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Chapter 51 - MRI Experiments

Early February

When February began, Tamara’s MRI project was in full operation. She had recruited fourteen subjects and had designed a protocol that was broken into several different related tasks, with a possible follow-up of smaller scope, depending on the results of the first series. Tamara had read several articles in the literature which claimed that the anterior cingulate cortex was highly active in empathic response, followed closely by the hypothalamus and amygdala, but specific details differed somewhat for gender and the amount of activity seemed to be related to age. So her studies would be concentrating on those structures.

The first session for each subject was to quantify their midbrain activities detected by the fMRI to try to rank them by degree of empathy. In the protocol, the subjects viewed images of great emotional content, listened to sound tracks of babies crying, and were exposed to similar items of emotional content, while the fMRI scan recorded how the subjects’ brains responded.

Then, on a different day, the subjects were given the task she had designed to activate their olfactory tracts. This task had them trying to distinguish between the three fruit flavors she had chosen while their nostrils were blocked. To confuse their visual-association sense, the flavored items were presented to them in a capsule of the color of a different flavor. She used a cognitive feedback technique in this task to have the subjects “train” themselves to pay very close attention in identifying each flavor.

The third task in the sequence combined the first two, in an attempt to see if the activation of the subjects’ limbic systems could be enhanced by exposing them to mixtures of the fruit flavors, in different proportions of two of the three flavors, and having them attempt to identify the predominant flavor. This test required the recall of a sensory memory and mobilized most of the midbrain structures responsible for memory processing and recall, including the limbic system and the hippocampal formation, while keeping their olfactory tracts active.

After three weeks, the first series of subject tasks were complete and Dr Marcos had the scans. A few days later, he called Tamara, quite excited.

“Tamara, those scans are incredible; the resolution and detail are amazing. I’d like to call in some colleagues to analyze these scans with me, I’m seeing things on the scans that have never been described before.”

“Of course. You can get others to work with the scans. Just one thing—they all need to sign an NDA ‘cause I’m working on the patents for the device. And there’s subject confidentiality to maintain also.”

“Sure. Can you send the NDA form to me?”

“Yeah, I’ll email you a pdf. They can sign one and you can return the signed copy to me by campus mail. But scan and email the scan or a photo of the signed copy back to me also in case the campus mail gets lost or something.”

~~~~

Tamara was in Emma’s Physics office going over some of the magnet monopole project measurements about a week later, when Dr Montern appeared at the door.

“She’s done it again,” he announced, solemnly.

“Sorry?” Emma said, looking up. “What? Who?”

“Upset the whole world of science. Tamara,” Montern said, unhappily.

“Chet, come in, sit down, keep calm and carry on,” Emma joked. “What’s Tamara done now?”

“Ha. What hasn’t she done. I got off the phone with Dr Karasitos, the head of the Neuroscience Department, a few minutes ago. He called me from the med school with Dr Ellenden on the line; she’s a vice dean there. My sense from their call is that the med school department heads are getting concerned that Physics is taking over their faculty. There’s about a dozen of their faculty who are involved with Tamara’s project now...”

Tamara giggled. “It’s twenty-three as of an hour ago...”

Montern looked at her while trying to keep a stern look on his face, but then cracked up.

“Yeah, Karasitos told me that six of his faculty, they’re in cognitive neuroscience, are poring over some MRI scans from Tamara’s project. The dean said that half of the med school’s and hospital’s radiologists, three pathologists, a number of neurologists, and several psychiatrists—if I’m keeping it straight—are glued to their computers, looking at those scans.

“Um, I think there are one or two psychologists and someone in histology too,” Tamara offered.

Emma leaned back and let out a hearty laugh. “She’ll take over the university next, won’t she,” she sighed.

“So tell me how a physics project got into, well, medicine, I guess,” Montern asked.

Emma looked at Tamara and motioned for her to answer.

“So I’m really doing physics where it interfaces with biology. That’s biophysics, and like one thing biophysicists do is to study how nerve cells communicate—and my work has been tending in that direction. I’m putting that topic together with electrical engineering, since nerve calls act like biological electrical circuits. I’m also using physics when I design MRI improvements. Every system in an MRI uses something based on modern physics. Superconductivity, electromagnetism, radio wave propagation, quantum electronics. And engineering physics too, that’s integrated circuits and semiconductors. Josephson junctions and even Andreev electron scattering are playing important parts in my work. My MRI project was to use the special properties of the SET, the single electron transistor, and designing superconducting RF generating and receiving circuits, to improve the spatial resolution of the scans. That’s helping my collaborators—all twenty-three of them now,” she giggled, “...learn how nerve cells communicate.”

“Hmm, a real cross-discipline project,” Montern mused. “The old model of physics with solo researchers is disappearing...”

“That disappeared generations ago, Chet, starting with particle physics,” Emma grinned. “Big physics started, most science historians would say, in 1929, when Ernest Lawrence got his idea for the cyclotron. Then, a little more than a decade later, came the Manhattan Project. Then the really huge projects started. Since the equipment in a typical high-energy physics lab costs a million bucks or more, that lab would want to keep a bunch of them occupied, wouldn’t it. My own solid-state lab has thirteen engineers and techs and three postdoc physicists—not to mention two remarkable students, and Tamara’s employing two additional engineer types. When I got my first appointment to the APL, I had decided to work solo and couldn’t understand why they gave me a lab. Blimey, I was so naive then. Even Tamara couldn’t have done what she’s done without a team backing her, right, Tamara?”

“Totally. It’s true that I get ideas but it takes a number of people to build what I imagine.”

“So I gather the resolution of your MRI coils is the featured news?” Montern asked.

“Yep. The ability to see structures at a finer scale lets you see new neurologic activity centers and new pathways linking them. So this is allowing the researchers to better understand what the brain regions do.”

Emma laughed. “Tamara’s got a bunch of patent apps in the pipeline now and it means that diagnostic and research medicine will get a new tool without having to invest in an MRI with a stronger magnet. I reckon that her new coil will be a hot item for most diagnostic centers. And I’ve got my Cambridge company’s solicitors talking to Tamara’s about licensing deals.”

Mid-February

“Emma, Dr Marcos sent me the preliminary results of the first set of experiments,” Tamara said.

It was mid-February and Tamara was getting ready for the second phase of her MRI tests; she had gone to Emma’s office to discuss her project and the latest idea she had gotten.

“You’ll recall that I was screening for empathy as a possible way to activate the parts of the brain that I suspect work to give me my abilities. To classify our volunteers’ empathy levels, Marcos divided them into three groups based on the written screening questionnaire and their brain activity. The least empathic was a ‘1’ and the most, a ‘3.’ What he found was that the people with the highest empathies also had the best results in the olfactory tests.”

“So I reckon that result helps support your chemical messaging theory, then?” Emma asked.

“Yeah, and also how the brain causes empathy in a person; so that raises a question about charisma. One of the most charismatic people I ever met was your sister-in-law Sam. Do you think that I could get her to do a session with the fMRI? It would be a one-shot scan session and she’d just need to watch a video clip and say something about what she thought about it.”

“I’ll ask, but if you’re flexible on the time, I think she’d do it.”

“Good, thanks,” Tamara said.

~~~~

The other part of Tamara’s latest idea was twofold. One was to scan Peter, her super-empath subject, and the other was to look for her own chemical signals. Doing the EEG part would have to wait. She had worked out a way to try to capture organic molecules from the air, even the tiny levels of her theorized personal pheromones. She had already lined up time on the new device that the Mass Spectrometry Lab in the Department of Chemistry had recently gotten—it was capable of detection of small biological chemicals in the low femtogram concentration region. The device was a chemist’s answer to the physicist’s particle beam accelerator.

Tamara recalled that very tiny amounts of illegal drugs could be detected in an athlete’s blood by using a device called a mass spectrometer. Sometimes a gas chromatograph device would be coupled to a mass spectrometer for certain complex analyses; in her case, that additional instrument wasn’t needed. Her analysis would employ the new time-of-flight mass spectrometer the lab had gotten. In the device, a volatilized specimen is placed in the source chamber and the molecules in the specimen are ionized with a laser pulse. Then the charged ions are electrostatically accelerated into a drift chamber. The ions of a small mass, as they travel through the chamber, move faster than the heavier ions, so the beam of ions which impacts the detector is separated according to ion mass. Each compound has its own ion mass signature; this is referred to as its “spectra.”

She also had figured out how to collect any airborne pheromones. Peter’s Uncle Dave worked in Ft. Detrick at USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the Defense Department’s facility for research into defenses against biological warfare agents. Dave had told her about some of the work he did as a virologist and had mentioned the small portable isolation units they used for field work. Tamara had contacted him and arranged to borrow one and had it set up in the MRI room with an air sampler on the unit’s exhaust; this would trap any organic molecules from the exhaust air on its filter.

Tamara planned to run several tests during the next few months. One was to try to collect any unusual organic chemicals in the air when she “pushed” an emotional color taste, but she had learned that her “push” needed a target—and the target couldn’t be herself; that only worked for limited things, like biofeedback methods did. She decided to use the thirst emotion as the challenge, since most of the others in her repertoire were more unpleasant. This part of her followup experiment had two components: the first was with her in the open but out of sight of the subject and the second was with her in the isolation tent with the chemical-capturing filter in place.

She planned slightly more elaborate tests with Peter and a simple one with Sam—Sam’s was to scan her brain when given the task of reacting to a brief video and presenting her point of view on the video’s topic in a convincing way. Tamara had no doubt whatsoever that Sam would perform that task admirably. Tamara, like many other people, saw how charismatic people always had their personalities turned on—like many other people, she had noticed that when certain people entered a busy room, most everyone in the room turned to look at who had entered, despite their being engaged with other activities, like conversations, at the time.

Tamara had arranged with a faculty member in the Hopkins Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to collaborate on identifying and characterizing the molecules that the isolation unit’s air filters had trapped. They had analyzed those molecules using the Chemistry Department’s mass spectrometer unit and now had copies of their spectra; this allowed them to use their characteristic fragmentation patterns to match up the fragment ions formed with known molecules. Tamara met with one of his postdoctoral fellows, Joyce Darner, who agreed to help to do the identification.

What Darner found from analyzing the spectra of Tamara’s compounds was that they were all based on a compound very similar in structure to the supposed human pheromones called androstadienone and estratetraenol, exocrine hormones produced by human males—the “andro” compound, and females—the “estra” form. Even though those molecules had been assumed to be sexual pheromones, Tamara knew that every well controlled study published to date failed to show a significant sexual response to exposure to the molecule. But Tamara’s molecules were slightly different from the base molecule; the MS analyses showed that in Tamara’s case, the major difference was that the methyl group moiety in the molecule was replaced by different radical groups of varying composition.

By early February, Darner had enough information to attempt to synthesize one of the molecules, one with the simplest radical group. Tamara had visited her to learn what she had found.

“Tamara, this is a hard one to make synthetically. The attached radical groups make the molecule fairly unstable during syntheses, but that’s not the real problem.”

“What’s the problem, then?” Tamara asked.

“I get optical isomers when I synthesize the compound,” she said, “and isolating one enantiomer from the other hasn’t worked; the molecules degrade easily. The molecules you secrete are the D-enantiomer, I suspect that, biologically, the stereoisomer mixture would not work at best or be harmful at worst. That’s what’s been found in pharmacology when dealing with stereoisomers.”

Tamara knew from her organic chemistry courses that biologically active molecules are enantiomeric, or stereoisomeric. They have identical chemical structures except that their bonding angles differ at certain atoms in such a way that the physical shape of one version cannot be converted to the other. Such molecules also possess optical activity; that is, under certain conditions, light passed through concentrations of the molecules is polarized in either a right- or left-handed direction; thus they are labeled “D” for “dextro,” or right-handed, or “L” for “levo,” the left-handed version. She also recalled that stereoisomers of the same molecule have different biological properties in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. These properties describe how long they stay active in the body and how the body absorbs, metabolizes, and excretes them.

“Uh huh, I understand,” Tamara told her. “Can you keep trying? This might be a breakthrough chemical. Or is there a way to concentrate the molecule from the filters?”

“Possibly. This work is a real challenge, and it’s an interesting molecule too. Something brand new that nobody’s seen before; that’s rare.”

Tamara left, wondering how to deal with this part of her emotion-communicating project. She vowed to look into the quantum-mechanical properties of steroid hormones to see if that could suggest an answer.

~~~~

But National Engineers Week was here and on Saturday, Tamara and Emma would be presented with the Draper Prize. Engineers Week gets little publicity, not because the seventy-odd engineering and education societies that observe it don’t try to make the public aware of it. So do all the fifty-plus corporations and government agencies which get involved in it. But most scientific events rarely get significant coverage in the news. News which isn’t scandalous, sensational, dramatic, or lurid, mostly doesn’t get published.

The National Engineers Week was created in 1951 to recognize the contributions to society that engineers make and it’s observed on the week in which George Washington’s birthday, February 22, occurs. Washington is regarded as the nation’s first engineer because of his initial career as a land surveyor, which he began at age 17.

The Draper Prize is awarded at an event hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and this year, the awards ceremony and banquet were to take place in a D.C. hotel ballroom. Honorees could invite family and friends to attend, so Tamara included her family and Peter and his family, while Emma invited her family. There was a dinner followed by speeches and then Tamara and Emma each gave a brief acceptance speech.

As the event was winding up, Sam looked at her siblings.

“Kinda low-key compared to the Nobel Prize ceremony, innit?” she chuckled.

Emma nodded, grinning. “I much prefer this kind.”

“You guys went to Emma’s Nobel Prize affair? Wow,” Tamara exclaimed.

“It was brill,” Abi gushed. “Especially how all the people there, the nobility too, thought Sam and I were the granddaughters of one of the laureates. And when they saw who this Dr Emma Clarke really was, a 14-year-old kid, most of the blokes there were gobsmacked.”

Those in Peter’s family were amused by this revelation and wanted all of the details and Sam was happy to comply [as told in Emma Comes in from the Cold].

~~~~

Back at work after the weekend, Tamara dealt with a number of invites for her to present a seminar, sent by email and even a few by postal mail, by politely sending her regrets. Then she dove back into her calculations. She had some new ideas which had occurred to her from speaking to a few of the engineers and scientists at the NAE event. Several had asked questions about applying her discoveries about electron storage and flow to their own design situations and her answers had led her to another inspiration about how mathematics could account for her discovery.

She had realized that the explanation for how her circuit permitted electrons to flow against a charge gradient was almost certainly related to the repulsive magnetic monopole phenomenon she had discovered; her accumulator circuit design and its physical layout were similar in both cases. She began her calculations with the assumption that the circuit that she had invented, which allows electrons to move against a charge gradient, must be analogous to the electrostatic phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, where electrons are able to penetrate a potential energy barrier whose energy exceeds the electron’s kinetic energy. Under the influence of her circuit, which employed her unique use of superconducting components and single-electron transistors, the SETs, to amplify current flow, she theorized that the attractive force exerted on the electrons by the coil circuit’s monopole force effect was stronger than the repulsion of the electrostatic field, allowing the electrons to travel through the electrostatic barrier of the field.

Because of the extremely small size of the SETs’ superconducting junctions, whatever force that the monopole effect created was operating on the negatively charged electrons, and was therefore attractive. An electrical charge in motion creates a magnetic field; electrons are charged particles, and since they are always in motion, their magnetic moment allowed the monopole force to pull them into the storage matrix. In the larger coil arrays Tamara had designed, the force no longer operated at a quantum scale; the scale had become macroscopic, so the force was repulsive, not only to ferromagnetic and paramagnetic materials; it affected most matter.

The dense electron packing her circuit achieved was therefore a result of the monopole force—the “coil force,” she had decided to call it—which appeared to fold space inside the lattice and allowed very high electron densities to be achieved. The reason that the Pauli exclusion principle seemed to be violated locally was because when the potential energies of the system were calculated, the calculations appeared to show that electrons with identical quantum numbers were occupying the same atomic orbitals within the same atom. That was the Pauli principle violation; no two electrons in an atom can have the same four quantum numbers. But the electrons in the storage matrix were not actually occupying orbitals in the same physical atom; they were distributed throughout the folded space created by the coil force.

When Tamara completed her calculations—and after multiple rechecks—that she finished several days later, she was very excited; she couldn’t see anything wrong with her calculations or her initial assumptions. It did look to her that the known theories of quantum electrodynamics could account for both the electron flow and electron storage. She needed Emma’s advice.

“Blimey, Tamara, where’s the fire?” Emma exclaimed as Tamara burst into her office, quivering with excitement.

“These calcs. Emma, please tell me if I’m right and didn’t make some kind of dumb error.”

Emma studied the pages for several minutes; then she leaned back into her chair.

“Bloody awesome... Tamara, I’m about to embarrass you the way my own advisor did when I showed him my maths for the superconductor formula design. I want you to present this work to the whole faculty; you’ve done something that physicists all over haven’t been able to figure out, and as well, you did it using current quantum physics methods.”

“So the math is okay then?” Tamara asked. She was still processing Emma’s comment.

“Quite. All the maths work out. It’s your initial assumption, the electron charge tunneling, that may be controversial, but the maths can’t be denied. Your idea of the ‘coil force’ though—that will set off many old-school physicists. The numbers work, however. And the maths backing the theory as shown here matches how the physical device works. Publishing this work, though, could be a challenge because it’s so revolutionary.

“But I’m not going to be like Niels Bohr, who was Werner Heisenberg’s supervisor. Bohr had prevented Heisenberg from publishing one of his ideas, the one which involved postulating a thought experiment involving a ‘gamma-ray microscope’ to directly observe an electron’s position—Heisenberg had formulated that idea to help validate his uncertainty principle. I had read that Bohr was opposed to that idea, so he blocked him from publishing it. But when Bohr went on vacation, Heisenberg submitted the paper anyway. Bohr was annoyed about his doing it but they did reconcile, though, and their later contributions to physics was enormous. Today, their work, together with that of Max Born and others, is known as the ‘Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.’

“So even though I don’t understand how the maths can be explained in terms of our physical reality, I won’t keep you from publishing the work—and the first step is for you to organize a talk—get other physicists involved in discussing the maths. The more it’s discussed, the quicker your ideas will get accepted. But on the other hand, you know, Max Planck once said that a new scientific truth doesn’t triumph because it convinces its opponents and makes them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that’s familiar with it. What that really means is that science advances by one funeral at a time.”

They both laughed.

“Okay then; let’s organize a seminar for you. At least you’ll get a chance to prepare. My advisor just grabbed me and a bunch of department members, dragged us off to a classroom, and told me to start talking. I’ll let you know what I arrange. Go prepare a forty-minute presentation; there’ll be plenty of questions, I’m sure.”

Tamara left the office, still feeling a bit unbalanced. My work was good. My math was correct. I guess I’m learning how to be a good scientist.

About an hour later, Terence dropped by. He and Tamara checked in with each other at least once a day and discussed their work; they had a lot of overlaps in their electronic systems designs.

“Hey, Tamara, Emma was talkin’ about y’all just before,” he told her when he stopped at her office. Tamara’s little office was located in a corner of Emma’s lab in the Physics-Astronomy building. “She was on a call as Ah was comin’ in to talk t’her and Ah heard a bit.”

“You weren’t eavesdropping, I hope?”

“Nah. It was good stuff. She was finishin’ the call and said something like, ‘she’s the modern version of Leonardo Da Vinci, actually,’” he chuckled. “Ah’m guessin’ she was talkin’ ‘bout y’all.”

“She said that? Really? Wow...”

“Hey, Ah think she’s right. He wasn’t just a great artist... he was also into engineering, anatomy, zoology, botany... um... geology, optics, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics, from what Ah remember of his work. Y’all’re doin’ most of the same things... much more modern versions, though,” he laughed. “Let’s see, quantum and classical physics, electrical engineering, neuroscience and neuroanatomy, biochemistry, and probably psychology too. Right?”

“I suppose so. But in my case, they’re all related. Leonardo’s work was all over the place. Just think of the range of inventions he thought of. How he found the time to do all of that work is mind-boggling. I’m nowhere in the same class as he was.”

Terence laughed. “Lots’a folks would disagree, right there. Say, Ah wanted to show you what Ah came up with for the latest version of my infrared detector for the ‘scope...”

They spent about an hour going over Terence’s circuit design and he left, happy with the results.

Early May

During the rest of the spring semester, Tamara worked with Peter and had him in the MRI for a few sessions; she also had Sam in once, and worked with a few selected subjects from her student volunteer group for a small follow-up study. Both she and Emma had decided to use some of their Draper Prize money to fund the parts of her research which were beyond the scope of Emma’s federal grants.

Tim’s shipment of the used EEG unit and electrode headset arrived in early April and Tamara paid a visit to the Neurology Department at the Hopkins School of Medicine to get some lessons in the proper electrode use. She was met by several very enthusiastic neurologists who were delighted to help her; they even offered to have one of the department’s technicians work with her to do some EEG scans. They told her about how their review of the MRI scans she had done in her study had triggered many new ideas about brain function and several of the physicians were actually writing research grant proposals to investigate the new brain interactions that they had seen.

In late April, Emma told Tamara that they were going to England in June.

“We are?” Tamara asked a grinning Emma. “Why?”

“Nothing very big, but I just heard that I’m getting a bloody knighthood,” Emma chuckled.

“Emma! That’s so awesome!” Tamara exclaimed. “That’s a really big honor. Is it about your research?”

“Possibly, but not bloomin’ likely,” Emma smiled. “They usually don’t look at science for those honors. They give them for performing some kind of extraordinary service to the country—usually in the arts, business, or humanitarian areas. Something that enhances the reputation of the British people. Science honors have been uncommon but that may be changing. In my case, I reckon that it was the startup of my battery-research and manufacturing enterprise in Cambridge three years ago. It’s made England the world center for battery technology and energy storage, innit. And that brings money into the country; it’s estimated to be hundreds of millions of quid. Now here’s why you’re coming too... as well, they have an honor for you...”

She had to stop as Tamara gasped as she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Indeed, as the inventor of the technology, you also have a share in the economic benefit to the U.K. I think you absolutely deserve it. If someone like Bill Gates got an honor for his charitable work—not that I think he didn’t deserve it; his foundation is well known—then you certainly should for what you’ve done. As well, the blokes at EEC Energy Solutions, my Cambridge company, want to show you the prototype for the commercial energy-storage accumulator unit based on your invention. Until now, the current largest unit on the market can store up to 3.9 megawatt-hours of electricity in a unit that is forty feet long, eight feet high and eight feet deep and weighs about 50,000 pounds.

“Our prototype modular unit stores about 14.7 megawatt-hours and it fits in an eight-foot cube and weighs perhaps 6,500 pounds, or a bit less. Your use of that porous polyvinylidene compound substrate as a base makes the accumulator so much lighter—not to mention its not needing much metals. All the boffins in my Cambridge group are celebrating at these numbers and we’ve got a lot of very happy staff now too, don’t we.”

“Emma, I have to say that I’m speechless...”

“My dear, I told you that you would become world-famous for your work, and the accumulator is just the beginning. I’ve set my marketing people a goal for developing batteries for electric vehicles now. And we haven’t even scratched the surface on the application possibilities for that ‘coil force’ invention of yours. Now I understand that your own personal investigation about the brain function research is complete and you just need to review the data.”

“Yep. There’s still just so much for everyone to do, though. Was this what it was like when you were developing your superconducting formula—so many people all doing different things? My head spins trying to keep track.”

“That’s it precisely, my dear. They were all collaborators in my project, as they are in yours. Your role’s like being the conductor of a symphony orchestra; every player could be a soloist in his or her own right, but they chose to form a group and each makes a vital contribution. The kind of science you’re doing is a true collaboration.”

End of May

University graduation was on the third Monday of May. It turned out that Tamara’s majoring in both physics and electrical engineering was the cause of a bit of bureaucratic wrangling. According to university policy, dual majors received the degree awarded by their “primary” major. But Tamara had completed all of the requirements for a bachelor’s degree in both physics and in engineering; indeed, she had earned some twenty-plus additional graduate credits in both majors. Because of her accomplishments, both departments insisted that she be counted as a graduate of their department and receive a degree that reflected her work in their discipline. This was a matter of real importance for both departments because, essentially, a renowned scholar brought recognition to the department which granted their degree.

In the end, the top university officials refused to change the university’s dual major graduation policy, despite their acknowledgment that Tamara was certainly worthy of such an honor. The officials’ reasoning? That setting such a precedent would encourage less worthy students to request waivers. A conference between the two departments took place with the result that Tamara was awarded three degrees at graduation: A bachelor’s and master’s of science degree in physics, and a master’s of electrical engineering degree. The departments took advantage of a loophole in the university’s graduate school degree requirements which placed no limits on the awarding of multiple graduate degrees, provided that the candidate met the degree program’s requirements. Tamara also received various other honors, both departmental and university.

Peter was awarded his own degree at the ceremony, a bachelor of science in electrical engineering with a mathematics minor, while Barbara received her bachelor of science in psychology with a sociology minor. Terence had not skipped a year, so he was continuing on as a senior. Barbara had accepted an offer from University of Maryland to enter their doctoral psychology program; she didn’t want to leave Terence, even for graduate school and besides, Maryland was highly ranked in their psychology program. Both Peter and Tamara were continuing on in graduate school at Hopkins.

~~~~

At the end of one of Peter’s final MRI sessions on the last Friday of May, he asked Tamara if she had drawn any conclusions about how empathy and charisma were processed in the brain.

“Actually I have strong evidence now that people appear to send signals to each other,” Tamara replied. “In my tests, I found that by having the subjects use the positive feedback techniques I showed them, I was able to get them to improve their empathy scores and we could see the corresponding changes in the MRI scans. So that tells me that the ability is native.”

“So it’s a learned ability?” Peter asked.

“Yep. That might be a good topic for a psych study, in fact, but I’m not gonna get sidetracked. So the MRI scans of those subjects showed the development of patches of receptors—or possibly the activation of inactive receptors—in their olfactory bulbs. And when I ‘pushed’ thirst to the subjects, it seems that they had two separate responses. If I was in the isolation tent and they responded to the thirst, then those neocortical patches I saw in my own scans lit up, but only a little—those were the ones I told you about, the ones whose layout looked like little antennas. When I was outside the tent, then both the neocortical patches and the ones in the olfactory bulb lit up.”

“That means the brain can receive both chemical and electrical signals, then, right?” Peter asked.

“That’s what the results of those experiments suggest, anyway,” Tamara agreed. “And I did get positive results from the mass spec lab about identifying a new biochemical compound in the air, captured on the air filter while I was ‘pushing’ the emotion. The scans done on me when I was ‘pushing’ showed much activity increase in my neocortical patches. It appears that the sebaceous glands in my scalp and forehead were stimulated and that appears to be where that chemical came from. A few swabs confirmed that. Joyce Darner, my postdoc collaborator in the Biochemistry Department, is still working on the molecule and she says she’s making progress. The endocrinologists over at the med school are jumping all over those results ‘cause it seems to show a completely new human physiological process: a voluntary biochemical secretion and the corresponding response to a chemical stimulus.”

“So your volunteers still got thirsty when you were in the tent and your chemical signal didn’t reach them.” Peter clarified.

“They got thirsty, yes, but it was nowhere as strong as when I was outside it. I said that their neocortical patches lit up a little but I couldn’t properly test what happens there electrically ‘cause I can’t do an EEG in the MRI room at the same time as a scan is run. But my own EEG tracings when I ‘push,’ show intense electrical activity in my parietal neocortex. I’m guessing that I generated some kind of external electrical signal that the subjects picked up and got the thirst sensation, but that was a weak result compared to when their olfactory tracts became involved.

“And then when Sam was scanned, that area of her neocortex totally lit up, so my working theory is that charismatic individuals broadcast some kind of electrical signal that announces their presence. And in your case, your empathy, I already told you that you appear to have the same number of those parietal neocortical patches that I do, but yours are always... um, energized, I guess I could say, at a much lower level than Sam’s but much greater than any of my first test subjects. Your brain is always in ‘receiving’ mode and that’s why your empathy gave you so much trouble in high school.”

“Jeez, that’s so cool, learning all that about the brain,” Peter said. “But how much of that stuff can you publish?”

Tamara chuckled. “I didn’t mention this, I guess. So much is going on. I’m a co-author on, um, fourteen papers now, those are just the ones for the medical literature. There are two more in chemistry and three in psych journals. My contributions to those papers came from my being actively involved in the experimental design that those papers describe. Only four of them’ve been published so far, but the rest are due out in the next two or three months.”

While Tamara and Peter were talking, they were helping Davy Foster to close up the lab and then they headed out to Peter’s car. He had recently gotten it as a graduation gift from his grandfather Mason, a four-year-old hand-me-down, and he was trying to get Tamara to learn to drive.

As they approached the car, he asked her, “So when d’you wanna start some lessons, then?”

She giggled. “Not yet, honey. I like having a cute chauffeur. Maybe when we’re back from England.”

“I can’t believe how many irons you have in the fire, babe; it’s crazy,” Peter smiled at her. “Let’s see if I can get them all. First, analyzing the MRI studies you just told me about, to see which brain areas your ‘pushing’ affects. Second, the work on your chemical secretion. You still don’t know how it’s different for each emotion you ‘push,’ right?”

“Yep, but we’ve made some progress there and we might be close. Go on...”

“Third, you wanted to see if the chemicals you secrete have any effect on a subject if the subject is exposed to them without your ‘pushing’ them. Fourth, the EEG studies. You’re trying to find out if you generate some kind of electrical signal when you ‘push’ an emotion color. You also told me you were trying to figure out a way to do the EEGs in the magnet room. Fifth, your work on the monopole force discovery. You’re working on the link between that force and the electron charge tunneling idea that you’ve hypothesized. Sixth, writing each of those things up for the stuff you plan to publish. Did I miss anything?”

“Um, us helping my folks move into their new house?” Tamara suggested.

Tamara’s parents had just closed on their new home and she and Peter were going to help.

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