting the series to photos that are older than me - maybe in its second year it will move on to those taken in my lifetime.
• My Plague Year Bach Project (trying to play the cello suites) started in March 2020 carried on until June this year (interim report). Then I paused it for the summer, because there were now many opportunities to play with other people outside, and by the autumn I was struggling with a frozen shoulder, meaning I could just about maintain orchestra participation, but wouldn't be able to keep up the one hour daily practices for the Bach. Maybe next year.
• Playing outside at the Florence Park bandstand has been a major success. In addition to the monthly slow sessions, we also played lots of informal sessions on the Sundays in between. On Wednesday evenings, members of Cowley Orchestra played chamber music (see my lists of duets, trios, quartets).
• A major revelation on one of those Wednedays in the park was playing Dvorak's American quartet with a mixed bag of instruments including clarinet, oboe, flute, violin and cello, making it sound a lot more like the New World symphony. Afterwards, I discovered that the idea wasn't completely new, there is a brilliant arrangement for wind quintet. YouTube has live videos from the Amsterdam Wind Quintet (fourth and first movement) as well as sound-only recordings from the Royal Flemish Philharmonic (complete) and Meliora Winds.
• As the weather turned autumnal and the orchestral and folkie activities moved back indoors (although Covid stats remained high), two of us carried on playing at the bandstand. Smaller ensembles need louder instruments to get heard, so it's mostly saxophone duos you can hear on a Sunday afternoon these days. Nothing like blasting out an ironic version of Sound of silence on the saxes. Seriously, though, a playlist of tunes that I am playing or trying to play is here. Note also that the tenor sax is ergonomically compatible with my shoulder problem, so for the time being, it is taking up much of the time I dedicated to the cello until the summer.
• Plague Year Day Trips this year led us to Romsey, Bournemouth and Winchester (again).
• Just one trip abroad this year, visiting Düsseldorf, Minden and Tangermünde. The latter two for reasons linked to the Heinrich biography. Photos from this trip are in this flickr album.
• I completed the Lost cities series I started in late 2020. And managed to visit two of the lost cities, see the point above.
• I managed to read a few interesting books.
• After the blissful time without haircuts ended, I grew some more around my chin, enjoying the fact that I now have a fur pattern.

Overall, as getting things done, books read, and music played makes me happy, it's been a happy year for me in spite of all the rage at the death eaters, climate catastrophe, and all the rest of it.

Trying something new during lockdowns.

five sisters, five decades

Every picture tells a story, No. 18

The five daughters of the station master of Adamsweiler all lived to a respectable age and had a tendency to regroup on family occasions so we have portraits of the quintet spanning half a century.

This one is the most recent I have, dated 1950, so presumably from Auguste's golden wedding celebrations. The place is Bad Münster am Stein, where Auguste lived with her husband who had worked at the post office.

A few decades earlier, the five of them with their mother on her 80th birthday in 1927 (the station master had died in 1909):

And then the classic 1900 family portrait outside the Adamsweiler station (which I've used in the master post on railway families):

In this one we have from left to right: Helene, Kätha, Johanna, Auguste, Anna. Good luck working out who's who in the other two. Their descendants are listed in the entry about the Kauer clan. (Quick cross-references to my branch of the tree: Helene married her cousin Julius, their first child was Ruth. I will have to reconnect with Johanna later in the series because she built the house that has preserved the bulk of our memorabilia.)

So much sh*t happened in the first half of the 20th century, thinking of the 250 years of life experience accrued between the first photo and the last just boggles my mind. Note also that their parents' magical recipe for long life did not work for boys: both their brothers died before reaching school age.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia
15. the case of the missing grandmother
16. checkpoint Glaner Brücke 1929(ish)
17. finding Mimi
18. five sisters, five decades

Twitter thread

In a somewhat roundabout way, this series relates to my research for the family history music memoir I'm writing.

new from Simone de Beauvoir

I read all of Simone de Beauvoir's novels and some of her autobiographical writing at a young and impressionable age when sitting in a Paris cafe writing books was my idea of a sensible career path. (Now, of course, after the rather strict lockdowns they had in France, I realise that writing from where I'm sitting right now is much more sensible.)

Seriously, though, having been imprinted on Beauvoir as an intellectual role model, I was thrilled to see she's got a new book out, at the age of 110 plus. I only found out this year, when the English translation was published, but the original came out in 2020.

Les inséparables is a fictionalised account of her childhood friendship with and crush on school friend Elisabeth Lacoin, called Zaza, who died in 1929 aged 21. The account written in 1954 was deemed to be too emotionally sensitive to be published in her lifetime. A more distanced version was include four years later in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée.

In a detailed preface to this belated publication, Beauvoir's adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir explains the complex relations between the real life story, the short novel, and the memoir, which I found really helpful. It also comes with 18 pages of photos and copies of letters between Simone and Zaza.

I may be biased for imprinting reasons cited above, but I found the novel very moving and relatable (as we've only started saying long after it was written), and I'm very grateful that it came out at last. At 150 pages, the text is much more accessible than the memoir (which I bought 38 years ago but I'm not sure if I actually read it!), and I guess it might help to introduce new generations to the emotional and sensitive side of the great philosopher and feminist.

My editions of both books, own photo. I was too impatient to wait for a folio paperback to match my collection of Beauvoir's other works.

PS: My grandmother Ruth, shown here with a friend in her student days, was born the same year as Simone de Beauvoir, which makes the story even more relatable.

finding Mimi

Every picture tells a story No. 17

Shortly after Peter the customs officer and Frieda the pianist had moved to Gronau, Frieda's mother, Luise, died from a tooth infection, aged only 48. Luise's mother died just two weeks after her, aged 75, for unknown reasons. In letters written around mother's day many years later, Frieda revealed that she never quite got over this early loss of her loving mother. Frieda was 25 at the time and had only recently moved out of the parental house by the railway tracks.

We don't have testimony from Frieda's widowed father, Heinrich (the station master at Minden Stadt), but just under two years after his loss he married Wilhelmine (Mimi) who was also widowed and I recently learned that she also lost children, not sure about the details. Her full name was Sophie Friederike Wilhelmine Franke (verw. Poggenklaas), so Franke was her birth name and Poggenklaas that of her first husband. Mimi was universally popular with all Heinrich's grandchildren and great-grandchildren and survived into the early 1970s. I don't have any data about her, but Frieda mentioned in a letter, using Mimi as a reference age, that Helene Kauer was about Mimi's age, and Helene was born September 1885. That would make Mimi around six years younger than Heinrich, and at the time of their marriage she would have been 45.

In line with the all round good-hearted personality attributed to Mimi, Heinrich and Mimi always look kind of quietly contented on their portraits, several of which were taken over the years at the railway properties Fischerallee 13 and later Fischerallee 11A.

The photo was marked as ca. 1950, which is also the time when they moved from No. 13 to No. 11A, so I'm not sure which garden this is. I've shared photos of both properties here.

I inherited the bible with which Heinrich and Mimi got married, which is a very beautiful one, but also got used, as she did leave various leaves from a day-by-day desk calendar between the pages, presumably looking up the context of whatever biblical wisdom the calendar makers had presented her with on that day. At the moment I can only find three of them, with the most recent dating from 1.3.1973. The date and place of the wedding in church marked in the bible is Uchte, 4.4.1930.

Sample page of the bible and sample calendar leaf.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia
15. the case of the missing grandmother
16. checkpoint Glaner Brücke 1929(ish)
17. finding Mimi

Twitter thread

In a somewhat roundabout way, this series relates to my research for the family history music memoir I'm writing.

make antibiotics evolution-proof

My first article about the dangers of antibiotics resistance came out in September 1994, so I am getting a little bit frustrated that this problem hasn't been fixed in the last 27 years. We are now reaching a point where a post-antibiotic age, meaning widespread incurable bacterial infections wiping years off our life expectancy, is a very real possibility. While I was writing this feature, I needed a course of antibiotics myself, which very nicely focused my mind on what a post-antibiotic world might be like.

The only thing that cheered me up was finding that all the recent work I discussed is based on the premise that we need to find a fundamental new way out of the race we've been running against the evolution and spread of resistance genes. Basically, bacteria have been dealing with fungal antibiotics for hundreds of millions of years. Thus, thinking that we might overcome them with slightly different antibiotics was always naive. So if we want to win this, we need to find evolution-proof recipes.

My feature on the latest advances in this quest is out now:

How to avoid a post-antibiotic age

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 24, 20 December 2021, Pages R1549-R1552

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Drugs specifically suppressing virulence factors instead of eradicating the bacteria have been tried on Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, among other pathogens. Here, Salmonella cells (yellow) invade a human gut epithelial cell (blue). (Photo: NIAID/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

just take carbon

In my school days, pure carbon came in two allotropes, graphite and diamond. By now there are dozens of them, or maybe even an infinite number as you could stitch together any number of fullerenes and polyynes to produce a new molecule consisting only of carbon.

But even fundamentally new types of carbon materials keep popping up, so I wrote a feature on the latest patterns which is out now:

Carbon rapture

Chemistry & Industry Volume 85, Issue 12, December 2021, Pages 22-25

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

I'm loving the design of the first double page spread (although I'm not sure about the title).

In the same issue, on page 39, there's my long essay review of the book

Ethics of chemistry

by Joachim Schummer, Tom Børsen, eds.

which is much better than the previous book on chemical ethics that I reviewed. (I may have forgotten to publicise that review, as the book was really not worth promoting.)

checkpoint Glaner Brücke 1929(ish)

Every picture tells a story, No. 16

Frieda the pianist from episode 7 met a violinist called Paul during her studies at Bückeburg, but somehow that didn't work out. Instead she found love closer to home. Her parents (Heinrich the station master and Luise the railway worker's daughter) had taken up a lodger in their flat overhanging the narrow gauge railway line at the station Minden Stadt. That lodger was a budding customs officer, and he introduced Frieda to his colleague, Peter Eberle (son of the baker Adam Eberle).

Peter and Frieda married in 1924, but still stayed with her parents in the flat overhanging the tracks (I do love that house!), had their first daughter the next year, then their own flat in 1926, but soon moved on to Peter's first proper customs role on an actual border, namely on the Dutch border at Gronau, where they stayed until the end of 1932 and had their second daughter.

I'm going on about this, because it dates the photo shown below, about which I wouldn't have known anything otherwise. You can see a car with the "NL" plate, so it must have been on the Dutch border, ie between 1927(ish) and 1932. The checkpoint was called Glaner Brücke, referring to a very small bridge across a brook which marks the border. Altes Zollhaus (old customs office) was where they lived, except for a period when they were moved to the Dutch side of the border, a move immortalised in the fact that, in December 1929, their second daughter was born at Lonneker (just north of Enschede, with which it was merged in 1934).

Peter is the second guy from the left, the only one not wearing a hat, for whatever reason. I have no idea who the other guys are and I'm no good at reading their clothes, so all hints appreciated.

This was as much as I knew until I started preparing this entry. Then I felt obliged to google the name of the border post and it turns out there is a flickr account that has an album with 114 photos of this border crossing from 1900 to this century (mostly from the Dutch side, where it's called glanerbrug). I'm still recovering from the shock.

The building we see in the background of our group photo, with the characteristic white stripes running both horizontally and also vertically on either sides of the windows, is recognisable in this lovely postcard from 1950:

as well as in several modern photos from the account holder, including this one from 2005 and this one from 2003.

The photos from the 1920s show trams as well as dense rows of mature trees lining both sides of the narrower road. In most views the buildings are obscured by the trees. Then the cars came and ate both the trams and the trees. In the most recent photos you mainly see cars.

After Gronau came a move to Hamm as well as, obviously, the Nazi takeover, but we'll get to that some other time.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia
15. the case of the missing grandmother
16. checkpoint Glaner Brücke 1929(ish)

Twitter thread

In a somewhat roundabout way, this series relates to my research for the family history music memoir I'm writing.

why the vaccine-only approach will backfire

After yesterday's announcement of betting everything on the booster programme to hold the omicron variant at bay I hear that the medical staff meant to deliver a million jabs per day from today were as surprised as the rest of us to find out about it from yesterday's speech.

Nothing wrong with protecting people with a third dose of vaccine, and I've had mine a week ago, but it's a bad idea to rely only on a vaccine in the face of a raging epidemic and do nothing else. Here's just one little number crunching to show why:

If the booster (or any other vaccine applied in an ongoing epidemic) is 90% effective in preventing undesirable outcome (eg hospitalisation, or deaths) and makes people feel safe so they engage in 20x more risky behaviour (eg take the tube to work and come into close contact with 60 people per day, rather 3 if they cycle to work; or they go out clubbing rather than staying safe at home), what happens?

The 90% efficient booster divides the likelyhood of the undesirable outcome by 10, but the behaviour change multiplies it by 20, so you get twice as many cases of the undesirable outcome. Which is why relying _only_ on a vaccination with less than 100% efficiency may produce the opposite of the desired effect. Behaviour/culture eats vaccination/policy for breakfast as the old saying goes.

I remember epidemiologists warning of this backlash effect since before we even had vaccines, and it's been the reason why we've had unsustainably high numbers since September inspite of good vaccine coverage, but the UK govt still does not understand this. So, starting from a high plateau we're going straight over the cliff with omicron again, and will need another screeching U-turn to sort this out. When will they ever learn?

Update 15.12.: Here's a good opinion piece from SAGE member Stephen Reicher on the mess we're in with omicron's arrival. As Reicher points out, the booster programme is a slow-acting measure, so the important bit is to have contact reduction to slow omicron down until the boosters take effect.

Diels Alder revisited

I don't often write about chemistry these days, but every once in a while I have great fun revisiting things that are so elementary and easy that even I can still remember them. Such as the Diels Alder reaction, which on paper goes like this:

Source

I wrote a news story for Chemistry World on an effort to observe the Diels Alder reaction happening on a surface, using atomic force microscopy (AFM). You can read the story here (open access if you haven't used up your quota of CW stories).

Sadly, the researchers had to make this very simple and elegant reaction quite complicated to achieve this. It made me wonder (after sending off the news piece) if biomolecules might offer a way of positioning a pair of simpler Diels Alder reactants on a surface.

It was long believed that nature didn't have Diels Alder enzymes, so various researchers took up the challenge to fill this gap and produced:

• a ribozyme
• an enzyme
• and a catalytic antibody

to catalyse the reaction.

More recently, however, natural Diels-Alderases were discovered, including this one earlier this year.

So there are plenty of biomolecules that by definition recognise and bind Diels Alder reactants. Surely one of them can be persuaded to handle the reaction in a way that is amenable to AFM studies?

the case of the missing grandmother

Every picture tells a story, No. 15

Staying in East Prussia, here's another mystery that needs solving. Auguste Adschuck, born around 1865, died in January 1945 in the turbulences at the end of World War II, somewhere between East Prussia and the river Oder, so in today's Poland. The first version I heard was that after visiting family in the West she was trying to get back home to East Prussia. Written notes from one of her grandchildren now suggest she was fleeing from East Prussia to the West, which makes more sense. At a push, both versions could be true if she was attempting to return East and then had to turn around and flee westwards.

From a family portrait dated 1930.

We have no documentation of her birth, marriage or death, so even the name could be spelled differently. It sounds to me like it may have been a Polish name originally (maybe a longer one like Solodczuk) and there are multiple versions to be found in East Prussia including Odzuk, Odczuk, Otsick, Atschuk, etc. Her husband (Friedrich Kosmowsky) was born in Gerdauen, so for lack of a better clue it makes sense to look there. This website with church records from Kreis Gerdauen has some Adschuck entries, as well as Adschack and other variants, but nothing that could immediately be linked to her.

She had three daughter and five sons. The only two for whom we have birth details were born in 1899 and 1904 in Ernstwalde, Kr. Wehlau (just north of Kr. Gerdauen), so that's another clue. The sons include Friedrich on the fiddle photo (No. 5), as well as Ernst Leopold whose family appears in the photo from which I clipped her portrait. Descendants of her three daughters go by the surnames of Kalippke, Cichy, and Popp. All three surnames turn up in the Gerdauen database, although not necessarily with the specific people we're looking for.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia
15. the case of the missing grandmother

Twitter thread

omicron blues

So here we go again, for the fourth time in a row, the UK govt (acting only for England as the devolved administrations have wisely gone their own ways) is doing too little too late and spouting nonsense while blatantly advertising the most important rule of all, namely that rules don't apply to them and their friends. (Impersonating police officers, anyone? Punishable offence for most of us, but not for the shifty character recently photographed at a dawn raid.) Their rules are only made for the rest of us, and we should be grateful, apparently. After today's news of how deatheaters are basically dancing on the graves of the people they killed with their stupidity (current hashtag on twitter: #ToriesPartiedWhilePeopleDied), I'm seriously running out of effs to give.

So, well, the science from wastewater monitoring (about which I've written a new article last week, due out early next year) through to vaccine development is still brilliant, but it doesn't save us from a never-ending chain of disasters if the guys at the top eff it all up. I could throw around some numbers etc, but probably won't bother. We don't have a shortage of scientific facts and figures, we just have a surplus of dangerous lunatics in high places. The immunisation against that is yet to be discovered.

What cheered me up immensely, however, was the recent front page of the taz (disclaimer: I own a share in the cooperative) linking the change of government in Germany to the change of coronavirus variant:

Source.

Rough translation: New Merkel variant prevails.

Oh, just now I also enjoyed the subtitles on today's Channel 5 News suggesting BJ was talking about Oma Crown. Sounds like a bilingual toddler trying to define the Queen.

rights of nature

Every once in a while we read in the news that a river here or a forest there has been granted legal rights, mostly the right not to be destroyed by human greed. Following a suggestion from one of the editors at Current Biology, I did a round-up of recent developments in rights of nature and examined whether it's more of a symbolic thing or actually helps protection.

My resulting feature is out now:

Reclaiming nature's rights

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 23, 06 December 2021, Pages R1505-R1507

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my twitter thread listing all the 2021 features in Current Biology as they move to the open archives. I will keep this thread on twitter until the end of the year, but probably launch the new one for 2022 open archives on Mastodon, assuming that the decline and fall of the bird app continues.

The former nature reserve Te Urewera in New Zealand has now become a legal entity that effectively owns its land. (Photo: Department of Conservation, New Zealand/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

a patchwork family in East Prussia

Every picture tells a story, No. 14

Karl Franz Faust (1857-1938) and Wilhelmine Justine Domscheit (1863-1942), shown here in 1920:

married in 1896, after they were both widowed. Each brought along around five children and then they went on to produce another five, some of whom are in the next picture, which is the one I want to talk about. (Due to the poor quality of the original, it looked horrible in preview so I've moved the couple portrait up to the top to appear in previews instead.)

Their shared batch of children includes the one we're interested in, Luise Auguste (1898-1979), third from right, at the back, who postumously became my grandmother in law. Her parents are at the back too, and who the other ones are is anybody's guess - the one holding a baby could be the oldest daughter from Wilhelmine's first marriage, Marie Wittke, who married a Karl Witt and had her first child in 1915, which is about the time the photo was taken.

The photo is a tiny print held in a souvenir etui opposite a portrait of one of Franz Faust's sons from the first marriage in uniform. All of which supports a date during World War I. The postal address during the war was Friederikenruh, Post Eiserwagen, Kirchspiel Allenburg, Kreis Wehlau, East Prussia. Friederikenruh was a Rittergut ("landed estate" the internet tells me but I don't know where that leaves the Ritter=knight) with 95 inhabitants. All of whom probably worked for the resident knight in some form. Franz is referred to as a Kämmerer in documents, ie financial administrator. Franz and Wilhelmine's joint son Karl Otto, born 1895, also was a Kämmerer.

Auguste moved to Hamborn in the Ruhr area in 1922, but her parents stayed in East Prussia all their lives. They both died at Groß-Neumühl (Kr.Wehlau), which may be the place mentioned on the photo with the fiddle.

The next family portrait is from 15 years later (1930) and shows Franz and Wilhelmine with the family of Marie and Karl Witt:

Their ancestry is poorly recorded but interesting. The Faust lineage hails from Lablack, Kr. Labiau, where Faust families are documented since 1619. Domscheit is a Lithuanian name found in East Prussia - a famous carrier is the painter Franz Domscheit who changed his name back to the Lithuanian version Pranas Domšaitis and emigrated to South Africa. The history of the (mostly bilingual) Prussian Lithuanians is a fascinating one.

Their descendants could be just about everywhere - two of Wilhelmine's daughters from her first marriage emigrated to Australia.

PS No idea what the shiny round thing is. Born in 1857, he was too young for the war of 1870 and too old for WWI, so I'm guessing it can't be a military medal.

Correction: I just realised he went by his second name, Franz. His father was just Karl.

This photo is also on flickr.

Every picture tells a story series so far:

1. string quartet Wuppertal Elberfeld 1927
2. greetings from Adamsweiler
3. Gastwirthschaft Ferd. Weirich
4. quartet times three
5. Neumühl 1923
6. Tangermünde railway station 1889
7. a singing lesson
8. bei Wilhelm Geppert
9. a bakery at Lorsch 1900
10. Consumgeschäft von Julius Düsselmann
11. Hanna and Ruth
12. a young chemist
13. school's out at Reichenstein, 1886
14. a patchwork family in East Prussia

Twitter thread