The Devo Post, Part Two

Before I continue with my Devo retrospective, I should make a couple of notes. First of all, Devo was never merely a band, it was really a performance art group, which combined music and visuals in a deadpan, satirical critique of modern consumer culture (writing this, I had to shed a tear for a Devo/Poly Styrene collaboration that should have taken place, but never did). I also have to note that Mark Mothersbaugh's and Jerry Casale's brothers were both named Bob, and were credited as Bob 1 and Bob 2 on the third album's cover. Jim Mothersbaugh was also a member of the band's original lineup, but left the band and was replaced by drummer Alan Meyers. Can't be leaving out these members of the band... wouldn't be fair.

With that out of the way, I can move on the Devo's third album, Freedom of Choice, which featured a cover shot of the band wearing their now-iconic ziggurat-shaped headgear. The album is best known for the band's top-forty hit Whip It. Whip It was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's parodies of Horatio Alger/Dale Carnegie self-help slogans, and the lyrics are cracked versions of such "you can do it" exhortations:

When a problem comes along, you must whip it,
Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
When something's going wrong you must whip it.

The song was widely misinterpreted as having a sadomasochistic or masturbatory theme, and the band played up the S&M angle in the video (embedding disabled), which received heavy airplay on an obscure cable T.V. channel.

Girl U Want was apparently inspired by The Knack's My Sharona. The video for Girl U Want (check out "General Boy's" cameo) is a send-up of 1950's and 1960's T.V. performances, complete with screaming female fans (Outkast's video for Hey Ya mines similar territory). Here's an alternate "spaghetti western" take on the song, which I had never heard until today:





The title track of the album (embedding disabled), while seemingly a straightforward number, has a pessimistic punchline (a feature also found in the at-first-glance optimistic Beautiful World). For an interesting early take on the song, here's a version I'd never heard before today (writing these posts has been a revelation!):





My personal favorite track on the album is Gates of Steel, co-written by two members of Akron band Chi-Pig, which mines some of the same territory that inspired Jocko Homo:

The beginning was the end,
Of everything now.
The ape regards his tail,
He's stuck on it.
He repeats until he fails,
Half a goon and half a god.
A man's not made of steel.

Half a goon and half a god, what a succinct description of the human condition. Here's a live version of Gates of Steel:





The whole album is terrific, but I figured I'd post the highlights, for brevity's sake.

New Traditionalists was the follow-up to Freedom of Choice- for the album cover, the band traded in its ziggurat hats for plastic pompadours, which I always took to be a sendup of corporate icons Ronald Reagan and Big Boy.

Beautiful World, at first blush, seems uncharacteristically optimistic for a Devo song, but its true meaning becomes clear at the end of the song, and the video (which prominently features our old friend Booji Boy) makes the true intent explicit:





Through Being Cool was featured on the soundtrack of the Canadian cult cartoon classic Heavy Metal in a scene in which a prematurely silver dominatrix/avenging heroine encounters some nasty mutants in a nasty mutant bar (warning: clip contains some graphic cartoon violence towards the end):





The video for Love Without Anger was directed by Church of the Subgenius founder, the Reverend Ivan Stang, and prominently features a picture of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs:





Devo did a cover of Alan Toussaint's Working in a Coal Mine, which was released as a 7" single





My favorite track on the album is Jerkin' Back and Forth, another song which could be misinterpreted as a masturbatory reference, though it's really about a relationship gone wrong (which could lead to self-gratification, I suppose):





The next album, Oh No, It's Devo, is less satirical than their previous albums, and contains such synth-pop exemplars as That's Good:





and Peek-a-Boo:





These songs, while entertaining, lack the subversive punch of earlier material- they seem to be Kraftwerk parodies, not subversive takes on American society.

Around the same time, the band recorded a theme song for the largely forgotten movie Doctor Detroit:





It just hit me- Gerald Casale was involved in video production, and the video for Doctor Detroit is a small "snapshot" of his endeavors in this field. The videos for That's Good and Peek-a-Boo employed the bluescreen technique portrayed in the Doctor Detroit video.

The follow-up album Shout was not a successful release, its most memorable track was a mutated cover of Dzimi Hendriks' experimental Are You Experienced?. The video was directed by Ivan Stang:





I have to confess that Devo fell off my map after Are You Experienced, although they released albums Total Devo (featuring songs Some Things Never Change and Disco Dancer) and Smooth Noodle Maps (featuring Post Post Modern Man and a cover of Morning Dew by Bonnie Dobson.

Smooth Noodle Maps was the last studio album by Devo before they went on a six-year hiatus. The band reformed recently and has been touring, and put out an album in 2010. The band also produced a children's cover band Dev2.0 (of course, the darker elements of Devo's music have been stripped out) in conjunction with (eep!) Disney. My one major beef with the project (besides the Disney connection) is that the band members are too conventionally cute (they should have gotten some cute mutants, cutants, to play in the band). Still, if they warp some 4 to 8 year old minds, it's a worthwhile project:





I'll just finish off my Devo retrospective with a video of a single off the 2010 album:





A video of a recent performance of classic Mr DNA:





And, finally, the first part of a 1995 interview with Gerald V. Casale:





Quite an extensive body of work for a "one hit wonder", no?

Goodnight, Bob #2

Via Tengrain, I learned of the death of Devo guitarist Bob Casale. Bob, the brother of Devo co-founder Jerry Casale, was dubbed Bob #2 to distinguish him from Bob Mothersbaugh, brother of Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh. About two-and-a-half years ago, I wrote a sprawling, two-part post about Devo... you can tell that I've long been a fan. Devo was always more than just a band- they could best be described as a performance art group. They were formed in the wake of the Kent University shootings, when it truly seemed as if "de-evolution" were at work in our society.

By the time Devo scored a mainstream hit with Whip It, they were largely characterized as a "synth band", but their early recordings were guitar driven subversions of roots rock. I figure the best way to memorialize Signore Casale is to highlight some of his outstanding playing.

Here's an early demo version of Freedom of the Choice, a song which, in radically different form, was the title track of their breakthrough album:






Here's a live version of Smart Patrol/Mr DNA, preceded by a recitation of Devo's "position statement", cribbed from a creationist pamphlet titled Jocko Homo Heavenbound:





I think Devo's best full-on guitar attack is perhaps my favorite Devo song, the goosebump-raising Gut Feeling/Slap Your Mammy, paired here with Mongoloid, another Bastard favorite:





Rest in peace, Bob #2, and thanks for decades of quality, thought-provoking, ass-shaking inducing music!

The Devo Post, Part One

Alright, spuds, I figured I'd have to write a profile of Devo after embedding the video to Space Junk last week. While I love Whip It! as much as the next person, I am aware of all Devo traditions, and I love to spread the word.

The band Devo was formed on the campus of Kent State University in 1973, in the aftermath of the killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard. "Wonkette" featured a video interview with Devo co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald V. Casale (their brothers were the other original members of the band), who, after witnessing the shootings, formulated a theory of de-evolution inspired by the barbarity of the massacre and a pseudoscientific book which promulgated the idea the modern humans had descendended from apes which had eaten the brains of other apes. The de-evolution band was also inspired by a creationist tract, Jocko Homo Heavenbound, which provided the basics of the "De-evolutionary Oath":

1. Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.

2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.

3. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display. It's all the same.

4. The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live.

5. We Must Repeat.

Jocko Homo Heavenbound also provided the title for the early single Jocko Homo. The video for the single begins with a brief dialogue between the creepy mascot Booji Boy and his father General Boy (played by Mark Mothersbaugh's father), in which General Boy declares that "every man, woman and mutant on this planet shall know the truth about devolution":





The call-and-response "Are we not men? We are Devo!" was inspired by a scene in the filmIsland of Lost Souls, an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Another terrific early single is Mongoloid (the A-side to Jocko Homo. While the song title wouldn't be considered politically correct by today's standards, the song is ultimately sympathetic- And he wore a hat, and he had a job, and he brought home the bacon so that noone knew is a humane characterization of the capabilites of persons with developmental issues:





Devo's first album, produced by Brian Eno, was released in 1978. The album, besides featuring versions of Jocko Homo and Mongoloid featured a cover of the Rolling Stones'(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (embedding disabled) which subverts the "rockstar bravado and manliness trip" of the original (The Residents did an even more outre cover of "Satisfaction" a few years earlier). At the time of the album release, the band's "iconography" included yellow commercial jumpsuits emblazoned with the band's name. With their uniform clothing and non-emotional delivery, some idiot writing for Rolling Stone branded the group "fascists". Talk about not getting the joke!

The rest of the album, while fantastic, is more conventional rock and/or roll music. Gut Feeling has a particularly fantastic introduction:





Uncontrollable Urge features a hilariously over-the-top vocal performance from Mark Mothersbaugh





Come Back Jonee subverts the heroic Johnny B. Goode rockstar hagiography:





The whole album is fantastic, a bizarre little send-up of RAWK GOD stylings, and a moribund culture. The second album, Duty Now for the Future, while having an excellent title (which would be a great political slogan), represents a bit of a sophomore slump. The album 's sound is more synthesizer-driven than the first album's sound.

The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise is a send-up of those 1950's "girlfriend meeting with an accident" songs. The video is terrific, but the song doesn't quite measure up (in my estimation) to the standard of the first album:





Corporate Anthem was inspired by the movie Rollerball:





On this album, Devo took Johnny Rivers' Secret Agent Man out to the woodshed:





My personal favorite moment of the album is the portmanteau song Smart Patrol/Mr DNA. Isn't every guy, deep down in his heart of hearts, only a spud boy, looking for that real tomato?





I'm going to break here, I've covered quite a bit of ground, and I haven't even gotten to Whip It! The next post will be shorter, not having the introductory material of this post. I want to end this post by thanking everybody for giving me an excuse to watch a lot of Devo videos- damn, I love these guys!

Society of Spectacle

So, last night I headed out to a local pub (I live in the Tavern District) to watch some OLD TIME (American) FOOTBALL!!! Of course, copious amounts of beer and free chicken wings and ziti during halftime figured into my plans as well. The game itself was a great one- the last quarter was amazing, with the Steelers almost catching up to Green Bay... a little suspense always makes for an interesting watch. Of course, I was cheering on the Packers, because I can't stand Ben Roethlisberger, and because the Packers are a bunch of socialists. Yeah, an exciting game that the good guys won- USA!!! USA!!! WISCONSIN!!!

As for the half-time show... well, I was in a noisy bar, drinking dirty big pints of stout Smithwick's, so the audio wasn't so hot. I have no animus toward the Black Eyed Peas, they seem like they're likeable people- I just have no familiarity with their ouvre. though I am sure I'd heard some of their songs, I couldn't name one besides that really silly, one may venture to say st00pid, Humps song. Yeah, I really don't know about the Black Eyed Peas, and I will readily admit to preferring gandules at any rate.

So, the half time show starts, and the group is dressed up in outfits which reminded me a bit of KISS' getup, though without the kabuki style makeup. One member of the band (I can't be arsed looking up who he was), was wearing headgear reminiscent of Devo's plastic hair- for me, the costuming evoked an image of an parallel universe Devo which originated in a multi-culti coastal city rather than a rust belt town. Of course, I am a huge Devo fan, so my inability to hear much of the music was a plus. The dancers in glowing suits and the appearance of performers wearing large white plastic cubes on their heads gave the impression of a Tron/Legoland mashup. I have to say that a multicultural KISS/Devo mashup playing with a Tron/Legoland mashup as a backdrop should have been incredible, but I just couldn't get too excited about it all. I guess I am just not a fan of big, intricate spectacles (no offense to Elton John intended).

As a coda to this post, I can mimic Average Joe customs and mores pretty well, being a big, thick-necked galoot, but I always give myself away... not too many Average Joes name-dropping Guy Debord. Pity, that!

Devo Going to the Dogs

Anyone who has read this blog on a regular basis knows that I am a huge Devo fan, to the extent that I wrote a lengthy two-part post on the band and its body of work. The new Devo song, although not quite up to the Empyrean heights of such epics as "Jocko Homo", "Gates of Steel", "Gut Feeling", "Mongoloid", and "Smart Patrol/Mr DNA", is a hoot and a half:





As one can imagine, Jerry Casale is no fan of the J.R. "Bob" Dobbs-like Romney, but he's not exactly enthusiastic about President Obama. Yeah, don't expect a guy who was so traumatized by the Kent State shootings that he and his friends formulated a theory of devolution to be too keen on a president who is unfazed by the extrajudicial executions of American citizens.

So, the new song is hilarious, as is the the Seamus themed video game, and don't we all need a good laugh these days?

Reminds Me of a Devo Song...

Am I the only one to see the irony in a satellite designed to map the Earth's gravity field succumbing to the Earth's gravity? At any rate, a one ton thing is going to break up and start raining down on the planet. Tales of the firey re-entry of satellites have been captivating the public imagination since the 1970s, when Skylab's remains fell down on a small town in Australia, netting the United States' government a littering fine.

Of course, the impending fall of this satellite reminds me of one of my favorite Devo songs:





For Muzak aficianados, there's an easy listening version, which sounds like the soundtrack for a very outré Nintendo game.

Be safe, people, keep an eye on the sky!

When Ohio was Cutting Edge

Believe it or not, Ohio had a vibrant avant garde music scene in the mid 70s, with Devo being the best-known band of the Ohio scene. Seriously, in 1973-4, Ohio was more of a hotbed of rock-and/or-roll innovation than any other place on the globe. Another celebrated Ohio band was Cleveland's Pere Ubu, a band which had its origin in short-lived band Rocket from the Tombs, a band which also gave rise to The Dead Boys.

While I have long been a Pere Ubu fan, and I dig a couple of The Dead Boys' songs, I had never heard anything by Rocket from the Tombs (not to be confused with the band Rocket from the Crypt, which took its name from RftT). Recently, I found some Youtube videos of live recordings by Rocket from the Tombs (who broke up before releasing an album). The sound reminds me of a lo-fi Black Sabbath, playing avant-weird music and fronted by a warbling art-school student).

"Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" was an early single by Pere Ubu, a chilling, jagged-edged soundscape inspired by accounts of The Doolittle Raid, a one-way bombing mission meant to bolster American morale and jar the Japanese out of a sense of military supremacy:

Dark flak spiders bursting in the sky,
reaching twisted claws on every side.
No place to run.
No place to hide.
No turning back on a suicide ride.

The version by Pere Ubu is enough to elicit goosebumps:





The original by Rocket from the Crypt is sparer, and even less conventional than the Pere Ubu single:





"Sonic Reducer" by The Dead Boys is a fairly straightforward punk song, all adrenaline and attitude, and has passed into the punk "canon" (covered even by St. Joseph):




While the original by Rocket from the Tombs clocks in at about twice the length, it clearly foreshadows The Dead Boys' version, sounding like a "Stooges" outtake:





I suppose it was inevitable that Rocket from the Tombs would break up, what with two such disparate musical styles (exemplified by David Thomas and Cheetah Chrome) characterizing the band's output.

I'd been meaning to hunt down music by Rocket from the Tombs ever since reading Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, but the recordings were as rare as hens' teeth. I'd make a snide comment about how the internet makes everything easy to find, but I'm too happy to have found these recordings to play at being a hipster d-bag.

Duty Now for the Future

The heartening story of the day has got to be the Students' Climate Strike, which brought perhaps as many as a quarter-million people to Manhattan to join activist Greta Thunberg in demanding action on the ongoing climate change crisis. The climate strike spanned the globe, and involved millions of protestors. The young and earnest were challenging the old and corrupt to change the course which will render this planet unfit for human habitation. They will be inheriting an overheated Earth because corporate oligarchs refuse to look beyond next quarter's profits.

I've been blogging for almost ten years, and nothing has been done about the looming climate disaster- things are even regressing as the Dotard is rolling back energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs and is trying to nullify California's auto emissions standards. At the precise moment that humanity needs to get its act together regarding carbon emissions, the United States government is seeking to increase them, perhaps as a way to 'pwn the libs'... it's creating a suicide pact as a means to troll.

The young activists are wiser than the foolish, greedy elders who are pushing the narrative that climate change isn't real, and it isn't anthropogenic, and there's nothing that can be done about climate change anyway (yeah, I know that those are contradictory, but propaganda doesn't make those distinctions). They are going to live in a world long after David Koch croaked, and I don't think they are going to go home without becoming politically involved. They are not old enough to vote yet, but I trust them to kick out the fossil fuel fossils, I just hope they aren't too late. They have been failed by their elders, but they will be the ones to end up saving us.

Post title taken from Devo's second album title... how about a selection from Akron's weirdest?





I'd take a wiggly world over a broiling one, any day.

The Truth About Devolution

I'm glad I did two posts on the career and music of Devo- it gave me an excuse to check out a lot of great music, including versions of familiar songs that I hadn't heard before. It also gave me an excuse to avoid writing about the real world for a while, but now that I consider things, the truth of the devolution concept seems to be evident. The creep of the week is definitely NYPD Lieutenant Anthony Bologna of Manhattan Borough South, the white-shirted blackshirt who pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters, and who has a history of abuse of power. Bologna needs to be fired, plain and simple. I don't have any animus towards the police, I know a lot of cops and they are good people, but Bologna is a loose cannon, unworthy of the shield, and he needs to be given the boot and brought up on assault charges. The city doesn't need a knuckle-dragger like him on the streets, abusing power and assaulting individuals exercising their First Amendment rights.

NOTE: Anybody referring to Bologna as a Neanderthal is flirting with a lifetime ban, Neanderthals were awesome.

Secret Science Club Post-Lecture Recap: This Lecture's Gone Viral

On Wednesday night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, for this month's Secret Science Club lecture featuring evolutionary biologist and virologist Dr Paul Turner of Yale University. Dr Turner titled his lecture Viruses: Good, Bad, and Ugly, in homage to his favorite spaghetti western.

Dr Turner began his lecture by addressing the amazing biodiversity of the planet, displaying first a list of North America's 'big five' charismatic megafauna- grizzly bears, caribou, moose, bighorn sheep, and wolves, contrasting it with an invisible 'big five' of North America- the Giardia protozoan, the influenza virus, the HIV retrovirus, a bacteriophage, and the Cordyceps fungi. He posed the question, are microbes nasty? His answer was that this was not necessarily true, that microbes can benefit human health. In humans, the microbiome, the community of bacteria, fungi, and viruses within the body, outnumbers the body's own cells. The microbiome can affect one's risk of heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses- it also plays a role in an individual's weight. It is currently believed that childhood exposure to microbes may help prevent autoimmune diseases, a concept known as the hygiene hypothesis. In experimental helminthic therapy, irradiated hookworm eggs are introduced into subjects in order to reduce autoimmune diseases. Dr Turner summed up this part of the lecture by noting that we live in a microbial world.

He then posed the question: What is a virus? After repeating his theme of ugly, good, and bad viruses, he posed another question: Might a virus save your life someday? Cellular life can be divided into three broad categories- bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes... all of which form cells enclosed by a membrane. In contrast, viruses do not form cells, they characteristically have genetic material, DNA or RNA, surrounded by proteins. Viruses come in many forms- typical bacteriophages have tail vanes (Dr Turner facetiously compared them to the lunar lander). Influenza viruses contain RNA in the center of a protein shell. Viruses have a non-cellular life cycle. In order to reproduce, a virus enters the proper cell type, injects its genetic material, the viral genetic material hijacks the cell metabolism to copy itself, and the viral offspring are released from the cell.

Viruses are biodiverse, most are sub-microscopic... an electron microscope is needed to observe them. Influenza viruses and rhabdoviruses come in many shapes. Virus size does not correlate with host size- a whale can be infected by small viruses, a bacterium by large ones.

The evolutionary origin of viruses is a mystery- viruses appeared billions of years ago. Dr Turner posed a multiple choice question. A. Did viruses evolve before bacteria, being inhabitants of an RNA-based world that existed before DNA evolved? B. Did viruses evolve as parasites within cellular organisms? C. Are viruses 'devolved' cellular information? D. Did viruses arrive to Earth from space? Dr Turner jocularly illustrated these last two options with a picture of Devo and a picture of the lunar lander juxtaposed with a bacteriophage. Dr Turner indicated that A, B, and C are the three leading ideas.

Viruses reproduce very quickly, while bacteria can reproduce rapidly through binary fission, viruses can grow even faster as their progeny are formed in the cells of other organisms. Viruses are very abundant, they thrive in all environments, and they outnumber all other organisms. They are the most numerous of Earth's inhabitants. The human global population is approximately 7.2 billion, while the global virus population is estimated to be 10³¹. If the genes of all of the Earth's viruses were laid end-to-end, they would stretch to the Perseus Cluster, approximately 250 million light years away.

We live in a viral world- the bad viruses make the news, they are the viruses that are researched. There is evidence of ancient viral diseases- the Pharaoh Siptah had a clubbed foot that suggests polio, which is probably depicted on an image of a priest on a stele dating to 3700BCE. The mummified remains of Ramesses V indicate that he had suffered a case of smallpox. The polio virus is common in soil, it is usually harmless to humans, but becomes extremely dangerous when it enters the human nervous system. The smallpox virus was rendered extinct in its natural environment, the human body, and exists only in labs at the CDC and in Russia.

Dr Turner then took us on a tour of deadly epidemics- the 'Ugly' viruses. The 1918 flu killed 50 million to 100 million victims, a single flu strain managed to infect approximately 500 million individuals before the advent of commercial air travel. In our modern era, where travel is common, a flu epidemic may be just as deadly if the available vaccines don't match the flu strain. The Great Plague of the 14th century, which killed approximately 40% of Europe's population, is generally blamed on the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but other pathogens may have contributed to the death toll, hygiene and sanitation being sub-par at the time. The smallpox epidemic which began in 1520 in the New World decimated the Native American populations, but there are no estimates of the death toll. The AIDS epidemic, which is generally considered to have started in 1981, has claimed 39 million lives, with 78 million likely infected.

Virus emergence is a continual process- viruses can 'jump into' humans from other organisms. Bats commonly harbor viruses, which are often transmitted to pigs, then from the pigs to humans. HIV has jumped from other primates to humans, with HIV1 originating in chimpanzees and the less lethal HIV2 originating in monkeys. The HIV strains were probably introduced to humans between the 1920s and 1940s. Flu viruses are commonly transmitted by birds, especially waterfowl. The human immune system is 'naive' to bird flus- infection is easy, and we don't have the money and time to prevent 'fires', just to put them out. The mosquito born Zika virus was first identified in a rhesus monkey, only recently emerging in humans.

After dealing with the positively ugly viruses, Dr Turner focused his attention on the merely 'bad' viruses. Some viruses make you sick but don't kill you. He repeated the 1969-vintage quip: "We can put a man on the moon but we can't cure a common cold." Colds are caused by a variety of rhinoviruses. If an individual has respiratory problems, such as asthma, a cold can be serious, but many people are healthy enough to go to work with a cold, becoming links in the chains of contagion. Rotaviruses can kill children, but generally don't kill adults. Approximately 5% of child deaths in the developing world can be attributed to rotaviruses, which cause severe, dehydrating diarrhea.

Dr Turner then posed the question, can viruses be used in biocontrol of pests? He brought up the use of myxomatosis, the dreaded 'white blindness' of Watership Down, to control the invasive rabbit population of Australia in the 1950s. While partially successful, this introduction generally failed because the virus tended to kill rabbits before they had a chance to transmit it. Dr Turner chalked this up to yet another example of the folly of introducing invasive species to Australia.

Dr Turner then focused his attention on the 'good'- are viruses good for ecosystems? He noted that an absence of predators tends to throw biological systems out of balance, citing the absence of the wolf in most of North America, and the resultant explosion of the deer population, as a factor in the spread of the bacteria that cause Lyme disease... fewer deer, less Lyme. Viruses indirectly regulate the photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria in the oceans. Cyanobacteria evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, and altered Earth's atmosphere by elevating oxygen levels. Cyanophages outnumber cyanobacteria by a factor of ten to one, regulating the cyanobacteria population. The cyanophages carry the genes which code for photosynthesis. Dr Turner noted that viruses infect other organisms and continually 'churn' genes. Approximately one in twenty of a person's daily breaths contain oxygen produced by virus genes.

Dr Turner then posed us a riddle: What would you trade 36 bushels of wheat, 72 of rice, 4 oxen, 12 sheep, 8 pigs, 2 barrels of wine, 4 barrels of beer, 2 tons of butter, 1000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver cup for? The answer, of course, is a tulip bulb, but not just any tulip bulb, but a bulb infected by a tulip 'breaking' virus which resulted in fantastic mixtures of colors.

Dr Turner then posed the question, can viruses solve health problems? He brought up the topic of antibiotic resistence, citing MRSA and XDRTB as worrisome diseases- the drugs used to treat them pose dangers to the body. Antibiotic resistance is a global problem, and will be implicated in hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide by 2050. Bacteriophages are viruses that only kill bacteria- they could be used as an alternative to chemical antibiotics. Bacteriophages could be used as a self-amplifying drug- they multiply, find and kill new bacteria. In the mid-twentieth century, the Russians and Poles invested more heavily in phage therapy than in antibiotics. Phage therapy was used to treat field wounds and cholera. In the case of cholera, patients were rehydrated and given anti-cholera phages. Bacteria can evolve phage resistance. Dr Turner asked, can we develop a strategy that works even with the evolution of resistance? He indicated that the best strategy would be to discover phages which attack bacteria by binding to virulence factors- by binding to these sites, the phages would force the bacteria to evolve phage resistance by compromising virulence. Resistance would be achieved by becoming more dangerous. OMK01 (PDF link),a recently discovered bacteriophage, found in a Connecticut lake, effects the efflux pumps that bacteria use to remove antibiotics. OMK01 forces bacteria to trade phage resistance for antibiotic resistance. Dr Turner referred us to the 6/3/2016 edition of NPR's Science Friday. In 2006, the USDA approved the use of phages to combat bacteria which can taint deli meats.

Dr Turner then posed the question, would you be here without viruses? He indicated that 10% of our DNA comes from viruses which entered the genetic germ line- these genes are known as endogenous retrovirus genes. Syncytin, a protein produced by endogenous retroviral genes, is crucial to the formation of the placenta- the protein is necessary for the proper reaction of the immune system, which does not treat the fetus as a parasite. All placental mammals are made possible by viral DNA, which is a really good note on which to end a lecture.

The lecture was followed by a Q&A session. Some Bastard in the audience asked if viruses could be used in gene therapy to combat genetic diseases. While viruses are good at swapping out genes, CRISPRs are better tools, simple enought to use on multicellular organisms for correcting genomes. Another member of the audience asked, are viruses alive? Viruses are often conceived as 'quasi-living', but Dr Turner considers them living because they can reproduce and they are subject to natural selection. Asked whether viruses could jump from one 'domain' of life to another, Dr Turner indicated that this is unlikely, because cross-domain protein recognition tends to be rare, though it has often been attempted in the lab. Dr Turner then brought up the topic of bacteriophage prospecting becoming a growth industry- there is an illimitable supply of viruses out there, some of which may have therapeutic value. He then pondered whether or not humans co-evolved with phages to welcome them into the body. Asked about tips in case there's another dangerous flu outbreak, he noted that people should have a home preparedness kit so they can stay home until the epidemic wanes... I guess I need to download more ebooks!

Dr Turner delivered a top-notch lecture, informative and entertaining. I'm biased toward biological subjects, so this lecture was definitely in my top tier. Dr Turner, an extremely nice guy, lingered for an 'adult beverage' afterward, and I had a brief conversation with him about OMK01, which he told me was located in Dodge Pond, a polluted body of water not far from Lyme.

Kudos to Dr Turner, Dorian and Margaret, and the staff of the beautiful Bell House for yet another fantastic lecture. Here's the first of a three-part video series on viral biology by Dr Turner:





Crack open a beverage and soak in that SCIENCE! Be sure to watch the other two videos in the series- more videos, more drinking, more learning.

Oh, and this month's lecture was the annual Lasker Foundation collaboration with the Secret Science Club. Special thanks to the good folks at the foundation for their support. The foundation was giving out these great T-shirts with the slogan: If you think research is expensive, try disease.

Space Junk

Put on your crash helmets, people, because a satellite will be crashing to Earth in the next couple of days. The last re-entry that received such coverage was Skylab's return to the Motherworld. With this Hail of Metal falling from the sky, the most appropriate song to post is Devo's Space Junk, from their incredible first album:





Link lifted from Tintin's Finn Finn's blog.