Remember to start your day right by listening to classical music which has the power to improve your mood, make you smarter, help you work faster with more accuracy, improves health and healing and grows healthier plants in fewer days.
Our July blog and Radio show celebrates the work of Dr. Eric F. Wieschaus, American Nobel Prize winner, Developmental Biologist, Professor, Investigator, Musician, husband and father.
Included are articles on how listening to classical music aids in healing, and how to improve your child’s study skills during the summer. Our article of the month is “ Controlling Emotions During Stressful Situations” by Madeline Frank, Ph.D., DTM
Radio Show Feature Question for July 2017: How does Classical Music play a part of Dr. Eric F. Wieschaus’s life as a developmental biologist, American Nobel Prize winner, professor, investigator, and musician and what musical instrument does he play?
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/one-minute-radio-show-2017/
Eric Francis Wieschaus was born on June 8, 1947 in South Bend, Indiana. When he was 6 years old, he and his family moved to Birmingham, Alabama. He says, “My brother, my three sisters and I could go exploring in the woods near our house, and collect frogs, turtles and crayfish from the local streams and lake.” He began studying and playing the piano as a small child. In school he was an excellent student in math and science. He read books, played the piano, and enjoyed “painting and drawing pictures”. He says, I dreamed of becoming an artist when I grew up.”
Summer before senior year in High School:
Eric Wieschaus attended a program in Lawrence, Kansas sponsored by the National Science Foundation “to encourage high school” students “to become scientists.”
Eric Wieschaus said, “For the first time in my life I was with kids who were smarter than I, who cared about science, and who talked about books and art. I felt as though I had finally found a group to which I belonged; in these surroundings I was able to conquer the shyness and insecurity that plagued me in my own high school back in Birmingham.”
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1995/wieschaus-bio.html
Summer after Junior Year in High School:
That summer he took a Zoology course and in the lab he “dissected animals for the first time, from fish up the vertebrate ladder to fetal pigs. He was invited back the following summer to work in the neurobiology lab of Nancy and Dennis Dahl.”
He says, “My work involved more dissection, this time removing vagus nerves from large land tortoises, stripping off the outer sheaths and recording the electrical depolarization when they were stimulated. The Dahls’ generosity in opening their lab to a high school senior still amazes me.”
Eric Wieschaus said, “The experience convince me that I wanted to become a scientist …and major in biology.”
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1995/wieschaus-bio.html
Undergraduate Work at the University of Notre Dame:
Eric Wieschaus while working for his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame “found a job preparing fly food in a genetics laboratory.” He learned about basic genetics in the lab and took courses on embryology. He became “fascinated by the early growth of the fertilized egg, which rapidly divides, to form a hollow ball of 16 cells, all of which look the same. Then, during a process called gastrulation, cells begin to specialize and the embryo becomes asymmetrical, eventually aligning itself along an axis with defined head and tail regions.”
Eric Wieschaus said, “I will never forget the thrill of seeing cleavage and gastrulation for the first time in frog embryos. I immediately wanted to understand why cells in particular regions of the embryo behaved a certain way and what forces were behind the dramatic rearrangements of cells.” In 1969, Eric Wieschaus earned his B.S.in Biology from Notre Dame.
Graduate work at Yale University & in Switzerland at the University of Basel Laboratory:
Eric Wieschaus went on to Yale for graduate work earning his Ph.D. in 1974 in Biology. He did “part of his thesis work in Switzerland in the University of Basel Laboratory of Walter Gehring, a leader in the field of Drosophila genetics and development.” While he was in Switzerland “ he met two women who would come to play important roles in his future.”
Research with Colleagues:
In Zurich, Dr. Wieschaus “continued to use the cell lineage techniques of his thesis work.” He now also analyzed “the development of sexually dimorphic structures.”
He worked with Janos Szabad developing “efficient procedures for making germ line mosaics using K10 and mitotic recombination. In collaboration with Trudi Schüpbach we also studied the cell lineage of the embryonic epidermis. Those studies paralleled a similar analysis that Janni Nüsslein-Volhard had begun with Margit Lohs using laser ablation.”
Most Important Relationship:
Dr. Wieschaus, “By far, however the most important thing that happened to me at Zurich was my deepening relationship with Trudi Schüpbach, who became my close friend and occasional scientific collaborator.”
Dr. Eric Wieschaus meets “Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard:
Dr. Wieschaus, “I met Christiane (Janni) Nüsslein-Volhard two months before I left Basel to begin my postdoctoral work with Rolf Nöthiger in Zurich. Janni had come to Basel to learn Drosophila embryology and we thus had many interests in common. Even after I had left for my postdoctoral work in Zurich, I would come back to Basel, in part to finish experiments, but also always to have dinner with her. We would talk science and plan experiments we eventually wanted to do together.”
In 1978 Dr. Eric Wieschaus and Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard were hired to work “at the new European Molecular Biology Laboratory” in
in Heidelberg. They “began working together to analyze embryonic Drosophila mutants and developed a screen to isolate new mutations. Within three years, Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus’ labs managed to isolate enough mutants and work out the major events in embryonic Drosophila development.” In 1980 in Nature “they published their results in a landmark paper.”
http://www.dnaftb.org/37/bio-2.html
Move to Princeton University: Teaching & Continued research:
Dr. Wieschaus,“I moved from Heidelberg to Princeton in 1981. Since then I have taught genetics and development courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. The Heidelberg experiments continue to provide a rich source of inspiration for further research. After arriving in Princeton, Trudi Schüpbach and I carried out similar large-scale mutagenesis screens for maternal effect mutants. The loci identified in those screens, as well as in a comparable screen made by Janni’s lab in Tübingen, allowed Drosophila oogenesis to come to rival embrogenesis as a ideal system for studying patterning.”
He “continued to be interested in segmentation genes, as well as genes affecting segmental identity. Peter Gergen, Jym Mohler and Doug Coulter began their analyses of runt, hedgehog and oddskipped in my lab at Princeton and the extradenticle gene was analysed by Mark Peifer and Cordelia Rauskolb. Our work on the armadillo was started by Bob Riggleman and Paul Schedl, and was continued by Mark Peifer.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1995/wieschaus-bio.html
Dr. Eric Wieschaus Marries Dr. Trudi Schüpbach:
Dr. Wieschaus, “We married, in Princeton in 1983. Life with her, and with our three daughters, has kept me busy and provided a needed balance to the demands of the lab. Our partnership in marriage and in science has played a significant role in my success.”
Dr. Eric Wieschaus Winning the Nobel Prize in 1995:
Dr. Eric Wieschaus and Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard identified the key genes responsible for embryonic development in drosophila and amassed a detailed catalog of mutations that cause physiological defects—insights that help scientists better understand human development.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/christiane-nusslein-volhard-120255378/
“No other researchers had attempted to identify these genes, both because of the potentially large number of genes involved and of the uncertainty about how to carry out the research. They decided upon a tedious trial-and-error approach to determine which of the fruit fly’s 20,000 genes were absolutely essential to early development. First, the team randomly created mutations in the fruit flies that “knocked out” the function of individual genes. Then, by breeding some 40,000 fly families with defective genes, they studied what went wrong by peering into a microscope fitted with dual eyepieces. Most of the mutations had only minor developmental effects. However, the pair ultimately found 139 genes that proved essential. Without them, fruit flies developed without muscles, eyes, heads, or other vital body parts.”
http://prometheus.stu.edu.cn/2012/eng/3.html
“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995 was awarded jointly to Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus “for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development”.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1995/
Dr. Wieschaus Research after Nobel Prize in 1995:
Dr. Wieschaus, “Much of my current work centers on genes controlling cell shape changes during gastrulation (with Sue Zusman, Suki Parks, Dari Sweeton, Mike Costa), and genes for the establishment of the early cytoskeleton (work with Lesilee Rose, Eyal Schejter, Marya Postner). My work has always had a strong visual component (probably to assuage my suppressed teenage desires to be an artist or painter). What I did not realize until late in my development as a scientist is that morphology and cell biology are actually the same scientific areas, or at least that the latter provides the molecular explanation of the former.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1995/wieschaus-bio.html
Dr. Wieschaus’s Work Today:
Dr. Eric F. Wieschaus is Professor of Developmental Biology and Genetics at Princeton. He “is also Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University an adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.”
Dr. Wieschaus says, “Much of our past work has been directed at identifying the genes that control cell fate in Drosophila. We are currently defining the connection between such cell fate genes and the morphological changes that are their immediate consequences.”
http://www.hhmi.org/scientists/eric-f-wieschaus
Dr. Eric F. Wieschaus is an American Nobel Prize winner, Developmental Biologist, Professor, Investigator, musician, husband, father, and a lifelong musician.
Controlling Emotions During Stressful Situations by Madeline Frank, Ph.D., DTM
Have you ever found yourself getting overly emotional during a tense situation at work, at home, or with friends? What three steps can you take to control your emotions during stressful situations?
Uncontrolled Emotions Will Ruin Your Judgment
I’m reminded of a Coach Wooden story at the beginning of his teaching career at South Bend Central High School when one of his students, fathers was on the school board. Coach was 99% sure he would recommend this student for a high school basketball letter even if he did not fit the criteria. This student “had worked hard with a good positive attitude throughout the season, and though he lacked adequate playing time, Wooden strongly considered him for a varsity letter in basketball.”
Coach Wooden said, ” A few days before I had written out my final list of letterman, the player’s father “suddenly” appeared in my office. Without even a hello, he demanded to know –“Are you going to put his son’s name on the list?”
“I haven’t made my final decision yet. I may include him, but technically your son doesn’t qualify.”
” The man poked his finger in Coach’s chest and threatened, “Wooden, he’d better get a letter or I’ll have your job.”
Wooden was angry and even challenged the man to “settle things outside.”
“Emotion had taken over for common sense, and fortunately, the boy’s father stormed out of the office, but not before he repeated his demand and threatened Wooden’s coaching job. Emotions got the best of him and he decided not to recommend the young man for a letter even though moments before he was 99 percent” planning on doing so.
Coach said, “It was an awful thing for me to do. In fact, after turning in the list of student athletes who were going to get letters, I came to my senses, cooled off, and tried to get the boy’s name added. But it was too late.”
Coach Wooden learned a valuable lesson that day about “Controlling Emotions During Stressful Situations”. He said the following:
1) “If you let your emotions take over, you’ll be outplayed because you’ll make unnecessary errors; your judgment will be impaired”
2) “A volatile leader is like a bottle of nitroglycerine. The slightest knock and it blows up. Those around nitroglycerine or a temperamental boss spend all their time carefully tiptoeing back and forth rather than doing their jobs. It is not an environment conductive to a winning organization.”
3) “Strive to provide a leadership model that is dependable and reliable and productive in the area of emotions.”
Coach Wooden, over time “became very good at controlling” his emotions. He was later called “a cold fish” and considered it a compliment. His former student and player Fred Slaughter described Coach Wooden, as “cool when it counted; his confidence and strength became ours. He had a positive attitude, focusing on moving forward with what we had to learn to make us better.” Slaughter said about Coach Wooden, “A cool leader prevents overheating.” (“Wooden On Leadership” by John Wooden and Steve Jamison)
For over 70 years Coach taught his students, teachers, assistant coaches, and family members the importance of “self-control”. He said, “Practice self-discipline and keep emotions under control. Good judgment and common sense are essential.” (Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success”)
Coach Wooden 70 years later still remembered how he let his emotions interfere with his good judgment disappointing that young basketball player who did not receive a basketball letter.
Coach Wooden’s “3 Rules to lead by”:
1) “Control emotion or emotion will control you.”
2) “Avoid excess. Shoot for moderation.”
3) “Instill emotional discipline.”
Coach Wooden wore a poker face. After winning a championship, he was asked by the news media how he felt about it. He said, “I’m pleased!”
In my early years as a professor at a local college on a military base in Virginia, I was teaching a three-credit course required for all Bachelors degrees. We were reviewing the materials for our first test of the semester and everyone was taking notes. One of my students, an officer in the military, told his fellow classmates and me during our class, “that he had a photographic memory and did not need to write anything down.” I said, “It’s always good to write something down to jog your memory at a later time.”
A week later we had our first test. After grading the papers, everyone in the class had made A’s and B+’s accept “Mr. Photographic memory” whose grade on the test was an “F”.
I handed the test papers back to the class the next week of class.
After class “Officer Photographic memory” waited till everyone in the class had left and cornered me in the room and said, “If you do not give me an “A” on this test I will make up a false charge against you. I am an officer in the CIA.”
“I took a deep breath, remained calm and quiet, and listened to him. When he finished talking, I asked him “What happened to your photographic memory?” He made no reply and left.
After class I went home and thought about the student’s threat to me. The next morning I called the Dean of the College and reported the student’s name and the threat he had made to me, after failing his test.”
The Dean said, “Give him what he deserves. I will take care of him! He is CID, Central Intelligence Department”.
What 3 three steps can you take to “control your emotions during difficult situations”?
1) Take 1 to 2 deep breathes, remain calm, and quiet!
2) Listen to the threatening person without interrupting or arguing with them.
3) When the threatening person leaves, focus your thinking on how to resolve the situation. If you need assistance then asked yourself is there an honest and trustworthy person in control of the organization who can advise me?
For me calling the Dean of the College set me free!
By following these 3 steps you will learn to be like Coach Wooden able to control your emotions during stressful situations. Coach Wooden said, “Seek consistency-avoid peaks and valleys. Avoid excess. Shoot for moderation.” Remember be like a businessman, wear a poker face., and control your emotions. © 2017 Madeline Frank Contact Madeline for your next speaking engagement at [email protected]
How to keep your child’s school skills current during the summer:
1) This summer find out what programs your library has for your child. Share with your child the joys of reading in your home every evening.
2) Are you planning to take your child on vacation this summer? How about having a journal for your child to write in about their vacation? Ask them what they learned about each place they visited and what did they enjoy most about each place?
3) Ask your child to help you cook dinner for the family by having them help you with a recipe. They will be reading and assisting in measuring out ingredients, which will help them in both math and science.
4) The local science and history museums offer classes for children. Find one that will be most interesting to your child.
5) Have your child help you make up Flash Cards in bright colors and letters to learn multiplication tables and vocabulary words.
“In Argentina, Professionals Play Music at Hospitals to Make Patients Forget Their Pain” (June 24, 2017) from the Hindustan Times. Musicians play classical music concerts for patients in hospitals to relieve and forget their pain. The organization is called “Music For the Soul” and they have been playing for five years in hospitals in Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Italy, France and Israel.
“The Secret of Teaching Science & Math Through Music” by Madeline Frank, Ph.D. is now available in book form, and newly updated as an e-book on Kindle, Nook, or iBook:
com(Kindle)
Barnes and Noble(Nook)
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/the-secret-of-teaching-science-and-math-through-music/
“Musical Notes On Math” by Dr. Madeline Frank teaches your child fractions and decimals, the fun way, through the rhythm of music, Winner of the Parent To Parent Adding Wisdom Award is now available in book form, newly updated as an e-book on Kindle, Nook, or iBook.
com(Kindle)
Barnes and Noble(Nook)
Tips on how to use “Musical Notes On Math”
https://www.madelinefrankviola.com/musical-notes-on-math/
Madeline’s Midnight Melodies- Music From around the World” . This CD complements her books with a blend of dance music, gigues, tangos, ballet and favorites including “Danny Boy”, Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”, Debussy’s “Claire De Lune” and others. “Madeline’s Midnight Melodies” is music to relax by and to move by for music therapy. ”Madeline’s Midnight Melodies” CD is now available for purchase by downloading a song, downloading the album, or by CD by clicking below:
Download Your Copy Today!
Dr. Madeline Frank’s book “Leadership on a Shoestring Budget” is available through amazon. To order your copy of “Leadership On A Shoestring Budget” as an e-book on Kindle click on the following link:
Wishing you and your family a happy July 4th from Your Non-Invasive Medicine Music Expert, Madeline
For over 30 years, Dr. Madeline Frank has helped children and adults overcome problems through Classical music. Madeline Frank, Ph.D., DTM is an award winning teacher, author, researcher, speaker and concert artist. She has found a scientific link between studying and/or listening to musical instruments and academic and societal success. Madeline Frank earned her Bachelor and Master’s degree from the Juilliard School of Music. Her education has included scholarships at the Juilliard School, Indiana University, and the University of Cincinnati and she has a violin performance diploma from the North Carolina School of the Arts. (C) 2017 Madeline Frank.