Editor ’ s Corner
Molecular Stamp Collecting
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The content of the Editor ’ s Corner is the opinion of the author and does not represent the official position of the American Society of Hematology unless so stated .
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HE GREAT EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICIST Ernest Rutherford ( 1871- 1937 ) provocatively claimed , “ All science is either physics … or stamp collecting .”
Lord Rutherford intended his cocky quip as a jab at the geologists , chemists , and biologists of his era – especially zoologists and botanists , with their endless species descriptions and taxonomies , but lack of a coherent narrative about the relationships among organisms , or their functions . Physicists , by contrast , value deductive reasoning and reduction to first principles . The biologists Lord Rutherford knew seemed happy to wallow in clutter , while his physicist friends craved the seductive power of simple , elegant explanations for complex phenomena .
Behind Lord Rutherford ’ s arrogant bluster , there is truth : Physics ( and its supporting mathematical constructs ) is , in a real sense , the mother of all science . Physics is fundamental to everything else . All other scientific disciplines can be considered “ special cases ” of physics ( e . g ., chemistry is essentially the physics of electrons and nuclear interactions ).
Still , while most geologists and zoologists of Lord Rutherford ’ s age were concerned with filling the dusty cases of natural history museums with exotic trophies , a few were genuinely trying to deduce patterns from the pandemonium of those collections . For example , useful theories such as plate tectonics and the genechromosome model of heredity arose from those efforts , and he was wrong to dismiss them as a silly hobby . The tension between these two approaches to understanding the world is as old as the debate between Platonic rationalism and Aristotelian empiricism .
As a lifelong stamp collector , I also think Lord Rutherford was selling philately short .
In the internet era , postage stamps are seen by many ( especially those of my children ’ s generation , who have never known an era without wi-fi ) as useless bits of old paper . Stamp collecting was once the king of hobbies , enjoyed by literal kings ( George V ) and presidents ( Franklin Delano Roosevelt ), but today the ranks of collectors are dwindling and aging . At some recent stamp shows , I was the youngest person there . Yet stamps still have plenty of stories to tell . If you know how to look , stamps also have tremendous explanatory power , and that is their enduring magic .
Argentina ’ s Perón-era Scott # 594 stamp ( FIGURE 1 ), for instance , looks like a simple map of the republic … until you notice that the shaded areas include the Falkland Islands /
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 2
Islas Malvinas ( claimed by the United Kingdom ), Tierra del Fuego and portions of the Andes ( claimed by Chile ), and a large wedge of Antarctica ( neutral ground by treaty ). This stamp is pure political propaganda , a philatelic land grab , and Chilean or British authorities who saw these provocative stamps on incoming letters likely marked them “ return to sender .”
The German definitive stamps of late 1923 ( FIGURE 2 ) have no pictures , yet poignantly illustrate the hyperinflation that plagued the Weimar Republic
David P . Steensma , MD , is senior physician at the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston , Massachusetts .
and the looming economic disaster that paved the way for the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s . Similarly , hematologist / oncologist Yamil Kouri , MD , recent vice president of the American Philatelic Society and one of the leading philatelists of our era , has created show exhibits in which a single envelope illuminates multiple dimensions of Spanish-American colonial politics and trade economics .
How is this relevant to hematology ? There is a parallel of sorts between stamps and genetics . We are living in an era of molecular biology in which report after report describes mutations and gene polymorphisms in samples with hematologic diseases and other conditions .
These days , anyone can sequence anything . For example , a family friend who studies plankton took a recent trip to the Southern Ocean in an oceanographic vessel that had an Illumina sequencer on board , eliminating the risk of sample degradation during the trek from Antarctica back to New England . If it is possible to sequence water samples in the extremes of the Southern Ocean – where the weather is so treacherous that mariners say , “ Below 40 degrees south there is no law ; below 50 degrees south there is no God ” – then any neophyte can sequence archival blood or tumor tissue back in Portsmouth or Portland .
It is easy to get lost in the deluge of genetic information resulting from this Easy-Bake Oven sequencing . Authors of many recently published papers have not helped us sift through the debris . As important as it is to collect molecular “ stamps ” to look for patterns , we do the community a disservice by torturing sequencing data with esoteric statistical techniques to find associations that are unlikely to be real , or meaningful , in order to publish a paper . What matters most is transforming the functional insights we gain from genetics into better diagnostic tests and treatments . Drug companies cannot design new medications by computation alone ; they need experiments . Similarly , although we need to “ collect stamps ” and look for patterns , we also need to try to understand the stories behind them .
It seems unlikely that anyone will stumble across a boyhood stamp album belonging to Ernest Rutherford but , with time , he may have come to appreciate that his views were overly reductionist . When he won a Nobel Prize in 1908 , it was not the prize in physics – it was in chemistry .
David P . Steensma , MD
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