Christmas 2018

For our 31^st wedding anniversary we traveled to Italy and Croatia, two places we both adore. While there I spoke twice at the Croatian Biophysics Society Summer school held in Split, which is where the Roman Emperor built his retirement palace. It was originally more like a fortress of course (www.diocletianspalace.org) which the modern city grew up around and into. Now melded seamlessly, the two are difficult to distinguish. We stayed at Marmontova apartments (www.marmontsplit.com/) run by a lovely family that put us only five minutes walk from the promenade where we consumed lots of sea air, wine and coffee at the many outdoor cafes. 

 

Split's food fresh and prepared

From Split we flew to Rome and took the train to Florence where I spoke at a workshop at the International Mass Spectrometry Conference (www.imsc2018.it/). We had both only ever been in Florence for one day each but not together. As time at the conference permitted we explored from a base at hotel Brunelleschi (www.brunelleschihotelflorence.com/) in the old town very near the Duomo. We skipped the Duomo tour due to long lines but went through the museum next to it, which contains loads of stone carved frescos from the original Gothic façade to the cathedral. Well worth the visit just to see how folk use to learn about what was in the bible. LOL ... For example, I learned that Noah was fond of wine and going commando (lower right panel below where the actual caption was "Drunk Noah" LOL ... and just above you can see that Eve really did come out of Adam's side).

Old and new art of Florence

From Florence we spent a day in Rome and then were off to Dubrovnik to visit with the Master Hotelier of the Sesame (www.bbsesameinn.com/en-gb/photos), Misko Ecergovic. He always hugs Donna straight away on exiting the taxi ignoring me while collecting her baggage. Because he is one of those people who instantly make you feel like family, most nights he took the time to buy us nightcaps at a local seaside café. Previously, we would just sit at his place, the Sesame (www.sesame.hr), where is partner Marina is the head chef and have drinks. Now though he has leased it out to better enjoy his family, but with Marina in place as chef the food remains delicious. The "retired" and well-seasoned Misko has lots of stories and opinions about life. For example, he favors the Socratic form of education which is difficult to accommodate in the modern education system. Adding to Misko's world view is the time he and his son were interred in a “concentration” camp during part of the Croatian Independence War (1991-1995). The Sesame Inn and restaurant are both in a stone building long owned by the family with the rooms decorated by artwork from when the lower floors were an art gallery.

Dubrovnik scenes

No visit to Dubrovnik would be complete without a stay in Cavtat, which is the village closest to the airport. If you can afford it, Hotel Croatia is the place to stay (hotel-croatia.cavtat.hotels-hr.com/en/). An all-inclusive resort built during Yugoslav times it was briefly occupied by Montenegrin forces during the war. A short stroll around the bay takes you to one of our favorite restaurants, Bugenvila (bugenvila.eu/). The harbor water is so clean and clear that you could literally jump in for a swim after dinner or maybe just to float around. 

 Scenes from Lokrum

Scenes from Cavtat

Meanwhile in Baltimore, other things happened that kept us occupied in 2018. Some good. Some, not so good. In my case, I continued to search for a new home for the lab. Insert the politics of academics, which makes everything more complicated than it needs to be, and the best I can say is that we love living in Baltimore but my job - not so much. I can only say here that the power brokers of academic politics are often outside the reaches of the normal legal system leaving Professors to fend for themselves. Hopefully, the situation will resolve in 2019. On the bright side of 2018 at work, six students graduated from the lab with their Doctor of Philosophy degrees (aka PhD = piled higher and deeper). This was really a great bunch of students who either began in year one or two after our move here in 2013. When I first started in academics in 2004, Sam Miller - a colleague in Seattle who was a few years ahead of me - said that students keep you young. Absolutely true. In many ways they are like adopted children who grow into young adulthood while with you. It's a blessing to have so many of them to enrich my life.

Baltimore scenes

In January Graham, having been at College Park for only a week of his 4^th semester, was back home unable to go on. After three semesters of success in math and physics and chemistry, he had just been admitted to the very competitive Chemical Engineering program at the University of Maryland. Going back to his start, the night before starting at College Park in Fall 2016 he received a Lyme disease diagnosis and started antibiotic therapy. However, by January 2018 his symptoms were worse to the point where he was dealing with so much pain that he had to drop out being unable to use his hands except like you might with no opposable thumb. For him, 2018 went by going through various therapies, but his symptoms did not resolve. We are now more convinced than before that his symptoms are not due to Lyme and have begun the process of going through various specialists to try to sort out this medical mystery.

 Mint and Ham

Mint (aka David Minter) continued the year at College Park without his brother and in their kinesiology program and will probably also end with a minor in business from his time at Towson University. We think he’ll finish Fall 2019 and then who knows. Medical school? Graduate school? Physical therapy school? Time to decide later because like his second grade math teacher explained to us during a conference “this kid will never die of a heart attack”. At least in public he never seems to lose his cool, which is an admirable trait. This though cannot be said of his watching Auburn University football games. Given the team’s woes this year, the curses flew fast and furious at the TV. So animated were he and I during games that Trixie usually left the room after just a few minutes into the first quarter. War Eagle, damnit!!!!

In a story line that might be heard in a country song, the dog - Trixie - cost me at least $2000 when one of her toes was remove due to a malignancy. We were told this was cheaper than chemotherapy. Chemotherapy? For a dog? Yep. It's a thing. So, I thought to myself - self - this is thousands more than the standard American veterinary care in the back country that my Grandpa administered as needed. Not long after the toe was removed, she went in to have a tooth removed. Back home, she was missing five teeth! When I asked how much that cost, “you don't want to know” was the reply.   However, it had to be cheaper than the crown put on one of my molars recently. When I told Donna this would cost $340, she growled “why didn’t insurance pay@#$%!?” to which I replied “they paid half”. LOL. C'est la vie. I still don't know how much the dog’s dental work cost, but more than mine I bet@#$%^&*!

Donna continues to work at Sunlight Natural Health (sunlightnaturalhealth.com/) helping out in the office. She also spent the year as a patient of Arivale (www.arivale.com), a company founded by my former boss Leroy Hood (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Hood) at the Institute for Systems Biology (systemsbiology.org). Arivale use massive amounts of patient specific data they collect along with lifestyle surveys to reshape your biochemistry by reshaping your interactions with the world. This is certainly one version of the future of personalized medicine that I recommend keeping an eye on. As an aside, early in the year Donna received the results of her 23andme genomic analysis (www.23andme.com). As expected given our geographic genealogy for the last couple hundred years she was mostly Irish, English and Scot but there was a small % of Finnish of all things. No idea where this came from if not from some Finns involved in the Viking raids of the UK. I'm waiting on my kit but I'll be shocked if it is much different than hers save for perhaps the Finnish component.

You can find us on Facebook, Instagram (instagram.com/davegoodlett/) and twitter (twitter.com/goodlettlab1) and for now in Baltimore but who knows where we might be this time next year. We are only 20 minutes drive from BWI airport and 10 minutes walk to Penn station, which takes you to WA DC in 45 minutes or NYC in a couple hours. So, please stop by when you are in town.

Happy Holidays from the Baltimore Goodletts ...

 Runner up photos from 2018

You have got to be kidding...

Patio

Bugenvila G&T

Split

Split smiles

Piazza del Duomo

Arch d' Firenze

Ponte Vecchio

Trevi fountain smiles

Incheon

Bros @ Cinghiale DEC 2017

Bros Christmas Day 2017

Comfy

Not your chair, Dave

Twice in 2018

Ryan Burns' music shack in Burien, WA

HEL to ICN Finnair business class

HEL to GDN

Is that big chicken staying?

Bros @ Loch Bar for April - May b'day celebrations

Really?

FFS

 Bros @Cinghiale DEC 2018

OCT Steak cake for b'day 21

 Bros 26 OCT 2018

 Gilded

 Washington's impressive "monument"

Donna's stocking acting out.

 ...and they did

Thanks Erik Nilsson for a wee dram of Iceland

Faded Glory

Baltimore's Artscape 

 Donna at Neal and Joe's hair salon

 Ridiculous

 ICCVS gang at MSBM

 MSBM's 2018 class

 That's right DPAK. Swim trunks. Not underwear. LOL!

 Istria bitters

 Whew! I needed that ...

 Southern end DBV harbor

Watching world cup in DBV

 Being introduced to MSBM for lecture

on the way to DBV harbor

 DBV

That's all folks

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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/).