C H R I S T M A S 2 0 1 7

In January this year having been in Baltimore long enough to have life settle down, I thought I had a bit of spare time. So, I started the year with some jazz lessons with local jazz guitarist Skip Grasso (www.skipgrasso.biz). In Seattle I spent time studying with Ryan Burns (ryanburnsmusic.com), a local jazz pianist, trying to understand jazz theory, not piano. With Skip, who is supremely enthusiastic about teaching jazz, each one-hour lesson typically lasted two. I think quite a bit sank in, but it required lots of pondering for which I have plenty of time, but even more hands on time which has been sadly precluded by my travel schedule. It was clear that my music theory understanding was way ahead of my musical reduction to practice. So, the lessons went into a holding pattern while I tried to get under my fingers what Skip was saying. For me this meant going back to the dominant 7 chord and mixolydian scales and arpeggios and its cousin the altered scale. The dominant 7 chord provides an opportunity for dissonance in jazz and music in general. It’s the tension part of the tension and release motif of jazz. Since last seeing Skip I have spent the 5-10 minutes per day I have available focused on comparison of dominant chord movement in the Major Blues, Minor Blues and Jazz Blues all in the key of Bb, which has helped but much work remains.

Dave with Ted Hupp (left) in the Lower Damgate, UK at the Ardgour symposium; see www.kilgourlab.com/ardgour-2017-travel-info/. Ted is originally from West Virginia but moved to Scotland for his postdoc with David Lane of p53 fame and never returned. He is also PI of the newly funded ICCVS (vide infra) in Gdansk Poland where we aim to discover peptide neoantigens that can turn on a patient's own immune system to kill cancer.

Just before the new year started Donna and I drove to Alabama for my Dad’s 85^th birthday. For that I learned a few songs from my childhood, which were infused with the sounds of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. As a young man I steered clear of these legends, but time provided context and appreciation. Like comfort food, which I would not eat when younger such as turnip greens with hot sauce that I now find delicious, these music legends now connect me to the nostalgia of my childhood. As we were leaving Dad said it was his best birthday ever. I don’t know about that, but I do know it wasn’t the best those songs - Folsom Prison Blues and I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry - have ever been played. He enjoyed them though, which was the point and they were certainly easier to master than jazz where I am still trying to maneuver through Autumn Leaves’ Major ii V I IV connection to a Minor ii v i VI.

Mr Dave’s home office decorated by Miss Donna*; for more on Mr Dave’s thoughts on this and that mostly related to biomedical issues please see twitter.com/goodlettlab1. *In Baltimore they often refer to older folk of course using Sir or Mam if they don’t know you, but if they do know you then you are likely to be addressed as Miss Donna or Mr Dave.

During the drive down and back to Moulton we listened exclusively to the Tom Petty channel (aka the TP channel) – that’s 14 hours one way of TP – all because Donna is a humongous TP fan and because she was driving the whole way had the driver's choice of music rule on her side. Ugh. Not my favorite, but there are some Mudcrutch (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudcrutch) songs that I like and even a few TP songs, but most of his compositions don’t do much for me. Not long after the new year began we realized TP was coming to Baltimore in July on his 40^th anniversary tour. Shortly thereafter TP tickets came in the email for her January birthday. I have to admit that even though I’m not a fan of his style, the concert was really well done. They were one of those bands that pretty much did the songs as you expect to hear them, which is no easy feat in part because as a musician it becomes a bit boring night after night….for 40 years! Sadly, TP passed on to the next world by Summer’s end as did one of my favorites - Chris Cornell of Temple of the Dog, Audio Slave and Sound Garden fame (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cornell).

La Famiglia waiting on Kansas to perform at the Art Model Lyric Performance Center which is only a 15 minute walk from our crib in Bolton Hill.

30 years ago this past May Miss Donna and I got hitched at Dalraida United Methodist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the years I have tried unsuccessfully to uncover the origin of the world Dalraida, which is also the name of the neighborhood I grew up in from ’66 – ’78. It is suspiciously close to the spelling of the ancient Scottish kingdom of Dal Riata (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata), but that is as far as I can get. We spent our anniversary this year in New York City where we got to meet the infamous Hari Kondabolou most recently of Apu fame (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Kondabolu) who was performing at Caroline’s comedy club. He has a sharp tongue when it comes to white privilege in the US, which we really appreciated because we too are tired of listening seas of white haired white men go on about what is good for the country. Some though find his routine offensive enough to leave mid-show. C’est la vie. He is a hoot! Donna also got to see the Liberal Redneck (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trae_Crowder) perform in WA DC this year. He is also a hoot, but in this case for his ability to poke fun at redneck culture, from which we are not too far removed.  

Mr Dave’s nemesis at the YMCA located in Baltimore at the site of the old stadium where Johnny Unitas played for the Baltimore colts which I watched on TV Sundays after church with my Dad. For the last year I have been stuck at around 5 sets of 5 reps of 225lbs for deadlifts and 185lbs on squats and bench press.

The reason to go to NYC instead of some exotic locale was that work circumstances meant that I would be in the Bronx at Albert Einstein Medical University right before our anniversary. While we had discussed going back to Cumberland Island where we honeymooned, the $600 a night was not appealing (greyfieldinn.com). Instead, we already planned to go to Florence Italy and Split Croatia in 2018, and thus didn’t see a reason to splurge on a 30^th anniversary trip just for the heck of it. Besides, NYC has more than enough sites to keep you busy for a few days. We even made it to the top of the Empire state building this time and ate our fill at numerous delicious spots including Korean at gaonnurinyc.com; nouveau Americana at thesmithrestaurant.com and overpriced Americana at www.bryantparkgrillnyc.com. We also spent a long day in Central Park and at the Metropolitan Museum where we wore our feet out seeing as much as possible.

Miss Donna taking a break at The Met in NYC, but thinking "Can we go back to the hotel now?". 

Meanwhile, the boys have been hard at work at University. Graham at the University of Maryland College Park studying Chemical Engineering, which is even harder to do well in than chemistry which I studied. David on the other hand is at Towson University in the pre-medicine program, but truth be told he, like his relative Mike Goodlett who is an MD for Auburn University sports, is mainly interested in sports medicine practice. Neither program is easy. So both of them are busy bees working hard to secure their futures. Both guys had jobs this past Summer. Graham worked in a microbiology laboratory optimizing an extraction protocol for bacterial lipids and David went door-to-door in the oppressive Baltimore humidity selling new roofs. Judging from conversations with his Mom Graham is a fan of logic and understanding life from first principles, while David is wishing he had enough money to turn my 2004 Subaru Forest XT, which he commutes in, into a tuner. Fortunately, he can’t afford all the modifications!

Miss Donna with her Resist Hon* sign at the 2017 Women’s march in Washington, D.C. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women's_March), which had so many people (estimates range from 440k to 500k people in WA DC alone) they could not march making it in fact a rally. 

* Hon = a popular euphemism for honey here in Baltimore, or as they say here Ball-mor not unlike where I grew up Mun-gum-ree instead of Montgomery.

Donna has taken a page from her past and worked for most of the year, but also protesting a bit on two occasions, the : 1) 2017 Women’s March and 2) Science March. At work she is an office administrator for a naturopath she met as a patient (sunlightnaturalhealth.com). As an expert uber organizer, which drives me crazy with my fail safe pile based method of organization, she has been doing everything she can to help them corral the loads of paperwork that comes with running a small, independent medical practice. Having the boys out of the house has meant she had time to take care of herself again part of which was just getting out of the house to work. However, she also signed up recently for a service provide by a company called Arivale (arivale.com) that my former boss Leroy Hood (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Hood) began. They run hundreds of standard biochemical tests on you but also provide a genetic profile to try to determine your overall state of health. After all the tests are done they provide counseling to try to correct any biochemical markers that might be out of range. 

This type of medical counseling is part a new wave of trying to better understand what defines healthy normal humans, which is not as easy as it might seem. While the National Institutes of Health has spent loads of money in the last 50 years studying disease, not much has been done to define what healthy normal looks like. In short it turns out that there is a wide range of healthy that can look heterogeneous with some folk who are normal being outside the standard normal ranges and some who have disease are inside the range. Arivale is one of the companies leading the way to the future of what they call data-driven health. The data part is not new but the amount of data they collect is well beyond what historically has been collected at one time on an individual patient. For example a typical doctor will listen to your complaints and order a few tests, whereas Arivale order everything all at once and then diagnose you. This concept is an offshoot of the Institute for Systems Biology (systemsbiology.org) that Hood created in 2000 that sought to define biological organisms as an engineer would reverse engineer how something worked by first defining all of the parts and their range of functions before developing a model of the whole system.

Jeff the Peroni drinking redneck rooster (made in Tennessee) that Miss Donna bought for herself for her 30^th wedding anniversary present, but from Mr Dave she got pearls.

 

Merry Christmas from the Baltimore Goodletts!

P.S. below are some leftover photos from the year

Dave lecturing about the importance of longitudinal as opposed to pair-wise comparisons for discovery of biomarkers of tipping points in disease progression at Clinprot (clinprot2017.org/) in Moscow.

Not the Heineken palace in Moscow but the Kremlin from a boat tour through downtown Moscow.

Dave, Garry and Eric in Dublin for HUPO (hupo2017.ie/dublin-ireland) at the Marker Hotel watching a rugby match.

Yes. Guinness (www.guinness-storehouse.com/en) tastes better at the source!

Mint ready to drive Ham to college park to start the 2017-2018 academic year.

The remains of Dave’s hogfish lunch in Key West in April on the way to the North American FTICR MS conference (nationalmaglab.org/news-events/events/for-scientists/ft-ms-conference) with my Russian friend Yury Tsybin of Spectroswiss (spectroswiss.ch) fame just out of camera range.

Side one of Miss Donna’s Science March sign.

Side two of Miss Donna’s Science March sign.

Dave “incognito” at Hotel Croatia water side for two days R&R (www.adriaticluxuryhotels.com/en/hotel-croatia-dubrovnik-cavtat) in Cavtat, Croatia.

Dave’s traditional post-MSBM (www.msbm.org) lunch of grilled squid at Hotel Croatia.

Promenade in Gdansk Poland where Dave will soon be a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science (www.iccvs.ug.edu.pl/).