Mendel University in Brno. Mendel Square in Brno. Mendel’s Museum in Brno, with the lawn and remnants of a greenhouse where Johan Gregor Mendel did his experiments with more than 30,000 plants of a pea. I lived in Brno for years, but Mendel’s importance passed around me, perhaps like many other Czech people. I mean, I knew that Mendel is said to be the Father of Genetics, but I never really paid attention to the details of his life. Until this summer. My colleagues from the fellow institute at National Taiwan University asked me to record a “message from Brno” for their celebration of Mendel’s 200th birthday. And I started to discover something I had been ignoring for so many years. I visited the Museum in Old Brno Town, where Mendel did his experiments while being an Augustinian monk in St. Thomas abbey. The Mendel Square just beside the museum, where should have been the statue of dancing peas celebrating Mendel’s discoveries, is currently under noisy and delayed reconstruction, as is also the greenhouse where Mendel grew his plants and which underwent archaeological excavations and now is heading toward reconstruction. I saw the lawn where Mendel grew the plants, now equipped with information boards about his experiments, and also tables belonging to the adjacent coffee shop. I visited the exhibition in the Museum, which shows historical artefacts, including the manuscript of Mendel’s famous (and the only one) article about his hybridization studies.

During Mendel’s life, his scientific explorations remained largely ignored or not understood, partly due to that time still unusual combination of biology and math, and partly due to the way Mendel presented his findings to others, reportedly full of questioning himself. I also visited the room where Mendel was living as a monk, which is now equipped with historical furniture and includes some of his personal items like glasses and a microscope. And finally, I saw the beautifully decorated library of the Abbey, even if only the public part (the private part with many more books is behind the secret doors in a wall). I bought a few magazines reporting about Mendel’s life and also about recent discoveries related to his DNA. Researchers quietly excavated his body from the grave of Augustinians, undertook detailed examinations of his body and DNA, and then (again quietly) buried him back, with only a handful of people knowing the details, before they released everything in scientific publications and follow-up conference. I put all this together into a 20-minute long “message from Brno”, which I was recording while still having brain fog caused by COVID. The recording was fun, done partly in Brno and partly in the yard of my grandma’s house. But as my colleague who saw it told me, I seemed to be pretty “subdued” (I had to search the word in the vocabulary, but yeah, it quite fits).

All this gave me plenty of opportunities to think about Mendel, what kind of person he could have been (obese and neurotic monk vs friendly and generous genius), and gave me a chance to follow up a bit on his life. I attended the event organized in Brno for his 200th birthday, three days of celebrations, talks, exhibitions, and also concerts and food. Since I was still quite “subdued”, I was mostly hiding in the back, but I enjoyed the repeated visit to Mendel’s museum and also the gallery in Old Brno Monastery, which was breathing the feelings of the old time. For example, I saw an outstanding painting of Jerusalem, with a blue mosque close to the centre attracting attention, and reminded myself of the rules I read in an old book about the composition of photographs – whatever scattered the content of the image is, it should have a central theme, to which everything eventually draws observers eyes. I also attended a public discussion with Simon Mawer, the British author of several books related to Czech, including “Mendel’s dwarf”. He is retired, and the discussion (organized at Museum’s yard) was relaxed and inspiring. I bought Mendel’s dwarf and another of his books right the next morning in the bookshop and dipped deep inside it. Simon Mawer is originally a researcher, later turned into a writer, and the book is an interesting combination of rather scientific parts with some very personal (and even some explicitly sexual) passages about the life of Benedict Lambert, a dwarf who is remotely related to Mendel, and who spends his scientific career searching for the dwarf’s gene. I am not quite sure how much the parts about Mendel in the book (including some rather personal details) are based on true evidence and how much it is a literary licence, but perhaps it just doesn’t matter.

It was interesting to think about Mendel, someone considered an unlucky genius who remained not understood until his death. A guy who should have been a farmer but instead ended up being a monk in the Augustinian order, which offered him access to the latest scientific knowledge and allowed him to pursue further education. I was wondering how he himself thought about his experiments with peas, whether he was ambitious and then disappointed that people did not understand and appreciate it, or on the contrary, he wasn’t instead flooded by neverending questioning of his results, eventually leading to abandoning the pea experiments at all and focusing on his career as Abbot. Mendel was born in 1822 and published his “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden” article in 1866 when he was 44 years old. I also turned 44 this year, and for not very clear reasons, I found myself balancing my personal and scientific past and hesitating about my future. It could be because of that long COVID, a surprise of this summer back in Czech. After three years of hiding in COVID-free Taiwan, I came back to Europe and almost immediately caught it, as expected. Symptoms were mild, like flu. But then, the sobering tiredness lasted for another three-four weeks, and most annoyingly, the brain fog, a weird feeling of limited attention span. I got scared. What if this is it, from now on, I will have intelligence close to that of broccoli? I was always slow when it came to doing science, but I felt lucky that I didn’t suffer a shortage of interest and ideas, and really enjoyed thinking. And all this was suddenly gone. Eventually, I recovered, I guess almost completely, although I still suffer from some troubles, especially when speaking and trying to express my thoughts, but I guess it’s just a matter of time to recover completely. But it was a lesson. Nothing is given. Everything can change at any moment in a direction I cannot really influence. Better to prepare for it, at least mentally, not to be completely devastated when it eventually comes.

Taiwan was COVID-free heaven from the very beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Taiwanese, experiencing SARS in 2003 and facing quite high mortality, became very suspicious when something weird started to happen in Wuhan in the winter of 2019, and started to check and eventually ban flights from China. Thanks to a quick reaction, strict anti-pandemic rules and also the perfect cooperation from the Taiwanese people, Taiwan managed to escape the first several waves which were plaguing the world, with just a few hundred positive cases and handful of deaths. At the beginning of 2021, Taiwan was even considered COVID-free heaven, a refugium worth hiding in, while the rest of the World is fighting with new waves, lockdowns and restrictions. But heaven eventually turned into a jail. Because there was no COVID, people were not eager to vaccinate, but instead became quite scared of COVID breaking in. At the beginning of 2022, when most of the world opened and rushed to return back to pre-pandemic times, Taiwan remained closed, with strict rules about wearing masks everywhere, disinfection, tracking, ban for foreigners entering the country and also strict quarantine rules on arrival for those who could enter. Terrible news from China about their enforcement of the zero-COVID strategy finally led to slowly relaxing the anti-pandemic rules and eventually abandoning the zero-COVID strategy, but it was (and still is) a slow process. I was really looking forward to leaving all this for a while, after 2.5 years of not being able to go back home or anywhere else. To experience freedom, to finally catch COVID, and to come back.

So I did. I went back to Europe, first to Czech to see my family, and then to Spain for the conference. I was careful not to catch COVID right away, because I needed to attend the conference and didn’t want to bother with it while travelling and socializing. I was careful, used respirators all the time and washed my hands as much as possible, something others around me in Europe had already forgotten (and sometimes evaluated with spicy comments like “see that dick with a towel on his mouth”). But still, on the fourth day of the conference in Spain I felt lazy, tested by rapid test, and bingo, I was positive. I isolated myself in the hotel, with pretty mild symptoms, wrote an email to all my colleagues with whom I spent time the last three days to warn them, and started to take a rest.

COVID itself was no biggie; sneezing, a bit of headache, fever, sore muscles and joints, some cough. Tiredness was perhaps the most obvious. It came in waves, and every time I felt as if I would faint instantly and had to nap frequently. Coughing became really annoying and was the reason I visited my doctor when back in Czech, to get some pills. But the scariest problem, which evolved eventually and lasted for quite a while, was the brain fog. I knew there was “something like that”, as I heard about it on the news and from some friends who experienced that. In my case, it was an almost complete inability to concentrate, causing a pretty short attention span. At its best, I was not able to concentrate on one thing for more than five to ten minutes. If I tried hard, I felt dizzy and even felt as wanting to vomit. That really frightened me. My brain is perhaps the only part of my body which is useful, at least in the long run. I need to think, concentrate, contemplate, and if I suddenly cannot, what will I do, and will it come back? My job as a teacher and researcher is dependent on my brain. How will I pretend I am capable of thinking when I am actually not? And what else could I do? I never learnt any skill, any other profession. Without my brain, I am useless. It was depressing.

These symptoms lasted long three weeks before they started to recover, and even now, when I am writing this on the flight back to Taiwan more than a month later, I feel I am not quite there. I still have troubles expressing myself, especially if it is under pressure or in English. And I get tired quickly when I am thinking about something, especially if I have to multitask. I think that I need a backup plan. Something for the situation if the brain fog comes back and does not recover. Next COVID wave (although I hope those will already be milder and milder), or simply unavoidable ageing. 

But maybe I am not alone in that? I was listening to a discussion about artificial intelligence on Economist the other day and strongly felt as if some of the speakers had the same problem as me, with longer times to find the right words and express themselves. What if, after COVID, the whole of humankind becomes a bit slower and a bit more stupid?

At least, the period of long COVID was not entirely useless for me. I rested a lot, because I had to. First in a self-imposed quarantine back in Czech, so that I don’t bring COVID to my parents. Then in Croatia, on holiday with my parents; I tried to go hiking with my Croatian friends twice, but felt like a lazy turtle unable to move. And then another week in a small room under the roof of my grandma’s house in the village, alone. It was a period of an exhaustive heatwave, but the village house was fine, cold even in hot summer. I did a lot of sleeping, some reading, a bit of diary writing, and every day I took a bike and went shopping in the neighbouring village for some goodies, an exercise which surely put me out of order for the rest of the day. I could not have such rest if I decided to have one, because, in ordinary times, I simply couldn’t afford that (and perhaps would die of boredom).

Everything bad is good for something (Czech saying). For me, COVID helped me to rest, contemplate about my life, and think about a backup plan, what to do if my brain says bye bye. Maybe I should learn how to work with wood and start making furniture…

The title of this post is aimed at my Taiwanese students, but the content is hopefully good also for a broader audience. Since I started to teach at National Taiwan University in 2015, I am constantly facing one interesting resistance from my students: learning Latin names (of plants in my case, but it applies in general, also for other organisms). I know it’s not easy (well, what is?). Latin is very different from the Chinese language most students use, and it may not seem so useful at first, especially when others around also do not use it. So why bother? I did my own survey (highly biased and with very low n), asking students why they think they need to learn Latin names. Far the most common answer (just after “because you force us”) was: because of foreigners, they don’t know Chinese names, so if they ask us, we need to tell them “scientific name” (some directly say “English name”, as if Latin and English are the same thing). At that point, I felt a bit guilty, because it means if not me asking the names in Latin, they don’t need to bother, and can go well with Chinese ones. Fair enough, but maybe that’s not how it works.

Let me depart from the topic, but just for a while. Recently I read an opinion piece in newspapers, which commented on the strategy of the Taiwanese government to turn Taiwan into an officially bilingual country in 2030. The author of that article (a foreigner living in Taiwan for more than 30 years) claimed that this is an impossible task. Not because people cannot learn English. But because – why should they? Just because “the government decided” to show how progressive Taiwan is and how good a place for foreign investors it could be? That does not sound like a good motivation for people to climb on a top of so steep mountain, or even start thinking about that. Unless people experience the real need and usefulness of English, it is hard to motivate them to learn it. Just like the Latin names.

I started to learn Latin names in the first year of my undergraduate study at the Biological Faculty. During the first week of the first semester, which we spent in the field station in the middle of the lovely south Bohemian landscape, teachers told us: now, forget the Czech names of plants, you won’t need them anymore. Learn the Latin names. No “discussion” allowed, in fact, there was nothing to discuss: from the first excursion, teachers always show us all the plants and tell their Latin name first, Czech one only if someone asked. When we did the final test from the excursion, we walked with the teacher and had to say the name of any species s/he will point at; Latin name counted for 2 points, Czech name just for 1 point. It was not easy; Czech is a Slavic language, not a Latin one, and those Latin names, with few exceptions, really don’t sound like anything familiar. I still remember how I was walking there and back through the yard of the field station before my first final test, memorizing “Sa-ro-tha-mnus sco-pa-ri-us” and trying to find similarity with something in Czech (untranslatable Sáro, tam hnus! Skopárius!). And yes, at the beginning we murmured a lot with other classmates why should we learn something that we will never need in the future! How wrong I was, by the way; those who were not kicked out of the school in the first year of the undergraduate study will agree that it would be impossible to get a Master or even just finish undergraduate study without knowing the Latin names of the organisms we study. Not because teachers push us, later they don’t need to: everyone was using Latin names, and it would be really difficult (and embarrassing) not knowing them. Now, I teach vegetation ecology at National Taiwan University; how would it be if I resisted and kept learning only Czech plant names at that time?

For English, my beginning was even more painful. Till the Velvet Revolution (end of Communism in Czech, 1989) we learned Russian at school as the second language (I was eleven that year). Then, our Russian language teacher almost overnight turned into an English language teacher, and ever since I studied English, through the rest of my elementary, secondary and also university study. When I decided to travel to New Zealand for a volunteering job in the Department of Conservation (that was 2002 and I was 24, just with a fresh Master diploma in my pocket), I thought I speak English pretty well, after sooo many years of learning it. How wrong I was I learned already at Auckland’s airport, when I got out of the flight and (surprisingly) everyone spoke English, with that unmistakable New Zealand accent (Gud daj!). The immigration officer asked me “Do you have some food in your backpack?”, and I said “yes”, because I thought she is asking about “foot” and I thought that “foot” is the same as “shoes”. She said “but you cannot have any food in your backpack” and wanted me to throw them out; I resisted arguing “but it is hiking food”; after I showed her my hiking boots, it was clear that there is something not quite working. But yeah, after half a year in New Zealand, speaking English all the time and Czech only occasionally with my family and friends using a phone (no Skype or Facebook that time!), I learnt how to use English. I do have a weird accent, though (one British girl told me I sound pretty Indian, whatever she meant by that), but I can survive with that.

It never came to my mind that I would be learning the Latin names of plants or study English because of “foreigners”, who may not know the Czech plant names or ask me something in English on the street. And yeah, there are pretty many foreigners in Czech, but who cares. In the beginning, I was pushed to do that, mostly by my annoying teachers, who insisted we need to learn it (I can never thank them enough for their wiseness and resistance to our ignorance!). Later, no one needed to convince me to do that, because I found how important it is for me personally. You don’t learn something “because of others”. You always learn it because of yourself. The knowledge and skills you have are what makes you special, and opens new possibilities for you. So, please, don’t waste your energy by searching for arguments why you just can’t or don’t need to do that, and just do that.

Years ago my computer addiction included playing cards (I think it was called Solitaire), browsing websites (news during the day, porn at night), later also Facebook and some other social apps. Now I found myself addicted to R. However stupid it may sound, it seems to be true. By addiction I mean: it is not easy to stop when you need to do something really important. All those things before (cards, news, porn, Facebook) are understandable, and I bet I am not the only one who fights with that. But R? Come on. I thought that I had a perfect therapy last year after the semester of teaching R three hours per week (and countless hours preparing the class and checking assignments). Right, I was sick of seeing R for a while, but not for long. It was around that time I also found Shiny, an interactive option how to play R, and coded my first Shiny app. It’s nice – you click, something changes, click again, changes again, keep clicking, improving, adding new ideas, making new apps… and addiction is cooked, no escape.

Some time ago I came with an idea to introduce “No Computer Day.” A day, when you should not touch the computer, at all. Obviously, it cannot be during the working day (unless I go to the field), so the weekend is a hot candidate. It would be cheating to set the No Computer Day on the day you go out of the house – so as so you would not touch it. No, just set up the ordinary Sunday, when you have a plan to relax, but ordinarily, you would still end up sitting in front of the computer (I may do something useful today) and keep clicking (doing nothing useful at all). It’s similar to “a week without alcohol” (all bottles in the house need to be locked somewhere since the late evening feeling of “just one beer” is surprisingly strong). Just leave your computer switched off (not just sleeping – you may touch the mouse, and it will wake up, with blinking screen luring your attention). You will see how difficult is it to resist (ok, I will just check emails, what if something important is there!), but how rewarding it could get (clean the house, read the book, fix what should have been fixed long time ago, go for a walk, sleep – add your own “no-computer” items).

Sometimes I wonder: how did the life of scientist (let’s say a teacher at university doing also research, or simply a full-time scientist in academia) looked like before the computers were standing on her/his desk? Come to office, make a coffee, check the mails, do paperwork (ok, this sounds almost the same as now). And then? Take a pencil, read a paper and write a notes, take a typewriter, write a short piece of manuscript, put it away, take a pencil again, make a phone call, take a typewriter, go for lunch, meet a colleague for coffee, pencil, paper, typewriter, … Anyway, the most important currency of scientists are the ideas, and those are not born in the computer, but in the head, often while doing things entirely not related to work or when the brain is simply idle. What if sitting the whole day in front of blinking computer makes the time for these idle moments rare, and thus the productivity goes down? Ok, by productivity I don’t mean the number of published papers (although I should, since that’s precisely how my productivity is measured by school/grant agency/colleague). By productivity I mean coming up with some interesting idea. What if switching off the computer (or even temporarily moving the computer somewhere out of the sight) in fact increases this kind of productivity?

Ok, but I still need to boil these ideas down to a paper…