Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter, and especially for going to the trouble
of describing in detail how proteins are identified.  Your account
revived memories of my improvised laboratory in the basement of the
old Konnarock Medical Center, - I didn't think of that cellar as a
laboratory or call it a laboratory, but a laboratory is what it was,
where I taught myself rudimentary physics and chemistry. Electrolysis,
watching hydrogen and oxygen bubbles coalesce on the electrode,
fascinated me, and devising practical, inexpensive sources of direct
current turned into a hobby. I would scavenge discarded automobile
batteries, - in those days they were all 6 volt devices, - identify
and remove the cell that was "dead" and replace it with a functioning
cell from a second battery that had failed in a similar manner. Being
only 10 or 11 or 12 years old, I was uncritical in accepting the
schematic explanations that I found in books. What these books might
have been and where I found them, I can't remember. I was thrilled
by the correspondence between observation and theory, and even today,
if I had the chance, I would happily spend hours in the laboratory
passing electric currents through filter paper, through gels, through
viscous sucrose solutions, such as the Konnarock hummingbirds find
more delicious than any nectar they can discover in our garden.

As I read your letter I am reminded by the inescapable anthropomorphism
of all our thought, including and especially, scientific thought.
All our inferences, all our deductions are referred to simple,
familiar frames of reference. Newton's falling apple is emblematic
of the force of gravity.  Einstein's relativity is made intuitively
plausible with reference to passenger trains such as are facets of
ordinary experience. For example, you write:

"Amino acids are identified by the fact that they
have the amine group, which can be chemically severed
from the molecule and released as ammonia (NH3)."

Is it foolish or frivolous of me to note that ideas
of identification, of identity, of severance and release,
are all of them imported into the biochemist's world
from our ordinary secular experience. When one speaks of 
electrical or centrifugal fields one implicitly alludes
to the fields in which cattle graze or barley is grown.

Again, your account:

"When the task is to determine the sequence of amino acids
in a protein, chemical procedures are used to protect all
the amino acid variable residues except the last one in the
chain.  Then an enzyme is used to cut off that last amino
acid and it is identified using the techniques above.  One
by one the amino acids are identified from the end toward
the beginning in this fashion.  The fact that enzymes have
been discovered and purified from different organisms and
tissues that specifically cut proteins only at the link between
two particular amino acids has greatly assisted the determination
of amino acid sequences." 

strikes me as a projection into a microscopic world of the
more immediate and compelling experiences of daily life. 
Please don't consider me disrespectful for my comment that
a chain of amino acids of which one cuts off the end, is
ultimately understandable from ones familiarity with, for
example, chains of sausages. What I am trying to point out,
albeit very awkwardly, is that we live, we survive and
flourish in reliance our experiences that are summarized in
simple concepts, in simple relationships. As scientists we
project this simplicity into microscopic or macroscopic realms,
as molecular biologists into the organelles of the cell,
as astronomers into a virtually unbounded universe. Such
projections of experience into infinitesimal or infinite
realms can be very productive, very useful. I'm not at all
critical, merely observing that this is so.

The research topic with which I have been wrestling for the past
several days is not nearly so edifying, but is, in fact, somber
and dispiriting: The estate tax. During the calendar year 2010,
as you know, we celebrate a holiday from this tax, and if I could
manage to die before January 1, all my problems would be solved, -
but I can't, because Margaret would miss me too much. There's no
alternative but to match wits with the IRS, - the few government
lawyers I've encountered have been obviously incompetent, - but
in dealing with them in this situation, I'm at an insurmountable
disadvantage.  I won't be able to file an appeal with the Tax Court,
because I'll be dead. Poor Klemens, - I can't be there to help him,
and Laura will wag her finger at my ghost and tell her husband,
I told you so. To make the tax code workable the government relies
on intimidation, and as I get progressively more senile, perhaps
because I may have lost the fear of death, - or think I have -
intimidation has a perverse, paradoxical effect on me, makes me
reckless, contemptuous and foolish. I've agreed that once Congress
has settled on the size of next year's Estate Tax exemption, I'll
go with Klemens to find an estate tax lawyer who will help him,
after I'm dead, with the seemingly intractable problems that my
legal bravado has created.

Jochen