Ashes to ashes, dust to stardust. Your brilliance inspired us all. Goodbye Starman. pic.twitter.com/FbcxlAzces
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 11, 2016
(The news came that) David Bowie passed away about 12 hours ago. The musician and performance artist, whose career spanned 50 years, died 18 months after being diagnosed with an unspecified type of cancer.
Bowie's death, just days after his 69th birthday, was announced on his official Facebook and Twitter feeds at 1:30 am Eastern time.
You can read and listen elsewhere for more information on the artist and his career. Scanning my social media channels and listening to Mark Goodman at The Spectrum channel on SiriusXM, I've been struck throughout the morning by the intensity of cross-generation respect for Bowie's artistry and mourning of his loss. His ability to create and bridge musical styles across five decades of music lovers speaks to his versatility and success.
But I wanted to spend a moment reflecting on David Bowie's connections in science and medicine.
Ground Control to Major Tom
While Bowie percolated throughout 1960s England in a variety of bands and theater, his 1969 hit "Space Oddity" is what put him on the map for most people of my generation. The song's recording on June 20 and its release on July 11 of that year was intended to coincide with the United States' Apollo 11 lunar landing.
As most readers will know, the song featured a mythical Major Tom on a mission more like that of John Glenn's first orbit and recovery than those of the moon program. But the BBC withheld the song until after the U.S. astronauts returned safely, owing to the final verse of the song with Major Tom drifting off forever in his tin can.
Bowie's connection with the space program was renewed when Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote his own lyrics and recorded the song while on the International Space Station for Expedition 34/35 (also playing a Canadian-made Larrivée P-01 acoustic guitar). Among the musicians who contributed to Commander Hadfield's May 2013 rendition was one of Bowie's former band members, pianist Emm Gryner. The video, which received the blessing of the Bowie camp, has over 27 million views and capped one of the most successful stints of an astronaut as a public science communicator.
Sex(ual ambiguity), drugs, and rock 'n' roll
I came to learn of David Bowie's music in 1973 or 1974 upon the recommendation of a Passaic General Hospital orderly who worked with my Mom, then an emergency room nurse-in-training. I still own Bowie's first three albums on vinyl but my 8-track tape of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars has gone off into the ether. My enthusiasm for Bowie's music did not make me popular in a Roman Catholic junior high school where Bowie's androgynous character and bisexuality earned me the nickname, Zowie, the given name of Bowie's son with wife Angela – and a successful movie producer who now goes by the name of Duncan.
I grew up in northern New Jersey just miles from where Roche chemist Leo Sternbach first synthesized the benzodiazepine class of anti-anxiety drugs, beginning with chlordiazepoxide. But the first time I heard its brand name, Librium, was in the lyrics of the Bowie song "All The Madmen" from his album, The Man Who Sold The World.
The song was reportedly inspired by Bowie's half-brother, Terry Burns, who suffered from schizophrenia and was institutionalized. The line, "Just my Librium and me and my EST makes three," also includes a reference to electroshock therapy, now called electroconvulsive therapy, an approach still used in very serious cases of depression where medications are ineffective.
According to biographer Davanna Cimino, Bowie later revisited this theme in the song "Jump They Say" several years after Terry committed suicide by lying in front of a train in 1985.
Medical philanthropy
Together with his supermodel wife, Iman Abdulmajid, Bowie supported the Keep A Child Alive Foundation, founded by AIDS activist Leigh Blake and musician Alicia Keys. Iman, born in Mogadishu, Somalia, served as global ambassador for the foundation's I Am African campaign to remind first-world whites that we all carry DNA from our ancestral origins in Africa. The campaign helped provide low-cost HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs to pediatric and family clinics and continues to operate in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda.
After publishing this story, Keep A Child Alive's communications director responded to my request for comment earlier this morning regarding Bowie's passing:
The news of David Bowie's passing has deeply saddened us. We couldn't have known, when he performed at Keep a Child Alive's Black Ball gala, in 2006, that it was to be his last public performance. A performance that was to directly impact the lives of children and families struggling with HIV in Africa. That night David, the master of reinvention, sang about the need to embrace change. His performance was mesmerizing, and we couldn't be more proud of, and grateful for his - and Iman's - support over the years. We send our thoughts and love to Iman and her family, as we now turn to face the strange changes that life sends our way.
Peter Twyman, CEO, Keep a Child Alive
Leigh Blake, Founder, Keep a Child Alive
Jeff Varner at The Borgen Project also wrote last year about the couple's longstanding philanthropic efforts in fighting HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty.
Other science tidbits
Another medical factoid about David Bowie relates to his eye color. Heterochromia iridis is an autosomal recessive trait whereby a person's irises take on different colors due to unequal melanin pigmentation. Bowie appeared to have a darker left eye than his blue right eye. However, the difference was not due to heterochromia. He suffered an eye injury during a high school dustup and the damage left his pupil permanently dilated, making it appear that his iris was darker than the other. That condition is called anisocoria.
But the science that I'll miss most about David Bowie is the way that the hair cells of my cochlea amplify and transduce his music into neurotransmitters. I was fortunate to see him twice: once on the 1983 Let's Dance tour at The Spectrum in Philadelphia and previously on Broadway where he played John Merrick in The Elephant Man in late 1980. I was particularly fortunate to see Bowie at the Booth Theater because the play was only scheduled to run there for three months. And after his dear friend John Lennon was murdered elsewhere in the city early that December, Bowie elected to have his understudy fill the final month of the run.
And as an amateur musician, I still find myself learning to play David Bowie songs, finally nailing "Drive-In Saturday" from Aladdin Sane in November.
For the young folks who wonder what all the hubbub is about – and for the oldsters who might not know fully of Bowie's artistic origins – I strongly recommend that you spend an hour with this 2012 BBC Four documentary, David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust. I have to admit that I didn't fully appreciate the origins of Bowie's theatrical mentoring by mime and thespian Lindsay Kemp. Moreover, the documentary shows the false starts Bowie had in developing the Ziggy Stardust character, demonstrating his perseverance in pursuing his craft.
