Peter Forbes

The Orange Prize party has been honed over the years till it has reached some sort of pinnacle of party perfection: last night everyone agreed: “the best party of the year”. It wasn’t always quite like this. In the days when bankers ruled, some of the vast outlay wasn’t so wisely chosen: there was the one at the Royal Opera House with pop girly dancers. The cathedral fluted roof of the Royal Courts of Justice couldn’t really combine with Orange’s slick stage dressing. But for the last two years they have settled on the perfect venue: the Clore Ballroom at the Festival Hall: a fairly bland room on which anything might be painted. 

The food was spicy, the music for once spot on: a very tall female saxophonist improvising over Latin grooves. The Orange isn’t just about women writers: it is a celebration of the international literary scene. The woman were exceptionally gorgeous and instead of the lumpy assorted males you usually see at literary do here were dazzling Africans in their tunics. 

The cat-walk treatment of the short listed writers, with rock music and flashing lights is still cringe-making, but it doesn’t last long. Beyond that, it is sheer effervescence. You go home with a goody bag and start reading on the train a book you probably wouldn’t have got round to for years. Mine is Ellen Feldman’s Scottsboro and I’m instantly gripped. How has she caught the voices of these two poor white girls in Alabama in the ’20s so well: “Some of the whites tried to get friendly, and most times me and Victoria wouldn’t say no to a piece of fun and maybe two bits into the bargain but this time we didn’t pay them no mind”?

It is well know (and extremely misleading, as I shall show) that human beings and chimps are more than 98% the same genetically. It is true but we need to understand what this means. A gene is something that has a particular effect, usually to make a protein or to control other genes. One way in which we can say that two genes are the same is if they do the same job. There is gene that makes the vital protein hormone insulin. All mammals have the gene to make insulin. But the insulin and its gene are slightly different in DNA composition in different species even though they do the same job. The easiest way to understand this is to go back before the era of modern genetic engineering. The insulin injected to treat diabetes used to come from cows, pigs or sheep. It was a by-product of the meat industry. These animal insulins function correctly in human beings but they are not identical in composition because the DNA has a few substitutions in its bases. Most of the genes in human and chimps have the same functions but they differ in a few bases in the way that the animal insulins differ from human. These small genetic differences must be responsible for the profound and stable differenecs between the two species.  

Insulin shows us that these occasional substitutions often have no significant effect. But we also know that a single base change can sometimes have a dramatic effect: cystic fibrosis is caused by a single base substitution. Besides having these crippling negative effects, small changes can sometimes have large positive effects. 

The Foxp2 gene is a major research focus for human/chimp differenecs. This came to light from studies of a family with speech defects running through several generations. This was traced to a break in a gene, Foxp2, which is found intact in all animals with only minor differences between them. Human Foxp2 differs from chimp Foxp2 by only two amino acids and mouse by only 3. DNA from Neanderthal man shows that they had the same Foxp2 gene as us. 

Foxp2 is a transcription factor with many effects besides speech. It is necessary for lung development in mice and it is involved in the development of birdsong. It is clearly a vital gene and the suspicion is that those two amino acid substitutions compared to the chimp have enabled the great gift of human speech. Probably many other genes are also needed to perfect human language but Foxp2 seems to be a necessary if not sufficient condition. 

As genomics develops, more such correlations between genes and body structures and behaviour will come to light. We will then know just what the significant tiny differenecs are that make us Not a Chimp, as a forthcoming book by Jeremy Taylor puts it.

 ‘Feeling Good’ is a song by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse written for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd in 1965. It was a slow burning classic, now available in numerous cover versions. The Wikipedia list includes Muse, Sammy Davis Jr, Michael Bublé, The Pussycat Dolls, Julie London, Bobby Darin, Olivier Newton John, among others. The first version I heard, and for many years the only version I knew, was by Traffic on the album Last Exit (1969). This was an odds and ends album, released for contractual reasons. Traffic’s version was recoded live at the Fillmore West. It is a stripped down 3-piece Traffic and Winwood’s voice and organ dominate it. This version has always thrilled me. The organ is over recorded and seems to have a harsh fuzz tone applied but it is curiously compelling. It is a song of yearning with Winwood’s voice at its plaintive best. And then there are some jazzy treats, tricky tempo changes and a heart-breaking Bach-like organ passage.

Then I started to hear the other versions. I was aware of Nina Simone for decades before she became my favourite female singer. She crept up on me. I’m ashamed now that I knew the Animals' ‘Don’t Let me be Misunderstood’ and Alan Price’s ‘I Put a Spell on You’ for years before I heard Nina’s orginal. Besides her classic version there is a remix by Joe Claussel on the album Verve Remixed.

So what is it with this song? It came to me when I finally heard, only weeks ago Anthony Newley's original. It is almost unrecognisable. The fact is that ‘Feeling Good’ is a rather characterless song. The melody is weak and predictable: it is almost spoken. The main chord progression is one of the most over-worked in musical history: the flamenco Am G F E7. It is this blandness that has invited so many versions. John Coltrane was a great spotter of tunes he could make his own so it's not surprising that he covered it. Vocally, it attracts dramatic voices like Simone or Winwood who can embellish the simple melody with their own vocal flourishes. That chord progression may be hackneyed but it is a great improvisation vehicle and in the right hands it doesn't sound hackneyed at all.

I wonder if Winwood's addition of the Bach-like passage was inspired by another Nina Simone tune on the same chord progression: ‘Love Me or Leave Me’, which has an extended Back workout at a fast tempo.

We haven’t heard the last of ‘Feeling Good’: it is an almost blank slate for musicians to write upon. Everyone wants their own new day dawning: ‘a new life for me’.

Here are two shopping lists: 1) removing wisteria £680;new fence posts £2,024; a massage chair £730; whirlpool bathroom suite £800. 2) Trident nuclear deterrent update £25bn; two new aircraft carriers £3.9bn; Joint Strike Fighters for the aforementioned carriers £12bn; third tranche of Eurofighter contract £2bn; identity cards £4.7bn; Heathrow’s third runway £9bn; Crossrail £16bn; and so on.

The second list comprises just a few of the major spending decision facing government. It is widely believed that the financial crisis means that we cannot afford all of these projects, and most were controversial even before the crisis, because they were indications of a country still trying to punch above its weight.

The really shaming thing about the MP’s expenses row is the revelation that with so many sleep-denying decision in the in-trays (for those in government, that is), some of them have found time for creative accounting in their domestic economies. The expenses row is a huge distraction from the real business of the nation. Never has “fiddling while Rome burns” been more apposite.

Whilst obsessing about such trivia, the government has spent more than a decade dodging big decisions – on filling the energy gap; on reducing carbon emissions; on curbing out-of-control Ministry of Defence spending on prestige projects for the Navy and RAF; on electrifying the rest of the rail network and rationalising its ownership and financing; on rebalancing the economy in favour of manufacturing.

The electorate seems mostly unconcerned and uninformed about most of these mega projects, especially the military ones. The government prefers to make these expert decisions on the quiet, and the Media, which should be creating a forum for debate on these big issues, mostly connives with the public in preferring prurience about dirty linen to examining the technicalities of defence procurement. It is easy to understand the furore. Most people haven’t a clue about the rights and wrongs of buying  Eurofighters or  JSFs. Why should they? But running a household is the only thing everyone understands. Mrs Thatcher used to play this card, claiming that she as a housewife would apply good housewifely principles when it came to the national budget. But it’s a sign of national inanity to be more concerned with MPs' feather dusters than with the great affairs of state and industry.

There is much loose talk now about people power. The humiliation of this parliament seems likely to open the door to a raft of celebrity MPs (the people’s choice) plus an intake of extremists. Do we really think that a Parliament –  probably hung – containing the likes of Joanna Lumley, Esther Rantzen, a few Greens and a small but growing gang of UKIPs and BNPs will be better than the present incumbents at addressing the real shopping list. Because such a grotesque celebrity/extremist Parliament is where our obsession with MPs’ laundry lists seems to be heading. 

 

 

Gecko Update

To bring a new technology to mass market can take up to 40 years. When I wrote The Gecko’s Foot (2005), I commented that predicting which bio-inspired technologies would come good and when was the toughest job. Bringing products to market is actually harder than innovating in the first place. The clear frontrunner of the technologies featured in the book has been Lotus Effect applications. The Lotus Effect spawned a new science of super-wetting and super non-wetting materials and new applications that have emerged since the book were featured in my Scientific American article in August 2008. In the last year the greatest strides have been made in gecko adhesion itself. Several labs are working on this and are making great progress.

While I was writing the book, I had the idea of making gecko-like arrays using carbon nanotubes and suggested this to Dr Binqing Wei at Louisiana State University. Unfortunately the nanotube idea is so obvious that many others had drawn the same conclusion: nanotube arrays are now widely used to mimic the gecko and are achieving good results.  Another Chinese team at the universities of Akron, Dayton and the Georgia Institute of Technology has created a nanotube array that mimics the real geckos in the important aspect of having a thicker spatulate end to the very thin fibres. They can create 10-100 billion such fibres per square centimetre. These arrays have strong adhesion when pulled along the line of the object they are stuck to but they release easily when pulled away from the surface, exactly what you want in a reusable adhesive.

The original gecko-array fabricator, Ron Fearing, at University of California, Berkeley, has also now produced an array that mimics the gecko’s directionality, using polypropylene fibre.

One of the most fascinating ideas is to combine the techniques of the two very different creatures with remarkable adhesive properties:  geckos and mussels. Mussel glue sets underwater: it evolved that way because that’s where mussels live. Mussel glue research goes back as far as the gecko’s and in 2007 Philip Messersmith's team at North-western University, Illinois reported ‘A reversible wet/dry adhesive inspired by mussels and geckos.’ They call it ‘geckel’. It sounds an idea almost too good to be true. A gecko-like array of tiny pillars is capped with a synthetic mussel-type polymer. The result works in both wet and dry conditions and maintains its strength for 1000 cycles.

Which technique will win through: carbon nanotubes; geckel or directional polypropylene arrays? Or maybe all or none of the above? What is clear is that gecko’s foot adhesives have reached a very interesting  stage of their career.

 

1962

Many People have a special feeling for a certain year. For Salvador Dali it was the year 1900 (‘every ornamental object of the year 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, etc’). Which reminds me that year worship is obviously a fetish. It is both rational and irrational. We don’t know why we were drawn to a particular year although it is possible after the event to rationalise the decision.

My year is 1962. Perhaps the reason is that it was obviously a year of transition in the world and national life and I was 15 years old. This convergence of the personal and public is what selected this year strongly for me.

1962 was not yet the 60s of course. The Beatles made their first bleat of a blip on the national consciousness with Love Me Do, released in October, but they didn’t become a phenomenon until 1963. But being a time of transition doesn’t mean that 1962 was dull or colourless. It seemed to me at the time to be replete with the glamour of a kind of life I hoped I would inherit as I became a man.

Here’s how it looked to me. That Was the Week That Was set the tone. This satire was knowing and very cool. The music of the era was jazz. Millicent Martin’s songs on the show were hip and scat jazzy. Jazz’s annus mirabilis was 1959 but Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Horace Silver were still blowing confidently, unaware of the rock explosion that would soon hit them.

This irreverent new culture was sophisticated; the scruffiness of hippiedom had yet to assert itself. Peter Cook, the coolest funny man around, wore Italian bum-freezer jackets. The first Bond film, Dr No, appeared that year and set the style. The musicals How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (‘You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth’), The Music Man, and Anthony Newley's Stop the World I Want to Get Off were running. This was the world of Vance Packard: the new consumer society with its button-down collars and whisky sour edge of cynicism.

Anthony Newley was a characteristic figure: an East End Jew with all-round abilities: singing, song-writing, acting, comedy. The early Beatles took on some of the colour of this time. Epstein dressed them in suits and in photographs of the time they have belonged alongside Cook and Newley as representative figures. The Beatles, whose main roots were in the R&B and rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly actually included ‘Till There was You’, a melodic show tune from The Music Man, in their set.

And then there was Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, a manifesto way ahead of its time, foreshadowing the submissive slut era of Sex and the City in the 2000s: ‘Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.’

At 15 I couldn’t wait to join this world but when two year later I went to university and started to live, the mood had already changed. Dylan and R&B replaced the sophistication of jazz with a new rawer edge. It was goodbye bum freezers and hello the donkey jacket. I vaguely missed the buttoned down cool which was still out there somewhere but at 17 you go with the tide and the tide was going somewhere else. Now, everything connected with the year 1962 seems imbued with an impossible charisma, glamour and eroticism.