In the Wake of Terror, Oslo 22th of July.

The past week, Ive been wanting to write something about the recent terror attacks in Oslo, Norway. I’ve sat down a couple of times, reached for the computer and opened Microsoft Word just to stare at an empty, white page…

It is not that I don’t know what to write about, it is more a question of how to write. How do you express and put into words an emotion you’ve never had before?

I realize that alone is a testament to my protected way of living. The very fact that I now feel in ways I’ve never felt before, is a proof of the comfort of the society I’ve grown up in. I imagine that if you are from the US or the UK, and especially London, you may look at the photos from Oslo that has been circulating the media lately and wonder what is different from Oslo to what keeps happening all over the world? You may look at images of people crying, dust covering destroyed buildings and pieces of paper caught in the wind from the explosion and think that this…this is no worse than September 11th. This is no worse than terror attacks in London. And you are right.

Any act that takes the lives of innocent people is equally atrocious.

I think part of the reason why Norwegians are so consumed of what has happened, why we are so shocked by this particular incident, and why every TV station is running 24/7 on news from Oslo and Utøya, is the very fact that this has never happened before. Not only has it not happened before, we never in our wildest dreams thought it could happen. Not in Norway. Not in our small, somewhat naïve society.

To those of you who are not familiar with Norwegian customs and law, I can give a few pinpoints into our governmental system regarding crime and safety.

• In Norway the justice system is based on integration rather than punishment. This usually means short (in international standards) jail sentences in apartments rather than prison cells.


• Our police officers are not allowed to carry firearms on a regular basis.


• Governmental buildings are rarely fenced in and thereby accessible to the public.

In fact, the last time I was in Oslo, the only building I can remember being surrounded by guards and fences, was the US embassy! The royal palace on the other hand, the very neighbour to the US embassy, has no fences. This is just the way our society works. It is to a very high degree based on trust.

So when I sat on the bus on my way home from work, Friday July 22nd, and a young woman in front turned and asked whether any of us in the back had heard of “the bomb that went off in Oslo”, we looked at her with a frown wondering who this crazy person was. I got up to get off at the next stop and she looked at me and asked me if I had internet access. I shook my head and got off the bus. But the terror in her eyes worried me, and I made a phone call to my boyfriend, who was still at work, and asked him to check the online news. Words like “Al Qaeda”, “terrorist attack” and “car bomb” intertwined with “Oslo” filled the online media. The knot that grew in my stomach is indescribable. I told my boyfriend to use other means of transportation home rather than the new, much profiled and hyped, light rail he would normally use. I couldn’t help thinking that if this was in deed a terrorist attack, Bergen could be next.

Obviously, as the evening went on and new reports of shootings at Utøya ticked in, it became apparent that all of this was the result of, not extreme islamists, not Al Qaeda, but an ethnical, blonde Norwegian.

It was someone who had grown up in our society. Someone who had grown up and spent his life in the better neighbourhoods of Oslo, with a normal, Norwegian, standard education. Someone with a deranged mind. Someone who believes that by blowing up buildings and gunning down innocent children, will prevent Norway and its government from welcoming new citizens from other parts of the world.

I do not feel like mentioning his name. I do not want to take part in making this individual immortal. But he claims to be anti-Islamic. He is against multicultural regimes and “Muslims taking over Europe” and his delusional way of showing that, is by doing exactly what Al Qaeda is known for doing; car bombs, terror and mayhem. By being against them, he becomes them.

It makes no sense to me.

Someone who could very well have been my neighbour, anyone’s neighbour, has caused the biggest loss of innocent lives since World War II in Norway. In a country with 4.6 million people, nearly 100 lives is a very large number. It causes a sense of grief in the whole population. Everyone knows someone who has been, directly or indirectly, involved in this.

It is then a great comfort to see how everyone cares. To see the flowers that decorate Oslo and every other major city in Norway, in remembrance of the victims. To see people hugging each other in the streets and lighting candles. And to see Norwegian embassies all over the world decorated in flowers. People care.

In the wake of the terror that was meant to frighten us from being democratic and open minded, to make us build fences and close our hearts to others, the people of Norway, both Christian and Muslims alike, have done the exact opposite.

It makes me proud and very hopeful for the future of our open, free society that we love so much.

An Ode to Evolution and Microbiology

I feel bad. I feel terrible to be honest. This poor blog has been gravely neglected. And there is no one to blame but myself.

Ive been over-worked and low on energy...and no energy creates bad writing. So to spare the few souls of you who might be reading what I write from time to time, Ive stayed away.

But today I had to write something.

I recently visited my old laboratory at the university. The building in which I used to do all my nerdy microbiology-stuff, is now an abandoned building. If you dont know me, you are probably wondering "how damn old is this person?" I can ease your mind by telling you that the building was abondoned already towards the end of my studies due to the rise of a new and better (read: modern) building.

Anyway... We, my significant other and myself, still have a keycard to enter the building, and used it to to leave our bikes there (dry and safe). Now, ofcourse we had to take a little look around the building. There is something very sexy about an abandoned, large, dark building... And to my big surprise I found one of my favorite poems still hanging where I last saw it. All alone... totally abandoned. (I am so sorry to those of you who now expected this post to be of the naughty, sexy kind...I am a nerd. Get over it.) And I took it with me (yes I stole it) and would like to share it with you. So to the biologists out there (and those of you who find science interesting) this is for you:

To the photosynthetical prokaryotes

In the beginning the earth was all wet-
We hadn't got life - or ecology yet.
There were lava and rocks - quite a lot of them both -
And oceans and nutrient Oparin broth.
But then there arose, at the edge of the sea,
Where sugars and organic acids were free,
A sort of a blob in a kind of a coat -
The earliest protero-prokaryote.
It grew and divided: it flourished and fed;
From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread.
Until it depleted the oceans's store.
And nary an acid was found any more.

Now, if one considered that terrible trend,
One might have predicted that that was the end -
But no! In some sunny wee lochean or slought
appared a new creature - we cannot say how:
By some strange transition that nobody knows,
a photosynthetical alga arose.
It grew and it flourished where nothing had been
Till much of the land was a blue shade of green.
And bubbles of oxygen started to rise
Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies;
While, off in the antediluvian mists,
Arose a few species with heterocyst
Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell,
Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell.

As the gases turned on and the gases turned off,
There emerged a respiring young heterothroph.
It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throved,
Creating fine structure, genetics and love,
And, using its enzymes and oxygen-2,
Produced such fine creatures as coli and you.

This, then, is the story of life's evolution
From Oparin broth to the final solution.
So, prokaryologist, dinna forget:
We've come a long way since the world was all wet.

We owe a great deal - you can see from your notes -
To photosynthetical prokaryotes...

Ralph A. Lewin

Happy summer!