Category: General Interest

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Failure? A Destination or a Benchmark?

The dictionary has multiple definitions of failure:

1. lack of success.
2. an unsuccessful person or thing.
3. the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
4. a lack or deficiency of a desirable quality.
5. the action or state of not functioning.
6. a sudden cessation of power.
7. the collapse of a business.

The definitions all deliver the impression of a finite conclusion rather than a step in a process. Failure equals being wrong. Being wrong equals death. As a result, failure has an obvious and deeply negative stigma associated with it. Hence most people fear failing.

In fact many people do not even attempt worthwhile projects for fear of failure. This has been commented upon by various motivational speakers as sad and lamentable but is a natural outcome of the way we are taught to think about failure – it is bad and to be avoided.

And it is a lot easier and very simple to say don’t fear failure than it is to spend the time necessary to change our thinking about it. So what is a better way to think of failure and how do we change our thinking about it?

I don’t know how true it is but I have heard that Edison failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb before his success. Imagine if he took his first failure as an end point rather than a new starting point. In fact each failure could otherwise be described as a successful experiment to find out that a particular hypothesis did not work.

I was struck by this when I was doing some pullups in the park with 13 kg of weights on my back. I was doing my third set of 5 repetitions and on the last repetition I could not pull myself up more than 85% of my top range of motion. That was my point of failure. Despite my best effort, I could not pull my body up to get my nose over the bar. I “failed”.

Now, when you are exercising, this is something to aim for. Exercising with good form till you are close to failure (with some capacity left in reserve) builds strength and muscle mass.

At this point I realised every person doing resistance training “fails”. We all hit a point where we are at or close to where we can do no more. We are all “failures”, at different points. Some of us fail after 4 repetitions at 13 kg, as did I. Some of fail after 44 repetitions or with 50 kg. None of us stop training “because we failed”. We recognise it as a benchmark or a measure of progress rather than a destination. A “That’s where I am up to.” viewpoint rather than a “That is my end result.” viewpoint.

Which reminded me of a quote I heard about people who are successful marketers, “They fail fast and they fail often.” They try a lot of things, knowing that many ideas they try will fail and need to be abandoned quickly before wasting too much money on them. By doing that many times and quickly, they sooner or later and without too much wasted money, find that which works and can then do lots of that to huge success.

These top marketers know full well that a fear of failure will not lead to success.

They know that in marketing, as in exercising, it is very easy and natural to view failure as a marker, a peg in the board. A “This is where I am up to”.

What if we started doing that in other spheres of activity? What if every time we thought of something and got the negative thought come in about failing, we just looked at it and thought, “That’s only to be expected. Nothing unusual here. Any time I fail it is just another step toward the ultimate success.”

 

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They Tortured Thousands

(Tom: If you ever wonder why I am SO against psychiatry, this will give you just a fraction of the reason. Not even a big fraction. Maybe one percent of the data I have seen on it over the years.

Psychiatry was behind Hitler’s genocide of the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, behind the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, behind the drugging of children with ‘speed’ for a fictitious ADHD diagnosis, the list is long and odious.)

They Tortured Thousands

1953. The Cold War was hot. The CIA was paranoid. American POWs had come back from Korea praising communism. Confessing to crimes they didn’t commit.
The CIA believed the Soviets had cracked it. Mind control. Brainwashing. A way to rewrite a human being.
America needed it too. Or they’d lose the war before it started.
Allen Dulles gave a speech at Princeton. Called it “brain warfare.” Said the Soviets were doing it. Never mentioned America was about to do it first.
On April 13, 1953, Dulles approved Project MKUltra.
In charge: Sidney Gottlieb. Chemist. PhD from Caltech. Club foot. Stutterer. Drank goat’s milk. Grew Christmas trees on his farm.
Looked like a gentle eccentric. Was the most dangerous man in American intelligence.
They called him the Black Sorcerer. He designed poisoned cigars for Castro. Poisoned handkerchiefs. Exploding seashells. Toothpaste laced with toxins.
MKUltra was his project. His vision. His playground.
The goal was simple. Find a drug that could control minds. Erase memories. Force confessions. Create the perfect spy. The perfect assassin.
They tried everything.
LSD. Mescaline. Heroin. Barbiturates. Scopolamine. Electroshock. Sensory deprivation. Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation for weeks. Verbal abuse. Sexual abuse. Isolation chambers.
149 subprojects. Funneled through fake foundations. Front companies. So universities wouldn’t know they were taking CIA money.
Over 80 institutions. 185 researchers. Harvard. Stanford. Columbia. Johns Hopkins.
None of them told the subjects what was happening. Most subjects didn’t know they were subjects.
Here’s what they did.
They dosed prisoners. Drug addicts in a federal facility in Kentucky got LSD for 77 straight days. Black inmates. Given LSD continuously for over two months.
Just to see what would happen.
They dosed mental patients. Terminal cancer patients. Soldiers. Students who signed up for “paid research.”
They dosed each other. CIA agents at a 1953 work retreat had their drinks spiked. No warning. Just dosed.
One of them was Frank Olson. 43 years old. Army scientist. Biological weapons expert.
The LSD broke him. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. Told his wife: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Nine days after being dosed, Frank Olson went through a 10th-floor hotel window. November 28, 1953.
The CIA said suicide. Said the drugs made him do it.
In 1994, his son had the body exhumed. Forensic pathologist found a hematoma above the left eye. No glass in his hair. Injuries inconsistent with falling through a window.
The medical examiner changed the ruling. Homicide.
Frank Olson didn’t jump. Someone hit him. Then threw him out the window.
Because he knew too much. And was about to talk.
But Olson was just the famous one.
Operation Midnight Climax. Subproject 3.
The CIA rented apartments in San Francisco and New York. Set them up as safehouses. Hired prostitutes. Paid them $100 a night.
The prostitutes brought men back to the apartments. Dosed their drinks with LSD. Random targets. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Anyone they could get.
Behind a two-way mirror sat CIA agents. Drinking martinis. Watching. Taking notes.
The operation ran ten years. Hundreds of victims. All dosed without consent. All watched like animals.
The man in charge was George Hunter White. Federal narcotics agent. Installed a portable toilet behind the mirror so he never had to leave.
He wrote a letter to Gottlieb years later:
“I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
That’s what this was. Fun. For the people running it.
Meanwhile, in Montreal.
Dr. Ewen Cameron ran the Allan Memorial Institute. Former president of the World Psychiatric Association.
The CIA funded him. Funneled money through a front foundation.
Cameron called his experiments “psychic driving.” He put patients in drug-induced comas. Up to 86 days at a time.
While they slept, he played tape loops. Phrases repeated tens of thousands of times. Designed to break their minds.
Then “depatterning.” Massive doses of electroshock. 30 to 40 times the normal amount. Combined with LSD. PCP. Barbiturates.
The goal: erase the personality completely. Rebuild it from scratch.
It didn’t work. He destroyed them instead.
Patients came out unable to read. Unable to remember their children. Unable to control basic bodily functions. Adults reduced to infant states.
These were people who’d gone to him for anxiety. Mild depression. Normal disorders.
They left broken. Many never recovered.
Cameron died in 1967. Never prosecuted. Obituary praised his contributions to psychiatry.
The program kept going. Year after year. Victim after victim.
Some survivors figured out what had happened. Most didn’t. Most went to their graves thinking they’d gone crazy on their own.
Not knowing a government chemist had broken their minds for an experiment that never worked.
Because it didn’t work.
After 20 years and millions of dollars, the CIA never created a Manchurian Candidate. Never found a truth serum. Never figured out mind control.
All they did was torture people for nothing.
In 1973, Richard Helms knew the scandal was coming. Watergate had broken. Congress was starting to look.
Helms was CIA Director. He ordered Gottlieb to destroy every MKUltra file.
They shredded everything. Every experiment. Every subject. Every name. Gone.
They thought they’d gotten away with it.
Then in 1977, a CIA clerk found 20,000 pages. Misfiled under financial records. Missed the shredder.
Those pages became the Church Committee hearings. America learned about MKUltra for the first time.
Over 30 universities involved. Covert drug tests on unwitting citizens. At every social level. High and low.
Sidney Gottlieb was called to testify. Claimed he didn’t remember. Couldn’t recall specifics.
No one went to prison. Not Gottlieb. Not Helms. Not Dulles. Not Cameron. Not White.
Gottlieb retired to Virginia. Grew organic vegetables. Volunteered at a hospice. Practiced folk dancing.
Died in 1999. Age 80. In his own bed. Peacefully.
The victims didn’t get that.
Thousands of Americans and Canadians used as test subjects. Without consent. Without knowledge. Without follow-up care.
Many were poor. Many were incarcerated. Many were mentally ill. Many were minorities.
Chosen because no one would believe them. No one would defend them. No one would miss them.
Some killed themselves. Some spent years in mental hospitals. Some never recovered.
We will never know how many. The files are gone. Gottlieb burned them.
Here’s what makes this unforgivable.
This wasn’t a foreign enemy. Wasn’t a rogue agent. This was official US policy. Approved at the highest levels. Funded with taxpayer money.
American citizens. Drugged. Raped. Tortured. Driven mad. By their own government. For nothing.
And the men who did it faced no consequences. No prison. No disgrace. Died rich. Died respected.
The victims died screaming. In bedrooms and mental wards and hotel windows. Their names never said out loud.
MKUltra wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was real. It happened. Proven in Senate hearings. The CIA admitted it. The President apologized.
And almost no one was punished.
The United States government ran a torture program against its own people for 20 years.
Destroyed the evidence.
Got away with it.
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If You Fail To Plan You Are Planning To Fail II

I heard the title of this article many moons ago now. In fact, about 50 years ago. That’s a half a century! Sheesh! Time flies when you’re having fun!

And that’s the trouble. We start out life thinking we have plenty of time. Which we do. But life is chock-a-block full of distractions and we get busy working to buy groceries and pay rent, going out socialising to have fun and to find a mate, then saving for a home, raising a family and before we know it, life is lived and we are looking at grown up grand children wondering, “Where did the time go?”

Well, it went on living. But was it the life we would have chosen if we knew then what we know now? Would we have done things differently if we could have known what was coming?

One way to know what will be the result of our actions is to be widely read, especially of people who research causes and effects, what causes generate what effects.

You may have heard the quote from Will Rogers, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

IMHO you and I cannot live long enough to learn all we need to by our own observation and experience. School is supposed to be a shortcut so we can acquire the wisdom and good judgement from a lot of other people’s experience without having to go through a lot of pain from our own inexperienced poor judgement.

All too often, when school stops, so does many people’s intensive learning. Truthfully, many people’s intensive learning stops even prior to leaving school but the failings of the education system are a story for another post.

Probably the first skill that needs to be acquired in order to learn is the ability to face the subject without flinching away from it. In one subject I have studied extensively that ability is called the ability to confront – to face without flinching.

Most people do not want to be uncomfortable. I have read that most people would rather live a comfortable lie than live an uncomfortable truth.

I have also read people say, “Once you see something you cannot unsee it.”

So if seeing something makes a person uncomfortable then the fear of what one might see and learn has the effect of reducing their willingness to look.

Obviously the answer is to gradiently increase a person’s ability to comfortably confront what is really there until they arrive at a point where they can confront anything without flinching away from it. This is a high ability indeed!

If that interests you, contact me!

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Lillian Wald

Lillian Wald

She could have lived a comfortable life.

Her father was a successful merchant. Her home in Rochester, New York was always full of books, music, and warmth. She had everything most people dreamed of.

But Lillian Wald walked away from all of it.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

The first time, she was 16 years old – bright, determined, and full of ambition. She applied to Vassar College, one of the most respected women’s colleges in America. They rejected her. Not because she wasn’t smart enough. Simply because she was too young.

Most people would have taken that rejection personally. Lillian took it as extra time.

She spent six years traveling the world and even worked as a newspaper reporter. She was curious about everything. She was watching, learning, absorbing life.

Then, in 1889, she met a young nurse – and something shifted inside her. She enrolled at the New York Hospital Training School. She graduated in 1891. She was finally on her way.

The second time she walked away, it was from medical school.

After graduating as a nurse, she started teaching home nursing classes to poor immigrant families on New York’s Lower East Side – one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire world. Families of ten people crammed into apartments barely 325 square feet in size. Children sleeping in shifts. Parents working in dangerous conditions. Sickness everywhere.

One day, she was called to help a young girl’s sick mother living in a filthy, crumbling tenement. What she saw in that apartment changed her forever.

She left medical school the next day.

Not because she gave up. Because she couldn’t justify sitting in a classroom while real people were suffering just a few streets away.

She moved directly into the neighborhood.

In 1893, Lillian Wald did something no one had done before.

She created a new kind of healthcare worker – one who didn’t wait for the sick to come to a hospital. Instead, these nurses went into homes, into dark tenements, into the streets. She called them public health nurses. She literally invented that term.

And then, with her friend Mary Brewster and the support of generous donors, she founded the Visiting Nurse Service of New York – bringing affordable, dignified healthcare to people who had never received it before.

A year later, in 1894, she opened the Henry Street Settlement House – a place offering not just medical care, but education, community support, and belonging for thousands of immigrants trying to build a new life in America.

She helped establish some of the first playgrounds in New York City. She personally helped pay the salary of the first public school nurses in NYC history.

The third time Lillian walked away from comfort was perhaps the most powerful.

She could have run her Settlement House quietly – kept her head down, helped her neighbors, and stayed out of the bigger battles. But Lillian Wald understood something important,

Treating sickness wasn’t enough if the system creating the sickness was never changed.

So she fought.

She helped launch the United States Children’s Bureau, pushing for the rights and protection of children across the nation. She co-founded the National Child Labor Committee, working to end the cruel practice of sending young children to work in dangerous factories and mines. She helped build the National Women’s Trade Union League, giving working women a voice.

She marched for women’s right to vote. She advocated for women’s access to birth control. She fought for workplace safety laws that protected laborers from dangerous conditions.

And when the devastating Spanish Flu epidemic swept through America in 1918 – killing hundreds of thousands of people – Lillian Wald led the Red Cross campaign to fight it, coordinating care across the country.

By 1913, the Henry Street Settlement had grown to seven buildings. It had 3,000 active members in its classes and clubs. Ninety-two nurses were making approximately 200,000 home health visits every single year.

In 1922, the New York Times named Lillian Wald one of the 12 greatest living American women in the country.

She later received the Lincoln Medallion – awarded to outstanding citizens of New York – for a life poured entirely into others.

Lillian Wald retired in 1930 and passed away peacefully on September 1, 1940, at the age of 73.

At a memorial held at Carnegie Hall, 2,500 people gathered – including the Governor and the Mayor of New York – to speak about one woman who had refused to look the other way.

She never sought fame. She never asked for monuments. She simply saw people who were suffering, and she moved closer instead of further away.

The Henry Street Settlement still stands on the Lower East Side today – more than 130 years later. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York still operates, one of the largest home healthcare organizations in America.

All of it began because a young woman from Cincinnati looked into a dark, crowded tenement apartment and decided that what she saw there was her responsibility.

Not someone else’s. Hers.

That is the kind of person who actually changes the world. Not the loudest voice in the room. The one who quietly moves in, rolls up their sleeves, and stays.

We don’t need to be extraordinary to make a difference. We just need to refuse to look away.

Who in your life quietly shows up for others? Tag them below. They deserve to be seen.

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It’s Today!

“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh.” ― A.A. Milne

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Quote of the Day

“It is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.” – Rene Descartes

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Jean Craighead George

Jean Craighead George

By the time Jean Craighead George had finished writing her last book, 173 wild animals had lived in her house.

That figure does not include the dogs and the cats. It does include the turkey vulture (her first pet), the crows, the owls, the raccoons, the tarantulas, the bats, the foxes, the falcons, the geese, the chipmunks, and the long succession of other species who came and went freely from the back porch of her old house in Chappaqua, New York, between roughly 1944 and her death in 2012. They were not in cages. They were not behind glass. They came in through the door, ate at her table, slept where they pleased, and at the end of the season — when the light shifted and some old instinct turned in their bodies — they let themselves out and went back to wherever it was they had come from.

Each one of them, before they left, gave her something her library could not.

A character. A detail. A verified piece of behavior. A line of dialogue she could put in the mouth of an animal in one of her hundred-and-some books for children.

Her most famous of those books is the one almost every American who attended elementary school after 1960 has read.

It is called My Side of the Mountain.

Jean Carolyn Craighead was born in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1919, into one of the most extraordinary American naturalist families of the 20th century. Her father, Frank Craighead Sr., was an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and an obsessive naturalist who spent every weekend pulling his three children — Jean and her older twin brothers, Frank Jr. and John — into the forests around the city. They studied owls. They identified plants. They climbed trees. They learned to make fish hooks from twigs. Their mother, Carolyn, was a fellow naturalist who shared the obsession.

Jean’s twin older brothers grew up to become two of the most consequential wildlife biologists in American history. Frank Jr. and John Craighead’s twelve-year radio-telemetry study of the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park, conducted from 1959 to 1971, fundamentally rewrote what scientists understood about grizzly population dynamics and is widely credited with helping protect the species from extinction in the lower 48 states. The brothers had a long and famous battle with the National Park Service over the closing of Yellowstone’s open garbage dumps, which the Craigheads correctly predicted would cause a population crash before they had finished their fieldwork.

Their younger sister Jean took the same family obsession in a different direction.

She graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1940 with degrees in both English and Science. She worked as a reporter for the Washington Post in the 1940s and was a member of the White House Press Corps. She married a fellow naturalist named John L. George in 1944, and the two of them co-wrote her earliest books for children — including the American Woodland Tales series, beginning with Vulpes the Red Fox in 1948.

She started keeping wild animals at home around the time the children started arriving.

She and John had three children: Twig C. George (who would grow up to be a children’s book author herself), Craig George (who would become an environmental scientist), and T. Luke George (who would also become an environmental scientist). The household they grew up in was, by every account anyone has ever given of it, like nothing else in suburban Westchester County. Bats in the refrigerator. Owls in the bathroom. A crow at the breakfast table. A raccoon in the hallway. The owls came naturally — Jean’s brothers’ lifelong work with raptors meant that every Craighead family gathering had at least one bird of prey in attendance. The raccoons and the foxes and the chipmunks came in, in Jean’s later words, because she could not stop them and did not particularly want to.

Most of them, when the season changed, simply left.

Her 1959 book My Side of the Mountain — about a boy named Sam Gribley who runs away from his family’s small Manhattan apartment to live alone in a hollowed-out hemlock tree in the Catskill Mountains, surviving on his own foraged food and training a young peregrine falcon named Frightful — won a 1960 Newbery Honor and has not been out of print since. It has been on American elementary school reading lists for sixty-six years. There are several generations of American adults who can still remember exactly where they were sitting when they finished it. Most of them, somewhere quietly inside themselves, briefly considered whether they could actually do what Sam did.

Sam was Jean. She had been him.

She and John divorced in 1963. She kept writing.

In the summer of 1970 — alone now, with her youngest son Luke in tow — Jean traveled to the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow, Alaska, where a small team of scientists was attempting something nobody in modern Western science had quite tried before. They were learning to communicate with wolves. The research was led by the wildlife biologist Gordon Haber. The team had identified the specific signals — postural, vocal, scent-based — by which wolves communicated within a pack, and they had begun, with small successes, to use those signals to communicate back.

Jean tried it.

She told the story for the rest of her life. She had stood out on the open tundra outside the Barrow lab. She had used the postural and vocal cues she had been taught. A wolf had answered her.

Two specific images from that summer — a small Inuit girl walking alone across the tundra outside Barrow, and a magnificent alpha male wolf leading his pack in Denali National Park — stayed with her for more than a year before she sat down to write what would become her most famous book.

Julie of the Wolves was published in 1972. The story of an Inuit girl named Miyax — who runs away from a violent forced marriage on the North Slope of Alaska, gets lost on the open tundra, and survives by patiently earning the trust of a wolf pack — won the 1973 Newbery Medal, the highest American honor in children’s literature. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. It became, like My Side of the Mountain, a permanent fixture on American school reading lists. It was followed by two sequels: Julie (1994) and Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997).

Jean kept writing, kept keeping animals, and kept writing about them, for the rest of her life.

She wrote more than a hundred books for children. She wrote two cookbooks for foraged wild foods. She wrote her own autobiography, Journey Inward, in 1982. She wrote up until her death, working on her last manuscripts in her ninth decade. Her brothers Frank Jr. and John outlived her, eventually dying within nineteen days of each other in 2016 at the ages of 100 and 99. The three Craighead siblings — born within three years of each other in the early 20th century and shaped by the same Maryland woods on the weekends — collectively shaped how Americans understood and cared for wild animals for the better part of a hundred years.

Jean Craighead George died on May 15, 2012, in Mount Kisco, New York. She was 92 years old.

She had spent nearly a century trying to tell anyone who would listen one specific thing about the natural world.

It is not a destination. It is not a documentary. It is not a school field trip.

It is something you let into your kitchen. Something you learn the language of. Something that, if you are patient enough — and if you do not panic, and if you do not put it in a cage — speaks back.

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Work With Your Soil

Work With Your Soil

What happens when you stop fighting your soil… and start working with it?
Everything changes.
Your input bills start coming down.
Because the soil biology is doing the heavy lifting FOR you now.
Yields hold strong at first… then they start improving.
Productivity maintained, then improved… without increasing spend to get there.
Your pasture bounces back faster after grazing.
After dry spells.
After stress.
The ground just RECOVERS quicker.
Water retention improves.
Which means less stress through dry periods… and a longer growing window.
Weed and pest pressure? It eases naturally.
Balanced biology crowds out weeds… and reduces pest vulnerability from the ground up.
You’re building something worth handing on.
A farm that gets BETTER with time.
Not harder to manage.
Not harder to justify keeping.
The paddocks start doing what they used to.
That feeling when the land starts responding again.
Ready to start working with your soil?
Download the FREE ebook “The Biological Farming Revolution” below to learn how to start experiencing these results for yourself.

https://microstartfarming.com.au/

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Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis

(Tom: Another story about a person who could look being ridiculed by “experts” who could not or would not look and the tough progress truth makes against stiff opposition.

Truth wins in the end.

You just need to be strong enough to outlast those who cannot or will not look.)

Lynn was born in 1938. Chicago Illinois. Jewish family. Smart kid. Really smart. Enters University of Chicago at 16. Younger than everyone. Doesn’t care.

Meets Carl Sagan. Future famous astronomer. Science nerds. Fall in love. Marry 1957. She’s 19. He’s 22.

Lynn gets masters 1960. Wisconsin. Then PhD 1965. Berkeley. Genetics. Cell biology. Has two kids with Carl. Dorion 1959. Jeremy 1960. Busy mom. Busy researcher.

Marriage falls apart 1964. Two brilliant scientists. Two big egos. Carl wants traditional wife. Lynn wants her own career. Doesn’t work.

1966 she gets first job. Boston University. Biology department. Age 28. Just starting out. Marries Nicholas Margulis. Takes his name.

She’s been thinking about cells for years. Something weird. Mitochondria especially. Little energy factories inside every cell. Keep us alive.

Mitochondria are weird. Have their own DNA. Separate from cell’s main DNA. Have their own ribosomes. Reproduce independently. Divide on their own schedule.

Mitochondria also look exactly like bacteria. Same shape. Same size. Same membranes. Same division method. Noticed since late 1800s. Nobody can explain it.

Russian biologist Konstantin Merezhkovsky wrote theory 1905. Maybe mitochondria used to BE bacteria. Got swallowed by ancient cells. Stuck around. Became part of cell. He got ridiculed. Theory forgotten 60 years.

Lynn rediscovered the idea. Takes it seriously. Connects the dots. Chloroplasts too. Green parts of plant cells. Also have own DNA. Also look exactly like bacteria.

She goes further. Proposes whole theory. Calls it endosymbiosis. Complex cells started simple. Then swallowed other cells. Some swallows became permanent. Those became organelles.

Every human cell contains descendants of ancient bacteria. Your mitochondria came from bacteria eaten billions of years ago. Still living inside you. Still making energy. Mind blowing.

Lynn writes it up. 1966. 50 page paper. “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.”

Sends it to Science magazine. Biggest journal in America. Rejected. Too speculative. No direct evidence.

Sends it to Nature. Biggest journal in world. Rejected. Too weird. Too much theory.

Sends it to Cell. Rejected. Sends it to PNAS. Rejected. Sends it to Journal of Cell Biology. Rejected. Sends it everywhere. Rejected everywhere.

15 journals reject Lynn’s paper. Fifteen. Senior biologists think she’s crazy. Think she’s resurrecting debunked theory. Say mitochondria can’t be bacteria. Say evolution doesn’t work that way.

Lynn doesn’t stop. Keeps sending it. Keeps defending at conferences. Gets laughed at. Gets talked down to. Senior scientists lecture her about basic biology. Like she doesn’t know anything. Young woman. No credentials. Easy to dismiss.

Finally 1967 Journal of Theoretical Biology accepts it. Smaller journal. Less prestigious. But they publish it. Lynn is 29.

Response is devastating. Senior biologists mock the paper. Say she has no evidence. Say it’s pseudoscience. Say she’s embarrassing herself.

She goes to conferences. Gets heckled. Senior biologists interrupt her talks. Make fun of her ideas. Colleagues stop talking to her. Don’t want association with crazy theory lady.

Boston University almost denies tenure. She’s too controversial. Too unconventional. Department almost fires her. She nearly loses career over theory.

But Lynn keeps working. Keeps researching. Keeps pushing. Writes book 1970. “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.” Expands theory. Yale University Press. Small print run.

Then things start changing. 1970s molecular biology advances fast. DNA analysis becomes possible. Scientists can compare genes. See how related they are.

Carl Woese at Illinois. Ford Doolittle at Dalhousie. Michael Gray. Several groups doing ribosomal RNA analysis.

What they find stuns everyone. Mitochondrial DNA is more similar to bacterial DNA than animal cell DNA. Chloroplast DNA almost identical to cyanobacteria DNA. Molecular evidence is unmistakable. These organelles really were bacteria.

1978 Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff do key experiment. First experimental proof. Prove mitochondria descended from specific bacteria. Alpha proteobacteria. Your mitochondria are domesticated typhus relatives.

By early 1980s endosymbiosis theory is widely accepted. Goes from crazy to mainstream in 15 years. Textbooks get rewritten. Biology courses change. Lynn was right all along.

Lynn is elected to National Academy of Sciences 1983. Age 45. Highest honor for American scientists. Vindication from peers.

She works with James Lovelock. He proposed Gaia Hypothesis. Earth is one living system. Lynn gives it biological credibility.

Moves to University of Massachusetts Amherst 1988. Distinguished Professor. Teaches until death. Students love her. Brilliant lecturer. Unconventional. Funny. Provocative.

1999 President Clinton gives her National Medal of Science. Highest science honor in America. Official recognition.

2008 Linnean Society gives her Darwin-Wallace Medal. Named after Darwin and Wallace. Lynn is in their company now.

Writes many books. Most with son Dorion Sagan. “Microcosmos” about bacterial history. “Five Kingdoms” about taxonomy. Millions of copies sold.

Argues with Richard Dawkins. Famous British biologist. Dawkins says genes compete. Lynn says cells cooperate. Different views of evolution. They debate for decades. Never agree.

November 22 2011. Age 73. Dies at home in Amherst Massachusetts. Hemorrhagic stroke. Five days in hospital. Surrounded by family. Peaceful. After most productive controversial career in modern biology.

Think about Lynn’s story. Young woman. Age 28. Just started career. Proposes theory contradicting 50 years of science. Says cells are built from swallowed bacteria. Science world laughs. 15 journals reject her.

One journal finally publishes. Senior scientists mock her at conferences. Colleagues stop talking. Nearly loses tenure. Career almost destroyed.

She keeps working. Keeps writing. Keeps teaching. Keeps fighting. Builds the case. Builds evidence. Refuses to give up.

Molecular biology catches up. DNA evidence confirms everything. By 1980s her theory is in every textbook. Every biology student learns endosymbiosis. Every human knows we have ancient bacteria in our cells.

Evolutionary biology changes completely. Before Margulis evolution was mainly competition. Mutation. Natural selection. Survival of fittest.

After Margulis people understand cooperation too. Different organisms can merge. Become new organisms. Symbiosis drives evolution.

Medical research changes too. Understanding mitochondrial DNA revolutionizes disease diagnosis. Mitochondrial diseases. Genetic testing. Ancestry testing. All possible because we understand mitochondrial heritage. All built on Margulis’s foundation.

Her papers still cited thousands of times yearly. 50 years after publication. That’s rare. Her landmark 1967 paper still foundational. Still required reading.

2017 biology community celebrates 50 year anniversary. Special journal issues. Conferences. Tributes. Scientists who rejected her now honor her.

She’s inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame. Posthumously. Named in lists of greatest scientists. Her tenacity becomes legendary. Story told to young scientists. Shows them how to stand up for ideas.

Biologist proposes theory at 29. Says cells contain ancient bacteria. 15 journals reject her. Scientists call her crazy. Nearly loses job. Keeps fighting. DNA proves her right in 1980s. Now in every biology textbook. Changed evolutionary biology forever.

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Charles Fraser-Smith

Charles Fraser-Smith

To everyone at the Ministry of Supply, Charles Fraser-Smith was just a clerk in the Clothing and Textile Department.
He shuffled papers. He placed fabric orders. He took the train from Hertfordshire each morning and sat in a cramped London office, and nobody thought twice about him.
That was precisely the point.
His real work happened elsewhere, under direction from MI6, in sessions with anonymous voices on the telephone who would call with requests that sounded like riddles.
Four hundred miniature cameras. By next week.
Three hundred Spanish Army uniforms. By month’s end.
A trunk capable of preserving a human corpse in dry ice. As soon as possible.
Fraser-Smith never asked why. He simply made it happen.
He had a gift that is very difficult to teach: he understood how people think when they’re searching for something. And he used that understanding in reverse — designing objects that looked so completely like what they were supposed to be that no one would ever think to look inside them.
A hairbrush wasn’t just a hairbrush. Unscrew the base and out came a silk map of Germany, folded to near-invisibility, and a miniature saw blade. A fountain pen hid a compass in its barrel and a map in its ink reservoir. Uniform buttons unscrewed to reveal tiny compasses with luminous dots for night navigation — but here was the genius in the detail: the thread was cut left-handed. A German guard turning it the normal way would only tighten it further. You had to know the secret to find the secret.
Behind enemy lines, in prisoner-of-war camps, in hostile territory after a plane went down — these were the tools that brought men home. Handkerchiefs printed with maps in invisible ink that could be revealed by a substance every prisoner had available to them. Bootlaces that looked ordinary but contained thin surgical saw-wire inside, capable of cutting through iron bars. Shaving brushes with film hidden in the handle. Cigarette lighters that were also cameras. Pipes lined with asbestos for carrying documents through fire. Even food compressed into toothpaste tubes — an idea, Fraser-Smith noted with quiet satisfaction, that later became a multi-million-pound commercial industry.
His proudest invention was the hollow golf ball. Packed with a compass or a coded message, the balls had to be indistinguishable from real ones — proper weight, proper bounce, passed between hands in full view of guards. They were. They worked. Countless men navigated their way home across occupied Europe following the instructions hidden in something a German officer had personally inspected and handed back.
Fraser-Smith worked with over three hundred London suppliers, none of whom knew what they were making or why. When Treasury clerks questioned his expenses, he arranged for one particularly persistent auditor to review a specific kit — after signing the Official Secrets Act. The auditor discovered the supplier had been undercharging. Nobody questioned a Fraser-Smith bill again.
His most extraordinary assignment came in 1943. British intelligence had conceived a plan of breathtaking audacity: plant false documents on a corpse, let it wash ashore in Spain, and convince Hitler that the coming Allied invasion of Europe was aimed at Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Fraser-Smith received the order that made the plan possible — design a trunk six feet two inches long, capable of preserving a two-hundred-pound body in dry ice without refrigeration, using evaporating carbon dioxide to do the work of cold.
The trunk was built. The body was dressed and prepared. The documents were planted. The corpse washed ashore.
Hitler redirected entire divisions away from Sicily. The Allied landings met far less resistance than anticipated. Operation Mincemeat had worked.
Working in the same world — though rarely crossing paths directly with Fraser-Smith — was a young Naval Intelligence officer named Ian Fleming. He understood intimately how the secret gadget networks operated. He knew the ingenuity and the discipline that kept agents alive. And in 1952, when he sat down in Jamaica to write a spy novel about a fictional agent named James Bond, he created a character who supplied gadgets to field operatives.
He called the character Q.
Fraser-Smith later said he “slightly” knew Fleming. Fleming, it seems, knew his work rather better than that.
The fictional Q Branch that Fleming invented was nothing like Fraser-Smith’s actual operation — flashier, more explosive, more interested in spectacle than survival. When Fleming borrowed the hollow golf ball idea for one of his novels, Fraser-Smith complained the fictional version wouldn’t have fooled an Irish farmhand, let alone a German prison officer. But the connection was real, and it ran deep.
For thirty years after the war, Fraser-Smith said nothing. The Official Secrets Act demanded silence. He bought a dairy farm in Devon, raised his family, and kept his wartime gadgets locked away. Only when the restrictions expired did he publish his memoirs and begin showing his inventions to visitors at a small museum on the Exmoor Steam Railway, spending one week each year patiently explaining how a left-handed thread had once saved a man’s life.
He died in 1992. His obituary called him “the gadget-designing genius on whom the character Q in the James Bond novels and movies was modeled.”
That might have been the end of it. A footnote to both real history and fictional espionage.
But then something happened that Fraser-Smith, with his understanding of disguise and concealment and things that are not quite what they appear, might have appreciated more than anyone.
The real MI6 — the Secret Intelligence Service — officially adopted the title “Q” for its head of technology. The department’s working philosophy became known as “Q culture.” The title wasn’t inherited from some ancient intelligence tradition. It was borrowed directly from the James Bond films.
Which were themselves inspired by Charles Fraser-Smith.
A man who built hollow golf balls to hide compasses had become a fictional character who had become an institutional title at the world’s most famous spy agency.
And then, in June 2025, the story completed its circle in a way that nobody could have planned.
The woman serving as MI6’s real Q — Blaise Metreweli, Director-General of Technology and Innovation, who spent her career building the tools that kept British agents hidden from Chinese surveillance systems and Russian intelligence — was promoted to become C. Chief of the entire service. The first woman to hold that position in 116 years.
Q became C. Reality became fiction became reality again.
Charles Fraser-Smith never sought recognition. His name was classified, his work invisible, his contribution measured only in the men who made it home because of something hidden inside an ordinary-looking object. He would have found it fitting, perhaps, that the most famous gadget-master in the world is a fictional character — and that almost nobody has ever heard of the real man who inspired him.
But that, as he understood better than anyone, is the whole point of a good disguise.
The best hiding place is the one nobody thinks to look.