Salty Fish
The transfer of my gill work to Sheffield did not happen, mainly because new safety standards on the use of sodium and potassium radioactive isotopes could not be met in Ian Chester Jones’ lab. I was loathe to give up on eels and invented the ‘eel-U-tube’, a device for studying sodium transport in individual anaesthetised eels. The device separated the head from the tail so that gill uptake and urinary excretion could be measured separately with the newly invented sodium glass electrodes. Eels recovered from the experience but concerns about a high stress baseline with excessive sodium leakage through the gills quickly led to the abandonment of this line of research.
I continued research in the Sheffield zoology department, which was an international centre for comparative endocrinology, for nine years, establishing the primary interaction of corticosteroids was with cell proteins in both the cell membrane and nucleus resulting in a change in their tertiary structure. Steroids exert a wide variety of effects mediated by slow genomic effects, such as enzyme induction, as well as by rapid nongenomic interactions with the cell membrane. We now understand that membrane-associated steroid receptors are coupled to transducers to relay information into the cell using a number of different signalling pathways.
Because steroid hormones are lipid-soluble, they can diffuse fairly freely from the blood through the cell membrane and into the cytoplasm of target cells. In the cytoplasm, the steroid may or may not undergo an enzyme-mediated alteration such as reduction, hydroxylation, or aromatization. In the cytoplasm, the steroid binds to the specific receptor, a large metalloprotein. Upon steroid binding, many kinds of steroid receptor dimerize: Two receptor subunits join together to form one functional DNA-binding unit that can enter the cell nucleus. In some of the hormone systems known, the receptor is associated with a heat shock protein, which is released on the binding of the ligand, the hormone. Once in the nucleus, the steroid-receptor ligand complex binds to specific DNA sequences and induces transcription of its target genes
This work led to studies of their short-term effects on enzyme induction and long-term influence on lifespan. On the way, I felt I was became more of a zoologist than ‘the zoologists’who were looking to biochemistry to solve their research problems. In this, I was strongly influenced by Fred Segrove, senior lecturer in the department and an old time zoologist, who took me to Robin Hood’s Bay on the Yorkshire coast, where he had spent most of his academic life studying small worms that live on rocks, shells and stones between the tides, making curly white tubes to protect themselves.
Looking back I can see that Robin Hood’s Bay spread its seascape magic to propel me towards the interdisciplinary issues of environmentalism. Scientists such as Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner were then claiming that living things other than humans are deserving of consideration in reasoning about the morality of political, economic, and social policies. This new cultural mode of thinking about applied ecology was reinforced when I was asked to be the lead biochemist on Knut Schmidt Neilsen’s Alpha Helix expedition to the Amazon Basin. Flying over just part of this vast ecosystem, I gazed hour after hour upon this seemingly infinite blanket of green. The impression of immensity is similar when viewed from the Amazon River itself, or from its tributaries, particularly the Rio Negro, where the expedition was based. From the fantail of the research vessel, after dinner reflections on the immensity of the forest and its steady progression of cloudy, rainy thunder heads presented an incredible cosmic monotony as one view of the shoreline blended unnoticeably into another. From both perspectives, the overwhelming reaction to the blanket of trees and water that stretched from horizon to horizon was an epiphany of the vastness of evolution.
Two years later, in 1969, from the position of Reader in Endocrinology and Metabolism at Sheffield, I was invited to apply for the Chair of Zoology in the University of Wales at Cardiff. Much to my surprise I was offered the post. The attraction to me was the environment. Wales is a predominantly mountainous peninsula located between England and the Irish Sea, covering 8,023 square miles. It has terrestrial habitats and many protected areas rich in biodiversity, including three national parks and five Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The national parks include: Snowdonia, Pembrokeshire Coast and Brecon Beacons. AONB include: Anglesey, Clwydian Range, Gower Peninsula, Llyn Peninsula and Wye Valley, which is partially in England. Wales also has many locations categorised as Site of Special Scientific Interest, Special Area of Conservation, Special Protection Area and Local nature reserve.
On the coast, a great diversity of species such as seals, dolphins, sharks, jellyfish, crabs and lobsters can be found. There are also seabird colonies on offshore islands, several species which can only be found in Wales and an orchid that is one of the most threatened plants in northwestern Europe.
All of this exceptional biodiversity existed adjacent to some of the most ravaged industrial sites in the world. Thus it was no accident that South Wales was central to launching large-scale schemes for land reclamation. This had begun in 1961 with the Lower Swansea Valley Project, which was a pioneering post-industrial land reclamation programme that cleaned up an area that was branded Britain's worst derelict landscape. In these various environmental contexts I saw Wales had exceptional opportunities for teaching and research in the new field of applied ecology and launched several cross-departmental initiatives in this direction.
In another sense than Popper explained, there are two kinds of worlds in which we live: The world of objects which would exist even if we did not exist and even when there were no other (human) beings that could give it a certain meaning, and the world as it is for us, for the human beings that we are. This implies that there are two kinds of subject-object divisions.
On the one hand we have the division between the subject that we are and the objects of the physical world around us and from which are physically separated. We could call it the ontological subject-object division.
On the other hand we have the division between the interpreting and knowing subject that we are and the fundamentally interpreted objects around us. These objects exist only for us, because we see them and we can see them only because they fit, in one sense or another, how minimal that may be, in our scheme of interpretation (“scheme” in the sense of Schank and Abelson). We could call it the epistemological subject-object division.
These fundamentally interpreted objects of subject-object division can be divided into objects that are only interpreted by us and objects that give themselves an interpretation (“human beings”).
We can interpret (“explain”) these self-interpreting objects only by taking part in their self-interpretations. The subject-object divisions are fundamental for science. Nowadays, the subject-object division between subjects and self-interpreting objects (or subject-objects is widely recognized, but hardly any investigator of humanity and its institutions takes it seriously in practice. Such is the educational and research context that led me to take up the Chair of Zoology in Cardiff.