Hugely popular, sold out, Dec. 4 Harvard lecture by Ferran Adrià, chef at elBulli. The last in this term’s series. For upcoming event, check back at the Science and Cooking page. Also see our NB reoprt on a November talk by Nathan Myhrvold, physicist, former Microsoft tech exec and author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
The concept of the First Night festival took hold in Boston 35 years ago. This year, most of the events lean toward the cultural, but the celebration also offers free admission to the Museum of Science Boston for the first 500 button holders. (The $15 buttons get you into most of the events, which are spread all over town.) The Children’s Museum offers admission to all button holders.
Earlier in the afternoon, kids can squeeze a little science ed in at the DinoMan performance:
Have no fear, Dinoman is here! With magic, merry mayhem, and magnificent props, the audience is taken on a trip throughout the mesozoic era.
Or, check out the Festival of International Short Films at the Museum of Fine Arts
A collection of recent short films from all over the world, curated by the MFA Film Department. Check back soon for titles and schedule.
Fisher by Yoram Benz (US, 2011). Fisher lives alone in his small cabin at the edge of the sea. When he’s accidentally pushed out to sea, he discovers a whole new world underwater.
Casus Belli by Yorgos Zois (Greece, 2011). People from all walks of life create the world’s longest human queue.
The Storyteller by Nanita Jain (UK, 2011). Seven-year-old Nirmala attempts to grapple with the demons of her grandfather’s dementia when he starts to forget the details of her favorite story.
Dimanches (Sundays) by Valéry Rosier (Belgium, 2011). A look at how mankind faces the passage of time.
An installation of algorithmic music exploring sound and visual mapping different classes of cellular automata
8–10:00pm
VenueNew England Conservatory’s Brown Hall30 Gainsborough Street
When new drug development company H3 decided to throw a party to launch the opening of Kendall Square labs and offices, organizers didn’t have to go very far. They took the elevator downstairs.
Last week, local researchers, bio boosters and lots of men in dark suits from the Japanese drug company Eisai gathered in the trendy meetings room at the new Catalyst restaurant.
Floor to ceiling windows overlook a landscaped concrete plaza that joins the cluster of new and renovated mid-rises known as Technology Square. The landlord, lab developer Alexandria Properties, chose the restaurant — and the former chef of now closed Aujourd’hui — with meetings like this one in mind. Thus, 1,900-square-feet of meeting space behind the dining room can be split up into the Crick, Franklin and Watson rooms. (The rest of the restaurant is farm-to-table chic, with panelling made of old barn boards a “two-way fireplace” encased in glass.)
Before the ribbon cutting, waiters worked their way through the crowd with minted oysters on the half shell and tuna tartar. Slides with information about the H3—for “human, health and hope” — looped on two flat screens embedded in the blonde wood siding.
Betting on an approach emerging from the Broad Institute labs, the company plans on “integrating human cancer genomics with next-generation synthetic organic chemistry and tumor biology.” In other words, they plan to use genetic insights gleaned from actual cancer patients to identify therapeutic targets.
H3 Biomedicine is not your standard startup. Rather than seek out venture capital, the company arrives as a subsidiary of Japanese drug maker Eisai. In turn Eisai, which makes anti-cancer cancer drugs along with an epilepsy treatment, has invested $200 million into H3. Many gathered at the event had “Eisai” on their name tags and company president Haruo Naito flew in for the champagne toast. Click here’s for Mass High Tech’s take on the event.
Angus McQuilken, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, told the group that “If you stand in Kendall Square and throw a rock in any directions, you’ll hit a world class scientist.” Two of them are H3’s “scientific founders” Dr. Stuart Schreiber and Dr.Todd Golub, both of the Broad. The website Xconomy describes them as “scientific luminaries.”
H3 aims to discover small molecule drugs that target weak points in tumors that have been uncovered through genetic studies of people’s cancers. Fittingly, both Golub and Schreiber are founders of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, one of the largest genomic research centers in the world. Schreiber, an expert at synthesizing drug compounds to home in on disease proteins, has been a founder of numerous biotech companies such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals and more recently Forma Therapeutics. Golub, a fellow scientific founder of Forma, is an authority on the genetics of cancer.
Always worth noting that much of the seed money that allows the Broad researchers to move into drug discovery comes from the feds. The National Institutes of Health database reports that for 2010 and 2011, Golub is working with grants worth $9 7 million, which included about $4 million for the Broad Cancer Center. Schreiber lists $22.3 million in grants, including $15 million money for including Broad comprehensive screening program
Most of Harvard’s Science and Cooking Lectures are first come, first served, so to speak. But, you needed a ticket for Tuesday’s return of superstar Spanish chef and modernist Ferran Adrià of elBulli, who talked about “The New Culinary Think Tank – el bulli 2.0.” And they were scooped up a few days after they became available.
But, you can watch this video of last week’s talk:
That great scientific debate – how to cook a turkey – came to Harvard last week in honor of Thanksgiving.
Using math, not a cookbook, Harvard physicist David Weitz introduced the week’s “Cooking and Science” lecture by explaining how to calculate the cooking time for a bird. But, guest speaker Nathan Myhrvold – also trained as a physicist – noted that dark meat and white meat need to be cooked to different temperatures. The author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking argued that it scientifically impossible to cook the whole bird and not undercook the legs or overcook the breast.
Myhrvold was the latest in a series of cooks to take charge of the lecture hall as part of Harvard’s hugely popular program. Now in its second year, the classes and public lectures features some of the stars of what is alternately is known as molecular gastronomy, culinary physics or, simply, avant garde cuisine. They use chemistry, physics and microbiology to improve on traditional cooking techniques and create new ones.
Or as Myhrvold put it: “If you’re going to do something difficult, it really helps is you know what it going on, as opposed to going by a set of instructions.”
Something difficult like the “instant soufflé,” a squirt and bake mix stored in a whipped-cream can. That, he said, took 150 tries to perfect.
Mynrold, was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft. When he left in 1999, he took his PhD. in theoretical physics and became a scientific foodie. His latest project is a self-published, six-volume, 2,428-page, 42-pound cookbook. The $625 package is designed to offer the best from books on food science — which Mynrold says are short on technique —and books about how to cook, which are short on science and dated.
“You’ll find no technique that is younger than about 30 years old and most of them are older than that,” he told the full house of grad student-age hipsters who lined up before the doors opened.
So, Mynrold, figured out how to “optimize” the hamburger. First he cooks it "sous-vide’ – encased in plastic and immersed in warm water. That heats it all the way through. Then he dunks it in liquid nitrogen for a minute to freeze the outside. Then he deep fries it, leaving the outside crisp and the inside medium rare. He also “constructs” ice cream – his signature dessert made without milk or eggs but with pistachios and emulsifiers. His kitchen gets even more lab-like when he uses a centrifuge to make turn peas into “pea butter.” (The Modernist Cuisine website recommends the Thermo Scientific Sorvall RC-4 General-Purpose Floor Model – which goes for $22,000 on Amazon.)
A week before he spoke at Harvard, Mynrold was on a panel on “Traditionalist Versus Modern Cuisine.” The New York Times said the group was supposed to talk about the controversy over the new molecular gastronomy. While some see it as bringing food to a higher level, others find the focus on high tech kitchen wizardry to be pretentious and gimmicky.
But that panel "hardly mentioned the tools of the nouveau science-fiction kitchen: foams, gels, nitrogen for flash-freezing, alginates for specification, immersion circulators and antigriddle cooktops for low-temperature cooking.
Even the potential dangers of cutting-edge cookery were lowballed, as when Dr. Myrhvold pronounced that liquid nitrogen, frigid though it may be, is less dangerous than spattering fry oil. Or as Wylie Dufresne, the chef and owner of WD-50, put it, liquid nitrogen is “unlikely to freeze your customers to death, and hot soup in the dining room is more of a danger.” He added, “As with scissors, proper training is important.”
Dufresne has already been to Harvard. A video of his Oct. 14 talk on “Transglutaminase Tactics” is online, with all of the lectures so far. On Monday 11/28, White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses returns with a talk on “Lip Smackin’ Science: Crystals, Emulsions, Foams, and Pink Vanilla Cupcakes.” All of the lectures are free. Next week’s requires a ticket: The return of legendary Spanish chef and modernist Ferran Adrià of elBulli, who will talk about “The New Culinary Think Tank – el bulli 2.0.” Tickets for that talk will be available on Tuesday.