Passion and Science and Intuition and Dogs

So tonight my husband and I had our totally embarrassingly, old-fogey weekly TV date to watch 60 Minutes—the only show on all of the 293,468 cable network channels on 24/7 (and if you multiply those numbers, the possibilities are almost infinite!) that we can both agree to tolerate together. (My taste runs to Desperate Housewives and Survivor—His to Star Trek and the History Channel. I guess it’s true that opposites attract…)

Anyway, the second story of the show was all about Howard Hughes and this huge endowment that his medical center has. A little snippet of the segment was about this one brilliant scientist who was once upon a time studying frog development, then he had a son who was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and how he immediately changed his scientific quest to find a cure for his son’s condition.

The point that 60 Minutes was making was that because the Howard Hughes medical institute is privately funded, and researchers don’t need to fill out a gazillion forms to get money, this guy could change his research focus on a dime.

And I said, “How, cool! This guy is now free to research something for which he is absolutely passionate!” The scientist is not just working for intellectual curiosity, or peer review, but for his very own son’s life!

Then my husband, (who it must be said, has a Ph.D. in Computational Fluid Dynamics—basically the way things move around in space--and has worked for NASA and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and has a button that a friend gave him that proclaims, “Why, Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist”) said, ‘That’s exactly what all science should be—about passion.”

And we were momentarily in agreement.

Then he added, “If I were to study something that I was absolutely passionate about, I would want to figure out how we could make dogs speak. Wouldn’t you love to know what Dog was thinking?”

Besides giving me a bit of the creeps, I felt like this was one of those science experiments that wasn’t really necessary, a little too obvious—like studying how toting guns in your car may make you more prone to road rage.

And I said, “Save the money. I know exactly what Dog is thinking. ‘Cheese, Treats, Walk. Cheese, Treats, Walk.”

My scientist husband laughed.