a scientist finds independence art robinson fights aging with his home-schooled lab rats

8/9/2019 A Scientist Finds Independence Art Robinson fights aging with his home-schooled lab rats.

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For more great stories from theAmericanSpectatorand subscription information clickhere.

Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's senior editor.

Art Robinson fights aging with his home-schooled lab rats.

February 2001 The American Spectator

Matthew Robinson, 13, has a Colt .45 strapped to his waist as hepractices the piano in the living room. He lives on a 350-acre farm in

southern Oregon, with his brothers and sisters, and his father, thescientist Art Robinson. Next to the piano is a huge home-madewood-burning stove. Twenty years ago, Art built a 30 kilowatt hydro-electric generator next to the creek near his house,but the Department of Fish and Game has yet to give its approval. The fish may be affected, they say. So the house isheated by burning wood, which of course releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This supposedly contributes to global warming, but it alsohelps the trees grow.

There are six Robinson children, all of them home-schooled. Matthew's older brother Joshua, 18,has pinned to the wall of his room the skin of a cougar that he trapped. His older brother Noah,22, was the top chemistry graduate applicant to MIT, but chose instead to go to his father'sschool, Caltech. He is working for his Ph.D. in chemistry. Noah's older brother, Zachary, 24, isat Iowa State University studying to be a doctor of veterinary medicine, and also working for achemistry Ph.D. Bethany, 18, is still at home, and her older sister Arynne, 20, has finished twoyears of college. On the piano Matthew is still on grade 1B, but his math is going well. He will beonly 14 by the time he has finished calculus.

The area around Cave Junction, not far from the California border, was developed in the gold-rush days. Miners used hydraulic methods that wouldterrify today's environmentaliststhe top soil was blasted away with fire-hoses. Today it's farming and tree-growing territory. The Robinson's havehundreds of sheep and lambs, 15 cows, 7 horses, 4 dogs, and 50 wild turkeys. But the economics of farming locally are not good, Art Robinsonsays. The price of wool is one-third the shearing cost. They may net $10,000 a year from farming, and if they did nothing else and made nomistakes, maybe they could double that figure.

A short distance from the farm house there stand several buildings of steel construction. The largest, with 10,000 square feet of floor space, housesthe Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, founded by Art Robinson in 1980. Inside there was an electrical hum, but few people. Jane Orient ofDoctors for Disaster Preparedness, visiting from Tucson, was working alone in the small library. Some of the labs are unused, others containequipment-vials, bottles, a cryogenic freezer-that was mostly bought at auction. The mass spectrometer cost $150,000 second hand. "It's a miraclein a box," Art says. Mass spectrometers were used at Oak Ridge to help develop the atomic bomb, but this version is many times more powerful.Robinson is using it to work on "molecular clocks" in the body. This could shed light on one of the greatest unsolved problems of biochemistryaging. "It's not understood at all," he says.

Art has no employeesanother triumph of the computer revolution. But

his children help out as lab assistants, and recently Noah became afull-fledged co-worker. Before he left for graduate studies, Art and Noahsubmitted a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences. Over the years, Art Robinson co-authored scientific papers withmany famous men, including his teacher of 40 years ago, Linus Pauling.But this new paper, "Molecular Clocks," based on research mostly doneon an Oregon farm with his own son, is "the best scientific paper I haveever had my name on," he says. Some of the work was also done in NewYork, at the Rockefeller University lab of R. Bruce Merrifield, who wonthe Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984. Recently they heard that the paperwas accepted.

Piled 12 feet high in another building, the mailing room, are the books andhome-schooling curricula that the Robinsons have published in recentyears and now ship to the public. In a smaller building is the printing press

where Robinson's newsletter,Access to Energy, is printed; and next to the main house is a log-cabin structure where all the Robinson children havebeen home-schooled.

Art Robinson will be 59 in March. He was a chemistry student at Caltech himself, and something of a whizkid. He was one of the few students ever to be appointed to the faculty of the University of California (inSan Diego) immediately after getting his Ph.D. He is not pleased by many developments in America in thelast generation, especially at the intersection of science and politics, and his own life has been beset byobstacles and tragedies. But he is a man of steely determination and intensity, and he has achieved a gooddeal since moving to Oregon 20 years ago.

In the mid 1970's, after a few years at U.C. San Diego, Robinson teamed up with Linus Pauling to form theLinus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Menlo Park, California. Robinson, president andresearch director, revered Pauling both as a teacher and a chemist, while Pauling had referred to him as"my principal and most valued collaborator." Pauling had won two Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry (1954),and Peace (1962), and by the mid 1970'S had widely publicized the claim that Vitamin C could cure thecommon cold. In addition, he said, "75 percent of all cancer can be prevented or cured by Vitamin C

alone."

At the new institute, on Sandhill Road, Robinson devised some mouse experiments to test this amazingtheory. By the summer of 1978, he was getting "highly embarrassing" results. At the mouse-equivalent of10 grams of Vitamin C a dayPauling's recommended dose for humans-the mice were getting morecancer, not less. Pauling responded to the unwelcome news by entering Robinson's office one day and

cientist Finds Independence, by Tom Bethell http://www.independentscientist.com/

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The experimental results were "highly

embarrassing." Pauling responded by

telling Robinson that he had in his

pocket some damaging personal

information.

Ted Robinson was "in love with chemical

plants." He is buried in an Alpine glaciernear the top of Mont Blanc.

announcing that he had in his breast pocket some damaging personal information. He would overlook it,however, if Robinson were to resign all his positions and turn over his research. When Robinson refused,Pauling locked him out and kept the filing cabinets and computer tapes containing nine years' worth of research. They were never recovered.Pauling also told lab assistants to kill the 400 mice used for the experiments. Pauling's later sworn testimony showed that the story about thedamaging information was invented, while experiments by the Mayo Clinic conclusively proved that the theory about cancer and Vitamin C waswrong.

A sharp divergence of political opinion between the two men also became apparent. A few years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Pauling alsowon the Lenin Peace Prize. He told Robinson that he was more proud of the Soviet than the Norwegian award. For his part, in the spring of 1978Robinson had given a speech at the Cato Institute, then in San Francisco, deploring the government funding of science as harmful to theindependence that is essential to scientific inquiry.

Pauling died in 1994, at the age of 93, but his peace-prize activitiescontinue to resonate among scientists, and the subject still absorbsRobinson. In 1958, Pauling had engaged in a series of televised debateswith the developer of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. The subject was"nuclear fallout," or the residual radiation after an atomic explosion.Pauling won, Robinson says, with the help of an argument that wasunsupported by evidence at the time. Since then, however, it has beenshown to be wrong. The argument involved a "linear extrapolation tozero," in Robinson's scientific lingo. High levels of radiation will certainlykill you, and lower levels will harm you. Pauling calculated the damage at

minuscule levels by extending that graph back in a straight line to zero. Zero radiation, obviously, causes no harm. At low levels, by hiscalculations, not many would be harmed. But multiplying that harm-rate by the population of the world, as Pauling did, allowed him to claim thatcontinued nuclear testing would kill "millions of children." So it should be stopped. Pauling and his wife Ava Helen organized a petition againsttesting in the atmosphere, signed by 11,000 scientists and presented to the United Nations. For that he won the Nobel Prize, and the Lenin Prize a

few years later.

Now we have the "hormesis" data, gathered in the last 20 years, and that's what interests Robinson. The graph does not go straight back to zero. Itgoes down to about 700 millirems a day, then heads back up again, like a hook. Low background levels of radiation seem to be good for you. Theevidence that the "linear extrapolation to zero" is wrong, accumulated by Bernard L. Cohen, an emeritus professor of physics at the University ofPittsburgh, comes from many sources. Bad for you in large doses, radiation does some good in small doses. It seems to keep the DNA repairmechanisms in good working order. The same principle is observed with alcohol, and a number of other poisons. Very heavy drinking will kill you,but a glass of wine a day is a tonic.

With radiation, nonetheless, the operative principle has been "zero tolerance," permitting environmentalists not just to stop nuclear tests, but todemonize nuclear power and to stymie the disposal of nuclear waste as wellwith little discussion of the evidence. As the recent energy problemson the West Coast suggest, we are going to have to start building nuclear power plants again. Meanwhile, Art ruefully points out, the hormesis datashow that Oregon is not a particularly good place to live. Its background radiation levels are below the national average, and its cancer rates areabove average. There's less cancer risk in Denver, where the background radiation levels are much higher. That inverse relationship holds all overthe country.

When he found himself locked out of his own office, Robinson sued Pauling for breach of contract, slander, and fraud. After many twists and turns,and a lengthy account inBarron's by the perennial Wall Street bear, James Grant, now the publisher ofGrant's Interest Rate Observer, the casewas settled out of court with Pauling paying Robinson $575,000. Art and his wife Laurelee, and Zachary and Noah, moved to Oregon in 1980.Concerned about the decline of public education, she had already begun to accumulate filing cabinets full of her own instructional material and washome-schooling all the children.

By 1988, the six Robinson children ranged in age from 12 to one and a half. One day inNovember all the children had stomach flu. Laurelee felt ill too, with a bad stomach ache. Artasked if she wanted to go to the emergency room but she said no. She slept in the living roomto be closer to the electric heaters. The next morning Arynne and Bethany, aged 8 and 6,came running into his room. "We can't wake mommy up." He ran in. "She wasn't dead yet, buther heart had almost stopped." She died before reaching the hospital. It was a rare diseasecalled acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis. Enzymes released by the pancreas, instead of goingdown the proper duct to the digestive system, had latched onto an artery and eaten a hole in it."All her blood was in her peritoneal cavity." Even if she had been in the hospital, it is not

likely that she could have been saved. "The sutures would never have held," a doctor told Art.It had all taken less than 24 hours. Laurelee was 43.

Now Art had to find a way to keep going on his own. "For most of my life," Robinson says, "I had found education to be a boring subject. I enjoyedteaching chemistry because I enjoyed chemistrynot education. When Laurelee died I continued our home school, but I let the children teachthemselves."

Since then, with many intervening adventures, Art Robinson has mostly been home alone with the kids. His formula"let the children teachthemselves"sounds as though it came from the progressive play-book. There are four keys to learning, he believes"study environment, studyhabits, course of study, and high-quality books"but he may not realize the extent to which his own discipline, determination and watchfulnesshave made the first two a given in his own household. He permits no television, which "promotes passive, vicarious brain development rather thanactive thought." Sweets aren't allowed either"sugar diminishes mental function and increases irritability."

As for the guns, they are not entirely for show. Out there in thewoods are cougars and black bears, and earlier this year Joshuashot a cougar that appeared in a tree just above him. Cap guns,

war toys and violent video games were never permitted in theRobinson household. Real guns were also unthinkable, until Artfelt the children were old enough. Two years ago, agreeing with

the title of his close friend Jeff Cooper's book, To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth , firearms training was added to their home school.

Their training was conducted under Cooper himself at the NRA Competition Center at Raton, New Mexico, and under Clint Smith, Cooper's


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CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Recycled paper is of poorer quality and higher cost than unrecycledpaper. But most of us are being forced to use it, since the ClintonAdministration declared that all government agencies must use itexclusively. Many paper mills found it too costly to maintain twoproduction facilities, so to meet government specifications theyswitched entirely to recycled paper-and raised their prices.

associate in Texas. Matthew was considered to be too young, but he went along on the trips. He proved to be such a favorite with the instructorsthat they sought Art's permission to teach him, too. In this, the family has reverted to earlier times in America when children were taughtself-reliance, good judgment and practical skillsincluding the use of firearmsat an early age.

Art is a Christian of no specific denomination and irregular church attendance. The family gets together for Bible-readings every night and thechildren say grace before meals (in nearly inaudible whispers). Art says of his own parents: "They were, I think, Methodist." His approach toreligious instruction parallels the teach-yourself philosophy he applies to education generally. "No one in our family ever questions the truth of theLord's Word as provided to us in the Old and New Testaments of the King James Bible," he wrote in Practical Home Schooling. "We only seek tounderstand these truths by repeated reading. That is rarely accompanied by interpretive comment. Each of us must understand these things forhimself and build his own relationship with God."

Art's father, Ted Robinson, lived in Houston and designed and constructed petrochemical plants for Union Carbide in various parts of the world. Inhis newsletter, Art said his father was "simply head over heels in love with chemical plants." He added this jolting postscript: "He is buried in analpine glacier near the top of Mont Blanc on the border between France and Italy, which contains the remains of the Air India Boeing 707 thatcrashed there on January 24, 1966. The cause of this crash is not known for certain. It is believed to have been the work of assassins that killed theIndian physicist Bhaba, who was then head of the nuclear energy program and was also on the plane." A year later, Art's mother found that shecould not live without her husband and she committed suicide. Art, an only child, was in graduate school in San Diego at the time.

Remarkably, Art has managed to convert the education of his children from a financial drain into a thriving business. Among them, the familymembers have developed a home school curriculum consisting of over 250 books-among them the 30,000-page 1911 edition of theEncyclopedia

Britannicawhich the youngsters took turns scanning into computers. The curriculum was transferred to 22 compact discs, which are sold in a boxfor $195. Over four years, 20,000 sets have been sold. More recently, with typical single-mindedness, Robinson tracked down all 99 historicalnovels by the Edwardian writer G. A. Henty, and they in turn were optically scanned. Three thousand Henty sets (6 CD'S) were shipped in the firstyear. They retail for $99.

Suffice it to say that Art Robinson has recovered his financial independence. He no longer needs government grants to pursue the unresolvedscientific questions that were put on hold over 20 years ago. In fact, his independence as a scientist is now greater than it would be if he were still at

a large research institution. Whether the institution is nominally private, or publicly funded, he points out, most scientific research is held captive byheavy infusions of federal money.

Around the time he heard that the Proceedings of the National Academy would publish the article, Art said: "If we just had a few thousandscientists pursuing their own goals, we'd really be able to get some new research done in this country. As it is, most of them are trapped."

Trapped by government money. Filling out grant requests, politicking to be well-liked, serving on grant review boards, going to the meetings to beseen by others, will take half your time. The project itself had better be popular. "You're only going to get the money for something that everyonehas heard of and thinks is the coming thing," he said. As for politically sensitive areas such as global warming, "your research had better come upwith the results they want." At private research institutions, where half the money may come from private endowments, the research is nonethelessstill held hostage. "Professors in these universities who are candid with you will say, Well, we can't really do what we want here because half of ourmoney comes from the government so we can't afford to put it at risk." A better system, Art thinks, would be to give one-time grants to a couple ofthousand scientists a year, with no further oversight or reports.

Art took overAccess to Energy in 1993, at the request of its ailing proprietor Petr Beckmann, a

professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. Beckmann had printed thenewsletter on his own press for 20 years. A defector from Communist Czechoslovakia, he valued theFirst Amendment highlyand exercised it through a printing press in the basement. Until recently,Noah continued to print the newsletter on the same press, which was hauled from Boulder to Oregon.The letter was always a lively read, and Robinson has preserved that quality. It is something yougladly reach for in the mailbox. A subscription costs $35 for individuals, $150 for tax-subsidizedorganizations (one or two do pay full freight).

Petr Beckmann saw in Art a kindred spiriteven though Petr was an atheist and Art is a believer.Robinson shared Beckmann's concerns about a number of issues. One was the rising power of "green"fanatics, whose bad science, or indifference to it, was no impediment to their influence. Another wasthe lesson that Robinson had learned from Pauling. Bad science had managed to demonize nuclearpower and the testing of nuclear weapons.

For a while, Art Robinson tried to revive interest in civil defense. He put out a newsletter calledFighting Chance, and published a paperback of that name with Gary North (half a million copies

were distributed). He even built demonstration shelters for the Federal Emergency ManagementAgency, which installed them at FEMA centers in Arizona, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Utah. But withthe end of the Cold War this doomed cause was lost totally.

On one issueglobal warmingArt has made a real difference. After he wrote about it forAccess toEnergy, an editor at the Wall Street Journal called and asked for an op-ed piece. Art and Zachary

Robinson had it on his desk the next day. "Then the enviros made an error," Art recalled. They started to tell lies about him. A physicist with theUnion of Concerned Scientists told radio listeners in New York that the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine was not qualified to commentbecause it has "no mainframe computers," and its "secret sources of funding" were "undoubtedly" oil-industry related.

Art once summarized his approach to cultural warfare as follows: "It isfine to complain about those who would do evil. It is better to take somenoticeable action to interfere with them. It is self-satisfying to take actionstrong enough to elicit praise. An enemy is not beaten, however, unlesshe is, in fact, beaten. It is best to win, even if this requires actions outside

one's field of specialization." Something from Vince Lombardi'splay-book, perhaps. Art is a scientist, but he is also a warrior.

He studied the Union of Concerned Scientists' manual on handling themedia. He had seen in print claims of a "consensus" among scientistsabout the cause of global warming. He knew this wasn't true, althoughsomething resembling a consensus had been confected by such journals


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Paper recycling has also destroyed the market for forestundergrowth. It was previously economical to make wood chips ofundergrowth, which were used for paper. Now this undergrowth isaccumulating in the forests, where it increases the dangers of forestfires.

The paper recycling craze has also helped convince the public thatindustries were not socially responsible until the enviros forced themto be. Why were they not recycling before?

The answer is that industrial recycling has always beenimportantin those commodities for which it was economicallysensible. Automobile scrap has been recycled for almost as long asthere has been an automobile industry.

Today astonishing machinesa fifth of a mile long and weighingseveral hundred tonsshred cars and separate them into reusablepieces and are able to process an automobile every minute. Thereare 200 such machines in the United States, which convert 13million automobiles per year into reusable metallic "corn flakes."

Moreover, the "mini mills," with which the steel industry has beenpartially resuscitatedfrom a near death brought on bytechnological change, foreign competition, and debilitating taxationand regulationhave benefited from these automobilehomogenizers. They provide valuable feedstocks for the mills.

Auto recycling could not, of course, become an enviro cause.Industry has been doing it for more than 70 yearsand it benefitstwo politically incorrect technologies, steel and automobiles.

-Access to Energy,

August 2000

Robinson's response to the Union of

Concerned Scientists might have been

taken from the playbook of Vince

Lombardi.

as Science, which Art calls "highly politicized," and Scientific American(whose deterioration has been sad to behold).

Art decided to circulate a petition among the "silent majority" ofscientists. This involved raising money, writing a summary paper,obtaining mailing lists, printing the mailing. The petition called for arejection of the Kyoto treaty, signed by the U.S. but not yet rat ified, andit added that "there is no convincing scientific evidence" that the humanrelease of green house gases has significantly warmed the Earth'satmosphere. He obtained over 17,000 signaturesthis in contrast to the"2,000 scientists" who were said to accept man-made climate change as a

reality. (Many of them were not scientists at all, and only 382 wereAmericans.)

The "greens" have not sat back. One person who submitted her signatureby fax, claiming to be a Ph. D in Boston, gave the name Jerry Halliwell.As soon as it was published on the Website, Ozone Action announced ata congressional hearing that the petition was fraudulent: "Halliwell" wasthe real name of a rock group member. The false identity had beensupplied deliberately, in an attempt to delegitimize the entire list. SenatorJohn Kerry of Massachusetts, a reliable shill for the environmentalindustry, wrote a sarcastic op-ed for the Boston Globe denouncing thepetition on the basis of the one false name. In addition, unscrupulouspeople are trying to manufacture the evidence for oil industryconnections. Robinson has begun to receive crates of mail subscriptions,and merchandise, addressed to Arthur B. Robinson of the Oregon

Petroleum Institute in Cave Junction. Unknown people are filling in thisfalse information on mail-in cards from magazines. All of it is beingreturned unopened.

"We are frequently confronted with our alleged oil industry associations,"Robinson wrote inAccess to Energy. "We reply that we have none. Now,however, the enviros will be able to support their side of this issue withdata-base information showing my 'oil industry' connections-fabricatedwith fraudulent mailings. These are not college pranks. This is the realworld, and these people are trying to shut off half of humanity's energysupplies. Anyone who opposes them can expect to be attacked in all sorts of underhanded ways. For this reason, many decent people avoid thiscontroversy." As to those who signed his petition, Art says, "We got quite a few famous names, but many of them are near retirement." They are nolonger seeking grants.

In private, he disparages the enviros as "warmed over college radicals who have found a way tomake radicalism pay," by attaching themselves to the richly funded environmentalist industry. They

"don't have much for brains," he considers. And the difference between truth and falsehood inmatters of science is not something that concerns them at all.

Art's warrior instincts also came to the fore after his daughter Arynne enrolled at Southern OregonUniversity. To graduate, she was told, she had to take a course called "colloquium," an exercise"specifically designed to destroy her faith, her innocence, her self-respect, and her happiness in herway of life," Art says. Advance placement had allowed the boys to skip this insult. So why notremove her from the school? As it happened, the science faculty was excellent, the university'sproximity was convenient, and his tax dollars were paying for this travesty. "What can a student do

if the science, engineering and mathematics courses are held hostage by the 'humanities' departments?"

Art informed the university administration that they faced law suits, adverse publicity, and "an ever increasing telephone, fax, and letter campaign."The first two did not worry them, Art says-they had the lawyers and the media. But the third did. It would have involved many thousands ofinquiries, and they would be needing extra telephone lines and secretaries. The president backed down at the last minute. "We won this fightwithout firing a shot," Art told his friends, "but only because we were prepared to shoot." And they were able to do so only because a large number

of his subscribers and home-schooling friends "were available to help.

He has more battle-plans up his sleeve. One is to tackle the DDT ban,driven by U.S. environmentalists since the 1970's. Art calls this genocide,as it now causes the deaths, from malaria, of about three million childrena year. Another is to educate the public about hormesis, which will beneeded to get nuclear power back on track. Weapons testing must also beresumed. No U.S. nuclear weapon has been tested for a decade, and theirreliability is becoming uncertain.

But all of these things are ultimately detours and distractions. At graduate school, Art hoped that he would one day do path-breaking work inscience. Home-schooling his own children, sheltering them from corrupted universities, and fighting environmentalists are so time-consuming thatthey would have derailed the scientific aspirations of almost anyone. Yet in recent years he has been able to resume that work. And that, in the end,is why his story is inspiring.

In the late 1960's, Robinson was working as a young professor at U.C. San Diego with Martin Kamen, the discoverer of Carbon-14 and later the

winner of the Enrico Fermi Award. A graduate student in the same lab, Torgeir Flatmark (today a professor of biochemistry in Norway), proved,contrary to what was believed at the time, that two of the 20 amino acids that are strung together in various sequences to form all known proteins,are in fact unstable. That is, when mixed with water, they turn into two different amino acids. Flatmark didn't pursue it, and Robinson had time toponder this odd discovery. "It didn't make sense to me that two of the 20 fundamental building blocks of proteins would be unstable in the body,"he said. There seemed to be nothing special about them. Other amino acids could have been substituted for them.


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"So my reasoning went this way," Robinson said. "The instability itself must be the function. Otherwise those two amino acids wouldn't be used.They are too disadvantageous."

A possible explanation for their presence was that the "instability" within the protein could be functioning as a timer for bodily functions. There aretens of thousands of different kinds of proteins in the body, each participating in different activities, and the discovery that two of the amino acidsin these proteins were "hydrolyzing," or changing structurally when combined with water, suggested that a fundamental mechanism of livingorganisms was at work.

Robinson theorized that the rate at which this turnover occurred was the bodily equivalent ofa clock. The clock-rate varies, he proposed, depending on the identities of the amino acids oneither side of the two unstable ones in the protein chain. As any one of the 20 amino acids

could be on one side, and any one of 20 could be on the other side, there were 800possibilities in all. He began to explore this theory with his students in San Diego in the early1970's. They had tested 80 of these possibilities in peptides (miniature proteins) and showedthat the order in which they were positioned could dramatically change the "half-life" of theturnover, from days to decades. "So this could be timing the biological function of theprotein," Robinson said. "It may be something that is wanted for a long time, like the lens of

the eye; or something that you want to function only briefly, like a hormone, and then to disappear."

The work was difficult to do in those days, even with the help of graduate students. More recently, he and Noah developed faster and bettermethods. Last summer they made all 800 sequences, doing some of the work at Bruce Merrifield's lab at Rockefeller University in New York. Theyhave now timed the turnover rates of about half of these, having measured 9,000 samples. The results are "elegant," he says, in a moment ofunguarded enthusiasm. "It's world class work."

As to aging, "it's reasonable to predict that there is a clock that determines lifespan," Art said. Fruitflies live for a few weeks, mice for about two years, man for 80 or 90 years. "But they all haveabout the same biochemistry," Art pointed out. "So it's evident that there are timers in them. We

don't know what those t imers are, but when we find that the basic building blocks of life have clocksbuilt into them, and we find that they are used to time short term processes, it is reasonable topredict that there are also clocks that time aging itself." Independent evidence for an aging clock isprovided by progeric children with the rare Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. For them, the clock isrunning much too fast and the interval between childhood and old age shrinks to just over a decade.Most die of a heart attack or stroke, wizened in their late teens.

Robinson recalled the "total immersion" that he and Noah experienced during the last months oftheir work. "We only ate, slept, and workedcalling upon our associates only when we neededadditional hands and otherwise ignoring entirely the world outside. There are few institutions wherescientists are able to work, for many months at a time, essentially without interruption. Yet this isthe best way in which to make progress. One must become so totally immersed in one's work thateating is an imposition and sleeping an inconvenience. As to other distractions, they are just nottolerated."

In New York, however, they did experience one big distraction. Art and Noah worked in 12-hourshifts, sleeping in a friend's apartment nearby and rotating at 3 a.m. One night Noah was nearlymugged. He narrowly escaped two thugs, one with a knife, by dodging around corners, arriving atthe apartment just ahead of his pursuers. Art draws the obvious conclusion. New York's draconiangun laws make the streets unsafe. Obeying the law, Noah had "left his .45 at home." The muggerscould feel confident that any law-abiding target would be unarmed. It 's a good thing they didn't meetthe Robinson boys down on the farm! After that, they started sleeping in a conference room nearthe lab.

There will be at least two more years' work on molecular timers. He allowed that it was "unusual tobe doing it on an Oregon farm with your kids." Without the computer technology, thehome-schooling profits and generous donors it wouldn't have been possible. Despite the manydifficulties, he has not only kept alive his youthful dream of doing great things in science, but hemay be in the midst of doing it.

"We didn't do as much as we perhaps could have done, if we had stayed in academia," he said, "butI am very happy with what we are doing. I think the work we are doing is important. The seminaldiscoveries in science are few and far between. And you can't tell what will happen when you set aman free. It doesn't mean that that freedom will be used to save the world. But the chances are alittle better. We have been free. That may mean that we will do something remarkable that wewouldn't have done. But no one knows."

Additional information can be found atwww.oism.org, and atwww.robinsoncurriculum.com.


a scientist finds independence art robinson fights aging with his home-schooled lab rats

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