A Meeting of the Minds

Among the annals of strange requests made in bars, the one posed by the paleontologist with the microphone surely rates as well above average.

“Do we have a dentist in the crowd here?” asked Zhe-Xi Luo, Ph.D., fossil hunter, and early mammal expert, to a crowd of Pittsburghers huddled over pints of lager and plates of bar food inside the Penn Brewery.

As if on cue, a silver-haired man, sitting at a picnic-style table, raised his hand. Now came the punchline, delivered by Luo, a compact man wearing a button-down shirt and slacks. “Thanks to evolution,” he addressed the dentist, “you have a job and we all suffer!”

The crowd in the North Side watering hole burst into laughter.

Backed up by a projected power point presentation, Luo then launched into a discourse on diphyodont tooth replacement (that’s the process of getting two sets of teeth in a lifetime), mammaliaforms (early precursors to mammals), and the encephalization quotient (the relative gain in brain size up the evolutionary ladder.)  

Luo doesn’t usually lecture in bars. He’s the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s acting co-director and associate director, as well as a curator for vertebrate paleontology at the museum. He’d come to the North Side to speak about his work as part of Café Scientifique, an informal lecture series that attracts some of the city’s best and brightest to talk about what they do for a living.

The series, which has featured physicists, surgeons, and climate change experts, has developed a devoted base of followers from all walks of life. No degrees are necessary, just an interest in science, although a taste for lager doesn’t hurt.

An International Community

Sandy Saban of McKees Rocks, described her own introduction to Café Scientifique as “kind of a mistake.”

“We’re here eating dinner one night, and there’s this guy lecturing in front of the room,” says Saban, a cytologist at Heritage Valley Sewickley Hospital. Intrigued, Saban kept coming back because she was interested in the topics and she likes the international crowd. “There was one guy from Africa, two guys from France. And the topics are all so different. There was one guy who worked on the Manhattan Project—that was pretty cool.”

That would be Irving Wender, the 92-year-old Pitt engineering professor. Other notable speakers include the environmental epidemiologist Devra Lee Davis, and Julius S. Youngner, the last living member of the Salk vaccine project.

The creative force behind the event is Tim Palucka. A science writer with a master’s in materials science, Palucka had read an article about other Café Scientifique groups in Europe.

 “I thought, there should be something like this here,” says Palucka, who is also Café Sci’s chief roadie, financier (it costs him about $100 a month to rent speakers, plus speaker beer and food costs) and publicist (his email list is 250 names long.)

The only problem for Palucka was his inexperience as an event planner. “I never organized anything in my life—no bachelor parties, no surprise birthday parties, nothing,” he says.

So he waited. “I thought, somebody would for sure start one of these, but they never did.”

In the meantime, he found Leah Kauffman, a fellow science writer, who was interested in helping start the group. Together the two organized the first Café Scientifique in 2004.

While the idea has taken root in other cities around the world, the Pittsburgh group was one of the first in the U.S.

To Palucka’s surprise, he’s had no problem getting the city’s top scientists to come in for an evening to talk shop with total strangers. Their only compensation? A warm meal and a cold beer.  

It’s amazing how many of these important scientists around Pittsburgh say yes to our call, he says. “They seem to get a kick out of talking to non-scientists who are interested in their work.” Palucka targets speakers whose area of interest is of current interest to the general public.

Sometimes he’ll go through university or museum press offices to find speakers. Or sometimes he’ll go right to the source. That’s how he got CMU physicist Ira Rothstein to speak this past summer after he had just published a paper on string theory.

“I called him up and said ‘Hey, I thought this was important, but I thought there wasn’t enough energy in the universe to test this theory. Would you come and talk to our group about it?’ He said, ‘Sure.’”

The group celebrated 2005, the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, in which he published four important papers that changed science, by bringing in an Einstein expert.

While the structure of the lectures is loose. Palucka generally discourages organized talks or anything overly academic. “We don’t want them bringing their last paper from their last conference,” says Palucka, 48, of Downtown. 

After a brief overview by the scientist and a fifteen-minute break, the crowd gets to ask questions.

Luo fielded queries on inner ear differentiation in mammals, the link between dinosaurs and birds, and how sure paleontologists are about the evolutionary tree. One man asked why mammals survived but dinosaurs did not. “By accident,” Luo replied, only half-jokingly. “Once dinosaurs got wiped out, they vacated the terrestrial niche, which mammals repopulated.”

The crowd, attired mostly in après work and late-summer casual, was generally pleased with their two-hour glimpse into vertebrate paleontology.

“I couldn’t make it to string theory, so this is my first one,” says Pete Baxter, a 35-year-old Englishman who works as a computer engineer at Ericsson in Warrendale. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Betsy Fleischer, who edits the MRS bulletin, a materials science magazine where Palucka once worked as a contributor, says she’s been coming since the series began. “It’s nice to learn something from outside of what you always know,” said Fleischer, who holds a Ph.D. in materials science. “It’s social. You always learn something. And all my friends come.”

The next meeting of Cafe Scientifique is on Monday, November 5th with Dr. Lester Lave of Carnegie Mellon University talking about alternative energy. To find out more click here.

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Reid R. Frazier last wrote about high-tech ed for Pop City. To read it click here.

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Captions:

Writer Lee Gutkind at Cafe Scientifique

Zhe-Xi Luo

Taking notes

Tim Palucka

Ira Rothstein

All photographs copyright © Brian Cohen