It certainly wasn’t my plan to not post something here on the new Leapology blog for a month after launch, but to quote my favorite joke, “How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.” Just like the rest of the world, I had a very interesting few weeks - but not just because of a hurricane, the economy, and election drama. My step-father (I call him Dave, everyone else calls him David) went in for a planned bypass surgery. He’s a very healthy guy whose only vice is gadget collecting, but sometimes your DNA doesn’t care if your cholesterol is low.

Mom and I waited out the very routine surgery (bypasses are performed over 600,000 times a year) in a windowless waiting room that became a defacto hotel in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. Much to our surprise, halfway into the surgery the surgeons discovered an aneurysm on his ascending aorta. They had to proceed with a dacron replacement of the offending vital artery or risk a probably fatal rupture in the near future. On one hand, this was terrible news. Dave just had his descending aorta replaced in an amazing and cutting edge surgery last Christmas with a long recovery. On the other hand, it was another miracle. Ruptured aortas kill thousands each year and they’re rarely caught in time (this is what killed John Ritter a few years back). Dave had TWO, they caught them BOTH, and now he has a complete shiny new space age aorta. Hooray for luck, and science!

The night before I left for Houston to camp out during the hospital stay, I happened upon the HBO movie “Something the Lord Made” about the dawn of cardiac surgery. Vivian Thomas and Alfred Blalock’s partnership caused much controversy in Jim Crow America. It was also unheard of to operate on the human heart, to even touch it since it was considered God’s domain. In the film, a priest admonishes Blalock as being vain, playing god. This exchange reminded me of the stem cell controversy today, that there are some things we simply can’t do because they’re akin to eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. I don’t believe religion and science need to be at odds, and will get into in future posts. Overall, it was novel to feel a personal connection to a docudrama about science - to watch the amazing and controversial leap these guys made not so long ago; a leap that directly lead to saving the lives of a few of my family members.

That connection turned out to be more direct than I thought. Dave was lucky to have his latest surgery at the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center. Alfred Blalock was a contemporary of Michael E. DeBakey (and in fact trained DeBakey’s protege and rival Denton Cooley). It would be difficult to conceive of the state of modern cardiac surgery without DeBakey. He revolutionized the field, including inventing the pump that makes open heart procedures possible, MASH units to save troops on the frontlines, and dacron grafts to repair blood vessels like Dave’s. DeBakey actually received the surgery he pioneered. The same one Dave had last year.

Mom and I are very thankful to the current generation of amazing surgeons, including Joseph Coselli and Michael Reardon who performed Dave’s operations and continue to innovate with new life-saving techniques. The future looks bright for cardiac surgery. One group of doctors is even growing new hearts!

Where is “The Future”? Where are the flying cars, the utopian poverty-free world of science fiction, and the solutions to the mistakes of our technological adolescence? I hear this question quite often and ask it myself. Two years ago, I attended NASA’s Ambassador of Exploration Award ceremony for Walter Cronkite here in Austin, TX. The event inspired me to turn my journalism skills towards science full-time. What is Leapology? The name comes from Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” quote when we landed on the moon, an effort of over 400,000 people to achieve something previously thought unattainable. Leapology is the study of a positive future and how we get there. I ran the idea by Buzz Aldrin at a space conference a couple months later and he liked it too.

Today is September 11th. I was there at the towers covering the attack for NBC Nightly News and have a hard time watching the news every year on this day. The yearly remembrance used to just make me despair and relive things I would like to forget. Most of the footage I got is too graphic to be seen in retrospectives. Seven years later, and I have a growing frustration that we’ve just been treading water ever since, if not making things worse. Today, there are more memorial services, a monster hurricane headed towards my family in Texas, and everything is seemingly spinning out of control. I hear words like hope and change and they resonate with me, not only because we need to feel it, we need to realize these emotions into direct action. Through my travels, I’ve met scientists and social entrepreneurs that are making “the future” happen today on many fronts. We don’t see these stories at the top of the news. Leapology’s mission is to cast sunlight on these projects, tell the human stories behind amazing innovation, and how we can organize for a positive future. This won’t be a list of the latest green gadgets to buy, but more an online World’s Fair and hopefully a collaborative space for solutions on a grand and microscale. We’ll also have some fun by discovering wonder in the world everyday, and how-to make personal leaps.

Every 9/11, I think of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. The team at Honeybee Robotics, designers of the critical Rock Abrasion Tool, were working on a tight deadline in downtown Manhattan when the World Trade Center attack occurred.  Weeks later, after convincing someone at the Guiliani’s office that they were legit, a few aluminum pieces of wreckage arrived for a quiet tribute to the victims. Honeybee’s Texas machine shop fashioned the metal into flag emblazoned shields for the instruments. Steve Kondos of JPL declared, “We’re not stopping our progress and hiding, we’re rising to the stars.”  I don’t know why more people don’t know this story, it’s amazing. They made the first permanent 9/11 memorial, as the Rovers will remain on the Red Planet forever. Twin robots, surrogates for humanity, still exploring the red planet over 200 million miles away. That’s leapology, that’s hope.

World Trade Center wreckage, now on Mars.

I’m a big fan of space exploration of all kinds because I believe it is an example of the best humanity can achieve. I shared this at Slooh.com and will continue to do so here in fields well beyond astronomy. It’s a passion for me to translate Geek into English.

We need to own our past and secure our future. Some of my friends know I have big plans for this little site. Please sign up for the newsletter and contact me if you have ideas or want to participate. The new field of leapology begins today. I’ll leave you with this for now; something to counter all the images of this anniversary, Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: