͵͵

Essay

͵͵ impressions of water as cuneiform cascade*

Thomas  E. Gorrell
By Thomas E. Gorrell
Oct. 31, 2024

This cascade is made up of cuneiform characters that include the character for water, drawn from the website of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project.

Sumerian is one of the world’s oldest written languages, dating back to 3000 BCE. It was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the part of West Asia that is now Iraq and its neighbors. The most familiar literary writings in Sumarian are the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi Stelae, and the Bihistun mountain inscription.

I have long regarded this ancestral sign of water as the most elegant depiction of H2O’s colligative features: the left wedge with its long tail as the lone pair of electrons, the upper right wedge as the proton and lower right wedge with its shorter tail as the hydroxyl anion.

The next six tiers in my visual cascade somewhat reflect a chaotic cascade of thoughts that comprise this molecular impression of water.

Tiers two and three include this sign in the interrogative questions that are the basis of the science of biological chemistry and other sciences.

Tier four is habitats of germs.

Tier five explores vascular plant processes of extracting minerals from soils and is intended as a simile to elaborate biomorphic images at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank, or RCSB PDB. 

Tier six depicts various biological fluids.

Tier seven shows the beginnings of a more personable chronology into biomorphic chemistry’s natural history and whether this sign for water may have morphed into Poseidon’s trident or also perhaps the question mark(?). Creation of the question mark has been credited to Alcuin of York, an eighth-century scholar.

*“But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds.”                                                        

— Charles Darwin,

Fiona Yang, adapted from Thomas Gorrell's design
The cascade begins at the top with the Sumerian symbol for water and moves down through the tiers described in the text.

Read more

Read more articles and essays about our ASBMB Molecule of the year.

Water, you say?  Sephra Rampersad recalls a great scientist asking, what is the one critical component that could make or break your experiment in any lab?  

Water takes center stage Danielle Guarracino remembers the role water played at two moments in her life, one doing scary experiments and one facing a health scare.

What I’ve learned about water, aging and protein quality control  Alice Liu thought an increase in heat shock protein chaperones would prevent misfolding in Huntington’s disease proteins. The results surprised her, and water was the key.

The subtle strength of hydrogen bonds Indu Sridharan remembers how water complicated her atomic force microscopy imaging studies of collagen.

The teaching power of water “I questioned whether children would be very interested in this exercise; there wasn’t much to it.” At an outreach event, Jessica Desamero learns that three cups of water can convey complex science.

Water rescues the enzyme “Sometimes you must bend the rules to get what you want.” In the case of using water in the purification of calpain-2, Dorothy Croall writes, it was worth the risk. 

There are worse things in the water than E. coli E. coli levels determined whether Olympic swimmers could dive into the Seine this past summer. But are these bacteria the best proxy for water contamination? Andrea Luis investigates.

Virtual issue celebrates water in ASBMB journals Check out a dozen gold open-access articles covering exciting research about the society’s 2024 Molecule of the Year.

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Thomas  E. Gorrell
Thomas E. Gorrell

Thomas E. Gorrell is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, a microbiologist with a focus on natural history tempered with few bytes of physical sciences and bits of biomorphic chemistry to provide a comprehensive exploration of the sciences of system biology.
 

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