I remember a grade three project where each student had to collect as many different types of weeds as they could, press them into a scrapbook, and label them. Classrooms scoured the fields and yards looking for different weeds. We even traded them. The general dandelion population was not frightened for an instant. Then there was the leaf collection and the flower collection. Who has not colored and labeled the parts of a flower? Pistil, stamen, petals, sepals: we have all made hundreds of labels and connected them with lines to the multitude of biology diagrams that we have done.

Like other science subjects, I took an interest in biology, but for me it never turned into any kind of a passion or hobby. As a youngster, the closest I got to biology as a ‘hobby’ was being very fortunate to receive as a present a small microscope set that included a kit of prepared slides and a kit of blanks for making your own. It was fun examining the prepared slides and studying the fascinating types of cells that were supplied in the kit. After interest in the prepared slides wore thin, I moved on to try preparing my own slides. You do all the simple things such as examining your own hair and trying to peel off a thin layer of your own skin. The toughest personal examination was pricking my finger to make a slide of my own blood and view blood cells.

After this self study, the next phase was to examine other objects. I recall getting a razor blade, trying to get thin enough slices of an onion, then using the supplied types of dyes, and finally examining the onion cells. What impressed me most about the whole process was how difficult it was to get a thin enough slice of anything so that light could pass through it and you could examine it under the microscope. It is no small feat when done totally by hand and without the use of automated and elegant slicing mechanisms.

For grade ten, my homeroom was in the newest section of St. John’s High and on the third and highest floor. Senior high, I had truly hit the big time and now I had to gaze down at those short, pesky, and exuberant junior high kids coming into grade seven. Not only was my room on the third floor but so was the biology lab. Yes, this was most definitely the big time. For in that biology class, not only did the teacher have her own dominating lab bench, but I too had a mini bench that was shared with another student. Issued with an impressive thick text book on biology, I was on my way and look out world.

Biology, in the senior years, was fun and I did not find it too difficult. I managed to probably keep a B average throughout grades ten to twelve. As I was not certain yet what I wanted to go into at university and I wanted to keep my options open, like many others I loaded up those years with the options of biology, chemistry and physics. Mathematics was a mandatory subject and this was fine with me. English was also mandatory and this was not quite so fine.

Biology throughout those years was always interesting. The woman teacher always showed excitement in her specialty and gave clear and very understandable explanations on the subject matter. The lecture portions were spiced with neat experiments or investigations that we got to perform at our private lab benches. These ranged from studying the anatomy and systems of animals and then dissecting frogs; to learning about the structures of the eye and dissecting a cow’s eye. We also learned about bacteria and how prevalent they were by doing experiments with petri dishes and a special growth culture media.

Like all science experiments, we had to formally plan what we were to do, execute the experiment, collect data, study the results and complete the report with conclusions. The bacteria experiment had all the fun in the execution phase. The petri dishes and culture media was sterile. According to your plan, you took cotton swabs and sampled objects of your choice by rubbing them and transferring the ‘rubbings’ by rolling the swab onto the sterile growth media. The media was on the bottom of the petri dish in a thin layer and had the consistency of gelatin. The media was all marked off in sections and labeled for record keeping. Once our preparations were completed, we scampered about the lab and the entire school like children in a candy store with a mission to get all we can. I remember sampling the bottom of my shoe, the floor, the tip of a classmate’s nose, and the hallway water fountain. The petri dish had its cover put back on and the whole thing was put in a special incubation chamber for a week to allow the cultures to grow. The incubation chamber was just another impressive feature that filled that biology lab. After the week was up, we analyzed the results and oooed and ahhed at all the strangely colored and spotted growths or hairy mold like patches. By the way, the answer is yes if you were wondering if something resulted from the nose tip swab.

The other areas of biology that I recall studying were heredity, the structure of a single cell, amino acids, DNA, chromosomes, and cell division. I will touch on a few of these a little later as part of the emphasis of this chapter. Grade twelve was the last of my continuous classes and studies on the subject of biology. As I went into electrical engineering, I did not take any university courses pertaining to biology until a fourth year elective when I selected biomedical engineering. The biology we took here was very focused on understanding human biological processes so that they could be measured and/or mimicked to assist in the field of medicine. Measuring lung capacity; studying electrical signals associated with the heart beat, electrocardiograms, and the detailed anatomy of motor nerves were some of the areas we delved into. We seemed to spend a lot of time on nerve structure including how synapses (connections between nerves) worked and signals were transmitted. This led to studying myoelectric signals that are generated by the muscles so that they could be used to control artificial limbs and prostheses that were motorized.

St. John’s High School was full of fond memories for me after spending six formative years there. It all started in September 1965 and finished in June 1971. I mentioned that the Biology lab was on the third floor of the newest section of the school. However, St. John’s had a much older and original section that faced onto Salter Street. It remained standing for only the first year or two that I attended the school. My recollections are fairly vague, but I remember it being an extremely impressive stone structure. It was multi-storied and had many stone steps that led up to an imposing front entrance. The wide hallways and classroom floors were all old hardwood. Those floors were well worn with history and notorious for creaking when the art teacher wanted absolute silence, which was every class.

I do not recall taking many classes in that old section other than art and shops. In case ‘shops’ is a foreign word to you, the proper terminology used today is industrial arts. Not only is the word dated, but back then the concepts were dated as well about who took what. Boys took shops and girls took home economics. As we know, times have changed significantly. With four daughters and a son, I am pretty impressed when my daughters bring back their woodworking projects that look so intricate and well done.

However, the shops in the basement of old St. John’s were not your routine run of the mill shops. These were ancient. The memorable one was metal class because, not only did we make things with sheet metal, but this shop was equipped with old forges. Yes, the shop had forges just as those that blacksmiths would use; and no, we did not have to take turns pumping air bellows. These were ‘modern’ forges that were powered by electric blowers. We had to learn about the proper use of coal and coke to get the right heat levels as well as starting the fire properly. Little boys were holding tongs with red hot metal, wielding hammers and clanking on anvils. What more could one ask? A silver painted tent peg, you say? A iron rod was cut to about ten inches in length with a carefully crafted point and a meticulously formed circular eye at the other end. Rushing your work was not wise as every project went under the careful eye of the instructor for final grading. That circular eye had to be as perfect as could be.

Halfway through metal shop, the class sections switched and we moved into sheet metal work. It was time to fashion something from tin, but like all shop classes you were held back from doing anything with your hands until the appropriate amount of theory, notes, and drawings were completed. For sheet metal, we had to chose the pattern we desired, spray paint one side of the tin sheet with blue for tracing, and carefully scribe the pattern and fold lines through the paint onto the tin. Prudent use of the tin snips and skilled manipulation of a metal folding brake would yield a cookie cutter that was a work of art. There may have been soldering of the tin parts, but I cannot remember this clearly. The final step is to get the projects home, deliver the solitary ‘useful’ tent peg to your Father, and the cookie cutter to your Mother. Beaming and grinning ear-to-ear with pride, the unspoken phrase to your parents is "look what I can do".

The other class I remember in that old section of St. John’s was taking electrical shop. I was excited about taking this class and thought we would get right into some interesting electronics. However, this was not to be as we started first with the very basics. We studied types and sizes of electrical wire and the only practical work I recall doing was making splices. Splices, now that was not my idea of excitement. However, we learned and practiced on how to perform four or five ways that two wires could be joined together to form a good electrical and strong mechanical connection. This was just the way the telephone or electrical companies would have them spliced. The twisting and overlaps of the wires had to be just right and there was a specific hand technique on how to accomplish this correctly.

We learned about insulators and conductors, but overall that first year was not highly memorable. Yet, the glimmer of my interest in electronics started and when I was to take this shop in subsequent years the interest continued to grow. It may have been the second or third cycle through electronics before we built an amplifier from all the component parts. Powered by an old fashioned vacuum tube, we had to follow a schematic to make the right connections and use the correct color coding for the wire to indicate power or signals. You were graded on how neatly and squarely the wires were routed and how good your solder joints looked.

My hobby with electronics was also driven by my interests at home. This included getting my first small transistor radio and not being able to leave it alone long enough until it was completely taken apart to see what it looked like inside. Tape recorders were next, the old reel to reel kind, and then came building speaker boxes. With more money saved from a paper route, it was back to buying another larger transistor radio that in addition to the regular AM/FM tuning had shortwave bands as well. This led to listening to short wave stations from distant countries and patiently waiting for them to say something in English, and with an address, so that I knew which country the broadcast was from. Then I would take note of the time, frequency and program content to send the information to the address. With luck, and months of waiting, I would receive a colorful confirming postcard in the mail. The idea being to collect as many countries as possible and cover another wall in my bedroom. There was a kind of mystic listening late at night to faint signals that were being broadcast from so far away. Tuning across the band, I was listening to Morse code, then loud gibberish tones or squeals as though from outer space, and back to strange voices or music.

The pull up whip antenna was not good enough to pick up those faint signals I knew must be there. So that led to the absolute necessity of stringing an antenna wire from the end of the garage to the top of the house with a signal wire coming down to my bedroom window. My parents had a lot of patience to let a youngster scamper all over the place making modifications to the home and not knowing if he fully understood about installing a lightening arrestor properly. All these interests in electronics, coupled with a fascination on how things worked and modifying them, contributed to my embarking into electrical engineering at university.

The old St. John’s building and the shops in the basement disappeared pretty quickly and are still hard for me to recall. Living six long city blocks away, this was not an area that I frequented during the summer holidays. So upon returning to school one fall, the old section had totally vanished to be replaced by grass and a large sports field. It was as though the old building was never there, it disappeared like it had been vacuumed up into space.

That episode being dispensed with; it is back to biology.

My problem with biology is what I consider the total absence of mathematics. This is an oversimplification of what I consider the difficulty to be as it is hard for me to put it concisely into words. I realize that mathematics does not have to be a central part of everything to make it legitimate. This would be arrogant. What I am looking for in biology is more than mathematics. It is laws and basic guiding theories that I am looking for. As a comparison, scientists and engineers are able to understand and describe so many physical principles and theories through the use of mathematics and physics. It is as though the universe has dared all of civilization to understand its basic laws. Understand my laws of gravity, understand my laws of electromagnetism, understand the strong and weak nuclear forces, it seems to taunt us. Fail to understand and you will not invent the wheel or even the simple principle of a lever. Yet, we have learned those basic laws and broken them down into numerous principles and sub-principles. If you need evidence, look back several hundred years and consider all the incredible devices, machines and principles that are at our disposal today. The growth and sophistication is outstanding and continues to progress.