On the road less travelled

The future is in our past -

Some of life's eureka moments occur out of the blue. A month or so ago we visited and recorded the music from four sand dunes in California and Nevada. That leaves two places in the world left to record.

The conventional wisdom regarding the cause of singing sand has always been the size of the dunes. My idea, which fell outside known thinking, was that the coating of the grains played a big role in the sound.

Today it is widely accepted that the size of the dune plays no part and the well-rounded shape (my colleague's idea) plus the coating on the grains (my original idea) are what induces the sound. And now eureka! My colleague has produced artificial singing sand in his lab.

The trips to the dunes have been spectacular, each in their own way. This time Death Valley was going to be the highlight of the trip. Death Valley conjures up memories of the cowboy movies Ned Andrews used to show in the United Church Hall in Newtown. The outlaw cowboy and his horse (it was never the hero), having run out of water, would succumb to death in the valley that was so hot it showed no mercy to man nor beast.

Yet, it was Eureka Valley, not Death Valley, which turned out to be the undiscovered gem. On a whim, we decided to take the less travelled Pass to the Eureka Dune. It wasn't advertised and any reference to it recalled that it was a rough road requiring a jeep.

The first surprise was the condition of the road. Would that we could have had such a good one, years ago, on which to travel to Gander. But Americans don't put much stock in dirt roads. A dirt road is impassible by definition.

The second surprise was that there could exist such a spectacular Pass, not overrun by tourists. The Eureka Pass is California's best-kept secret. The colours, the shapes and the narrow Pass combine to give the impression of being folded and transported by the universe's mysterious forces. Words cannot describe the feeling of bliss.

Singing sand has been part of my life for seven wonderful years. My first encounter with the sand that produces musical notes, the origin of which puzzled scientists for generations, left me in awe of nature and its secrets. But it was the human encounters that have morphed my thinking, from sand dunes to cancer research.

The young student who worked on the formation of dunes and reproducing sand sounds in small experiments, in the lab, wasn't very happy with one of his colleagues. In the last few months of his PhD work, the student was ready to quit.

No one in the lab realized the fascination of the work. On the well-travelled road, we often miss the treasures. Since I pointed it out, the movies he made are a must show in all their presentations.

In the end, the student completed his PhD, and went on to do a post doc at Harvard University in Boston. In my egotistical moments, I like to think that my words to him played a small part in his decision to stick with the program.

"For one thing your work is amazing. To leave it at this stage would leave an unfulfilled gap in your life. And if you leave because someone else is troubling you, you will be letting someone you don't like decide for you. Why don't you take the less travelled road?

In every situation, there is the odd person who can make our lives unbearable, if we let them. The nicest amongst us will walk away rather than confront. When we walk away, we are unhappy renegades who can never forgive ourselves for being weak. We walk away to be happy but it has the opposite effect."

It was the formation and shapes of the dunes, and the unhappy student, that gave me the idea about cancer. Some say that cancer cells are renegade cells that decide to branch out on their own. Cancer cells are renegades on the road less travelled. That is a given.

Society has taught us to destroy renegades. Get out the weapons; get rid of the rebels. That is exactly what we do to cancer. But what if we took a different approach? What if we gave some serious thought to why we have renegade cells? Maybe the cells are telling us that they aren't happy in our bodies.

Instead of destroying cells, the research could be about why they change shape and what they are missing. What do they need in order to remain interacting with the cells we regard as normal? Or, better still, what does the body need to attract the deviant cells back to the fold?

There have been no appreciable advances in understanding cancer, for decades. Cancer has developed into a treatment business and science follows the same well-worn road. The good news seems to be that a scientist or two may be venturing down the road less travelled. Let's hope that road is as spectacular as the Eureka Pass.