An "old" blog

Here is something I wrote while in grad school in The Graduate magazine. The title is "The snake that swallowed his tale"

I was watching the football playoffs with a beer in my hand, when I started thinking about history. Brett Favre had just completed a forward pass. He owed this completion to Newt Rockne, the coach from Notre Dame who, for all intents and purposes, invented the forward pass. Before him, American football looked more like English rugby.

English rugby was "invented" when a not-so-bright schoolboy at the Rugby School outside of London England was playing soccer and picked up the ball. The ref told him the rules, but by the third time the boy did it, the ref left the game play on, and rugby was born. The boy's name was William Webb Ellis, and the World Cup of Rugby trophy is still named for him.

It's no surprise that American football used to look like rugby, since it is a direct descendant of it. The first recorded game of American football was played between Yale and Harvard in the mid 1800's. These tow schools have tried to mimic everything English since their inception. Harvard was founded in 1636, sixteen ears after pilgrims landed at Plymouth rock. It has graduated seven American presidents, from the famous -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy -- to the infamous -- George W. Bush. It has also housed more than forty faculty members whose international fame has been ensuredby the endowment of Alfred Nobel and the Nobel prizes.

The Nobel prizes came about due to a misprint in a Swedish newspaper. You see, Alfred Nobel had a prother who passed away. Some reporter mistook the two Nobels and printed Alfred Nobel's obituary the next day. when he read his own obituary (a rather frightening thought), he was not pleased with the report: "Only to be remembered from his destructive contribution" of trinitrotoluene, an explosive responsible for many deaths" (not a direct quotation). It was so written because Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite, or trinitrotoluene (TNT).

Nobel disliked his obituary enough that he decided change his will and he established an early prize to be given to those academics that have contributed the most in their field, the fields being physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. Economics came only in 1968 through a donation of a bank in hopes of securing economics as a legitimate scientific field (the reader is left to decide the success).

There were three winners of the Nobel prize in medicine in 2001 -- Leland Hartwell, Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse -- for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle. The cell cycle includes cell division and the creation of energy through the breakdown of glucose (among many other things). In most living cells this is done in the presence of oxygen.

However, there is another pathway available when oxygen is not present. For humans this pathway leads to the creation of lactic acid, which is what aches in your muscles after physical exertion and must be coarsing through Brett Favre's body at the moments, and the corresponding pathway in plants leads to the creation of alcohol, which is responsible for the beer I'm currently enjoying.