Who am I?

Big Al Your Science Pal

I’m an insatiably curious, figuratively bind and literally deaf soul always learning about minor limbs and tails of the infinitely large Elephant of Life.

I want to provide some context of where my little soul came from so you can all better understand when I’m speaking about aspects of life close to me, and when I’m speculating about limbs of the Elephant of Life so distant from my circumstances that I may benefit from rolled eyes and informed comments closer to the source.

I believe in the healing power of stories. A lot of my writing, including scientific writing, attempts to tap into the intuitive powers of storytelling. This article has a little bit of my story, aimed to give you a better, intuitive sense of who I am.

My Mom

From the top: My Mom, Uncle Scott, and dad on the cover of Holy Water and Whiskey’s classic Folk/bluegrass/Gospel album, “Better Late Than Never”.

My mom (Maggie Werner-Washburne) is a biology professor and a real role model who lived a crazy life I aspire to. Her mom moved from Mexico with nothing but the clothes on their backs saying, “Thank God for Nothing,” as the revolution taking everything from them revealed what really mattered. My mom grew up riding horses in Iowa, did her undergrad at Stanford, ran off to Columbia to fall in love with Latin America, went to Alaska to build a cabin and live off the fat of the land, and then she got a PhD in Botany to do groundbreaking research finding proteins (chaperonins) that assist with critical duties inside the cell, to study yeast genomics in the microarray era, and to help underrepresented minorities find careers and meaning in science. She is unstoppably curious about nature, forever dedicated to making the world a better place, and a little bit wild.

Once, when I was 5 years old, I was riding on a train with my mom from Albuquerque to Iowa. At the time, it was clear that I loved animals and I loved pets. I loved lizards, frogs, and snakes, and took care of green anoles, whites tree frogs, rough green snakes, bearded dragons, and more. My mom pointed out the window to the plains rolling by and said,

”You know how you take care of your animals? How you feed them, give them water, and make sure their cages are clean? You see that bird soaring out there? Nobody has to take care of that bird. That bird is what we call ‘Wild’, nobody takes care of it. The grass is also Wild, it grows by turning sunlight and air into sugar. The Wild grasshoppers eat the grass, the Wild lizards eat the grasshoppers, the Wild birds eat the lizards, and the Wild snakes eat the birds’ eggs. Nature is powered by the sun and air, and everything lives in balance out here, with nobody needing to take care of it.”

”Wow…” I said as my eyes widened, my jaw dropped, and my mind expanded to grasp the magnitude of what I’d just heard. After a moment of awe, I started to test the conceptual tools my mom taught me, “So… everything I see out there is Wild?”

”Yes!” she said.

”That bush is Wild?” I asked, pointing to a passing bush. She nodded and smiled. “That tree is Wild??” I asked pointing to a passing tree. She nodded and smiled! “WOW!!!” I grasped the concept and began to point out every wild thing I saw, the wild grasses with their wildflowers and more…

“Look! Look!” I shouted so loud that everyone in our cabin could hear, “Look, mom! It’s a Wild telephone pole!”

My Dad

My dad is equal parts hilarious and compassionate. After being drafted in the Vietnam War wearing a peace sign next to his dog tag, he dedicated his career to working as a social worker for the Veterans Affairs hospital. My dad worked with veterans facing crises from psychiatry, drug-abuse, and alcoholism, to chronic struggles with blindness and, towards the end of his career, in the hospice center seeing to it that veterans and their families were supported in the final chapter of their lives.

Once, when I was in third grade, my dad took me for a drive along Route 66 close to home in Albuquerque. We entered the rougher region of this rough town, and I saw people who scared me, with disgruntled faces, disheveled beards and tattered clothes, prowling up and down the sidewalk. We approached a liquor store with a bright red neon “XXX”, a siren’s song luring people in like the tongue of an alligator snapping turtle dancing for fish or the delectable smell of the Venus fly trap flirting with flies. Outside the store was a scowling, prowling man, as scary as they come. My dad slowed down to stop the car, directly in front of this terrifying man. I looked at my dad with eyes begging to know “What are you doing???”, and to my disbelief my dad rolled down my window, offering me up as a human sacrifice for the Cannibals of Central Avenue. I was scared.

With my window down, I looked right to see the man sneer and creep towards the car, looking at the innocent victims inside. As he came closer, his eyes widened, and suddenly… his face burst into a smile, his eyes glowed, his arms raised to hug a giant and he shouted, “BRUCE!” He came running over, threw himself in my window and past my lap to hug my dad and shake his hand.

“Frank,” my dad said, “it’s SO good to see you! Frank, this is my son, Alex.”

Frank looked at me, his eyes sparking with a contagious love and compassion, and he grabbed my hand with both of his and shook my hand with a profound joy. “Alex, it’s SO great to meet you. Your dad is an amazing man - you listen to what he tells you, alright?”

After a pleasant conversation full of beauty and gratitude, we drove off and I felt as if somewhere deep inside a profound truth had been revealed, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. My dad slowly helped me piece together this puzzle, “Frank is a good guy,” he said. “Frank had a wife and kids who he loved dearly, and then was drafted during Vietnam. When he was in Vietnam, his best friend died in his arms, and he saw horrors he can’t unsee, giving him ‘PTSD’ or post-traumatic stress-disorder.

”After the war, Frank returned home alive, but he wasn’t the same. He would dream the horrors again and again, night after night, and wake up screaming as he did when his friend died in his arms. During the 4th of July, the sounds of fireworks exploding would throw Frank into a crisis, a flashback of the war, and he would run around the house screaming, throw his wife into a closet, throw his kids in the basement, and grab a loaded gun to hide behind a wall, waiting to shoot someone. Sometimes, those flashbacks would simply cripple him and imprison him in the horrors of his past.

“Eventually, Frank’s wife and kids left him. His behavior at home, and the combined tragedy of the war and the divorce, changed his behavior at work, so Frank lost his job. Frank became homeless, depressed, and hopeless.

“I’ve been working with Frank for the past few years. We have tools to help people overcome and learn to live with PTSD, to find peace after the war, to help people like Frank get and keep jobs. After a rough period of life, Frank’s doing better.”

“Frank isn’t alone. Every person you see on this street has a story like Frank’s. From childhood trauma to traumatic brain injuries, paranoid schizophrenia to alcoholism, every person here is a person who has suffered misfortune and tragedy. They’re not on this street because they’re bad people, but because we as a community have so far failed to help them.”

We drove away, and I was never the same. As my mom opened my eyes to the Wild things everywhere outside the train, my dad showed me the Humans, the humanity, tragedy and hope in every person on Route 66.

My Brother

Gabe and Me, characteristically guilty of having way too much fun.

I have one sibling: my older brother, Gabe. Gabe is brilliant, strong, insanely creative and cripplingly hilarious. Gabe and I challenged each-other intellectually and athletically throughout our lives, especially in our favorite hobby growing up: skateboarding.

As skateboarders, however, we were criminalized starting at a very young age. We also grew up in minority-majority public schools, some of the roughest public schools in one of the worst states to raise a child. Albuquerque is a cultural crossroads of the United States - in Albuquerque, Route 66 and the Santa Fe trail that brought Anglos to New Mexico intersects with the Camino Real, the Spanish Royal Road that brought silver from Zacatecas to Santa Fe. The Camino Real itself was a repurposing of a Native American migratory route bringing seashells, macaw feathers and people from Mexico to Chaco Canyon for centuries prior to the arrival of Conquistadors. Our school-to-prison pipeline was a mosaic of these overlapping systems of oppression in New Mexico’s history, from the Native Americans who survived conquistadors, black people whose ancestors were enslaved and fled Texas, a South Vietnamese diaspora from the same war that changed Frank’s life, and white Americans looking West like my own family. My brother and I were molded by that melting pot of cultures, peoples, and criminalization.

I’m not at a point of sharing all of my brother’s and my stories because they are long, complex, and span everything from comedy to tragedy as we battled the systems of oppression and loved the full humanity of our peers, with all their virtues and faults. Many of our friends died before high school, others got traumatic brain injuries and other injuries they bear the rest of their lives from fights and tragic accidents. Now, some of our childhood friends roam Route 66 with Frank. Other friends are in jail, some because of crimes they did commit, and others because their word was denied the benefit of the doubt while the words of white prep-school kids was believed beyond reasonable doubt.

One overarching moral of the story of our youth is that despite being white upper-middle class kids, my brother and I were immersed in the lives of friends from very different histories and contexts. We learned to distrust many institutions, and we saw how many well-intentioned efforts to help people, such as zero-tolerance policies in public schools, ultimately caused harm by incarcerating our friends and altered the course of their lives as surely as Vietnam altered the life of Frank.

My brother and I were Wild Skateboarders who grew up in the multicultural jungle of New Mexico, a jungle of verdurous Humanity teeming with cultural diversity that rivals the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest.

Me

I’ve had a profound hearing loss since I was 3 (I take the word “profound” as a compliment!). I love Nature, in the broadest sense, and I see humans - not just human physiology, but human social, political, and economic systems - as part of Nature. Because of the zero-tolerance policies and a teacher who hated me (in his words, I’m “the reason he lost faith in all humanity”), I was almost expelled from high school 3 days before I graduated high school. The teacher went on to have his mugshot in the Albuquerque Journal for drunk driving. Our principal went on to get arrested for driving drunk while shooting guns out his car, and during the arrest he told the cop he had to take a piss, and while pretending to piss he tried to stuff a bag of cocaine in his mouth.

I survived the zero-tolerance policies of our school-to-prison pipeline and went on to college at the University of New Mexico, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in biology and applied mathematics, nearly getting minors in chemistry and psychology. In college, I learned that turning off my hearing aids helped me focus on my imagination, and this life hack helped me excel in science. I also found myself passionately interested in literally every course I ever took, hence my cornucopia of degrees and near-minors. During college, I fell in love with mountaineering, volunteered in mountain rescue, and applied to grad school.

After 4.5 years of sending emails of contagious enthusiasm as the social chair of the Princeton University Mountaineering Club, I received my PhD in “Quantitative and Computational Biology”. My work linked the mathematics of competition - between tropical trees in the Amazon, between the ungulates of Yellowstone, and between microbes in our microbiomes - with competition between companies fighting over consumers, and stocks competing over market share in a sector, market, or individual portfolio.

I did a post-doc at Duke University with Diana Nemergut. Diana was a legend. Tragically, Diana passed away from a brain tumor just 3 months into my 2 year position. As she battled cancer, she fought to ensure her start-up funds would support her post-docs throughout our 2-year contracts, and she succeeded. My fellow postdoctoral orphans and I looked after each other while doing science without an advisor. During this time, I conceived a novel biostatistical method I’m extremely proud of. I also started consulting a hedge fund, allowing me to continue my studies of competition in real-world financial markets, develop trading strategies, analyze nearly every kind of alternative dataset out there, and continue learning about the nature of our financial systems.

Now, I live in Montana. I was a research scientist studying pathogen spillover from bats to people with Raina Plowright, and then COVID hit. COVID disrupted everything, and I hope to share more of that story in other posts here on Substack. I’m supporting my hobbies & Wild lifestyle as a consultant working with clients in biotech, finance, and more, and trying to do good for the world by starting a phage therapy company using viruses that kill bacteria (and can’t infect humans) to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

I climb, hike, ski, fish, boat, hunt, and, above all, continue to learn. Now, apparently, I blog, too. I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts, insights, and musings about this large Elephant of Life with you all.

That’s me, in a blog post.