The failure of decades of misplaced priorities and the determined few; can they change this world?

History has taught the human race that failures are not just lessons for one person or a generation but for everyone across generations. We seldom learn, seldom choose to learn and fail to learn from our failures as a race. The wars of ancient Greece till the wars of this day all portray one appalling human quality, greed. However hard we try to flush it out of the human memory; it rejuvenates in a new form. The truth is; we always look for more returns, more money, more land, more food and more of whatever is known to us. Smart phones and tablets share the same features from hardware to software (with minor variations) but we want them both, when we already have sleek portable laptops. If you ask young ignited minds their thoughts about a better planet; we are always assertive. We aim and dream to leave behind a better planet, but only through the means which will make us prosperous rising above the populations. We have come too far forgetting what got us where we are! We cannot achieve our goal of leaving behind a better planet by revolutions in information technology or in politics or innovative business models or anything which is materialistic; but only through leaving behind a legacy which creates more ignited young minds, only through efficiently passing the knowledge we gained to our next generation . When all the brilliance of the young minds are lost to the commercialization of this planet, how can we claim to have successfully passed the baton to the future generations? When we complain about brain drain, shouldn't we think about ways to stop it draining out of the entire education system? We as a generation have forgotten about this big responsibility of becoming and grooming educators.

Shortsightedness of our long term plans of a confused generation!

7 years ago in March 20^th 2007 final day of our public exams the last day of high school. “Machi (the way of calling dude in Tamil Nadu), all the formalities done now where do you see yourself in 5 years?” asked one of my friends Krishna Prasad standing outside the school gates. We were all like ok that's not the best question when you had just finished one of the craziest exam series which will literally change our lives. (At least that's what we thought at that age.) We were all like this and that bla bla bla going around the group.  Reality strikes harder than a fabulous exam results and it struck our lives in 3 months and most of our futures changed.

2 years into college and we had the same question and the weird guy to ask the weird question this time was me. Talking about the future is always exciting even though we might be the dumbest person in the group. Everyone was like again bla bla bla bla again. It all looked so cool that day not realizing what exactly we were talking about.

Our life’s choices become drastically different influenced by the circumstances of the day, to state the least daunting pressure on the choices we make. Everyone’s perception of life changes as we grow we all wanted to be pilots one day, then astronomers, may be a social activist, then a crazy scientist, a teacher may be, the list goes on as we get influenced by the amazing people we experience in our day to day lives to the people who motivate us through the news we hear. But where did things go wrong? Why suddenly every one of us just started working in the IT/services industry (at least in Madras and in India) and whatever the local influence was. Yes, it is intelligent to adapt to the demands of today but are we missing the point?

Weren’t we fighters? Aren’t we explorers? We always talked about fighting to figure out our lives and not taking no for an answer. Will this generation be content with the choices we are making with our lives? This doesn’t end there and that's the worst part of the problem. Some of us follow our dreams, break away from the system and explore. When I went back to research after working in IBM for a year my parents asked me what you are going to do, I told them a PhD, a postdoc and then become a professor one day with so much confidence. It all began there…..

We all see successful people like Professors and Scientist being a Graduate Student and we walk like zombies just following the trail. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. This is the only thing which runs through our heads as a grad student. (If you are not a Grad student and if you thought we think about amazing experiments all the time no you got us completely wrong) Education was to help us explore the world, to apply our knowledge to try and make it a better place; just think about it. 

The first answer which comes of a student these days on the very first day of school about a question of life after graduation is, “I want to get a decent job with a decent salary.” Then the other answers starts to come like, “Want to find a nice life partner.”  Bla bla bla.. but most of the time we don't get to hear something like, “I am going to put the knowledge I gained to help solve the problems in my community.” The closed we get is like, “I am going to cure cancer or AIDS.”, if we are Bio students.

Looking for a well-paid job, a life partner, curing cancer, etc. are all ok but shouldn't this be an offshoot of a much more primary goal of figuring out what we what to do in life to put it more bluntly, FINDING OUT THE REASON FOR OUR EXISTENCE. Shouldn't we be following our heart rather than just going into a degrees with pre-set goals and just becoming a prey to our goals. We always complain that we don't have the freedom to choose what we want to do in life due to family pressure but are we still making the choice we really want even if we manage to break away from the system? Are we just too short sighted just flowing successful people rather than trying to be successful ourselves in our own ways. 

Success is always very subjective word. If we are satisfied by the choices we made all though our lives and die as a content person, we will be the most successful people ever to walk on the face of the earth. Will this generation be successful or regret the lives we lived?

Scientific openness...

We talk a lot about having an opened mind, having a transparent government, striving for an open society and the list for openness goes on. Yes, transparency and openness are not actually synonyms but they are degrees of openness itself. Something which is transparent doesn't mean that it is open to everyone and it holds good for a few scenarios, such as the government where a lot of intelligence reports and other high security information are maintained; and it is justifiable. But sometimes absolute openness is essential. 

Sometimes, human evolution doesn't go forward, one such area is knowledge sharing. One aspect we humans pride over other living creatures is the collective knowledge which we have accumulated over the past thousands of years. For example, making fire wasn't just learnt and forgotten but it was just passed on and on and even till this very day, we use the same cave man technology to create fire using abrasives. These are very different from protective instincts which is also kind of genetically driven like a mice being scared of a cat (like human beings afraid of lizards and cockroaches :P :P) but this is not knowledge.

When humans started to accumulate knowledge 1000s of years ago, they were very open, they drew/ wrote on walls and just passed the knowledge to everyone. In the times of the great scholars of the Greek and Roman Empire a lot of philosophers though scholarly, took to the general public to profess their knowledge and ideas. As centuries went by, the scholarly started to isolate themselves from the society and started to form their own class ignoring the others. This led to a certain drift and the bridge of knowledge transfer between the scholarly and a general public started to crumble. There has been a great deterioration in this process from a day where scholars were the once who were able to explain big science to common man; to this day were scholars are the ones who talk with scientific jargon which the general public could never understand.

There has also been a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is treated, from the days when science was free and just pure knowledge to a day when everything in science means money and business. I read this title somewhere but it hits the bull’s eye, “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted”. Today, when more than 60% of the world earns less than 2USD per day, an average scientific article could cost around 10-20 USD. We are talking about knowledge explosion and all those things these days but; in reality it is knowledge implosion. We generate so much knowledge but we prohibit people from reading it and just because it is not open to everyone, the knowledge which is generated is just becoming obsolete and useless.

This cocoon which someone initiated thinking that a butterfly will eventually fly out of it one day, is strangling the same beautiful creature to death. There are some positive signs though in the recent past, leading scientist have come out in favor of openness and are pushing for greater knowledge sharing. They have created platforms of open access of scientific articles and a lot more people have started to appreciate the fact of openness. The irony in this is, we receive the money to do research from the general public in the form of taxes but totally shield them from the knowledge we generate out their hard earned money. Thus far except the warriors of open access, the larger scientific community has been silent spectator on this sad truth.  

The illusion of every moment

Life is a marvelous gift; if there could be a better gift than our life itself is our perception. We live our lives at a pace where, we are unable to really enjoy living our lives and rare so appreciate the power of our human perception. It is how we perceive things really drives our day today living. It starts with thinking its 10 am in the morning when you wake up but when it’s hardly 9am to thinking that a stranger you just met might have a crush on you.  It all lies in the power of our brain and the complex biochemistry (which no one really understands) which drives this 1500g of crazy stuff inside the skull making us the dominant beings on the blue planet (or this is how we at least perceive human being as).

Let me start by just giving you a simple explanation of the complexity of perception. Once, I and a friend of mine were deeply introspecting on our mere existence; he brought up the point of perception. He explained it this way, “When we are young, we are shown different colors on a board and pointing at specific shaped objects which scientifically have different wavelengths are taught this is red, blue and green and so on. How can we be so sure that the red color which the teacher is pointing out and telling is red is the same color the student is seeing through is eyes?  What if he sees it as some other color and perceives it as red? “. Of course, we have scientific explanations to colors, like red is 625 (nanometer) nm and so on but still, how can we be sure what the other person’s brain is seeing when showing him/her a picture which absorbs just 625 nm wavelength light?  He can just be seeing the 625 nm as a totally different color and believe all his/her life that it’s red.

This illusion of perception has been the basis of many ideas and theories but more often than not these were just far away from the common man and his day to life. But the fact is, it actually is an integral part of our life. Say for example, every ordinary person spends so much time thinking about what other people would be thinking of the words he/she uttered or the actions performed.

When you start walking along this path in your thoughts, you feel like you have gone crazy; you just start to think, how much you could have been tricked by your senses all these years; whatever we consider as sensory organs; eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Probably the perception of seeing something is the most easy to explain. It is not just about colors, it can be expanded to every single thing starting from landscapes to people. How can we be sure that we look the same way like we see ourselves in the mirror every day?

This also goes very well with smells and sound. Just sit back and think about the smell of a rose or jasmine; do you think the other person who smells the same flower smells the same odor? Or say a dog barking sound might be interpreted in a different way by every single ear. This can just be the pure basis of our differences in liking something or someone. Everyone perceives everything in a different way; so, why do we even have to think about how we look in others eyes when we are not really sure how we look in the mirror through our eyes is our actual self-image.

So every single moment in our life is driven by this basis of perception. It is left to us to be optimistic or pessimistic; it is left to analyze our lives the way we want to; it is left to us to be joyful or depressed; it is left to us to be critical or gullible. EVERY MOMENT IS OUR OWN PERCEPTIONAL CHOICE!

Creativity the never dying spring...... The Birth place of Science as well...

The technological advancements in an era are the fruits of the great minds who envisioned it. When people thought that the most useful things on the planet to aid them sustain a living were wood and stone, there was the birth of the Iron age. We might speculate that those were accidental events like the fire sparked of flint stones, but to make iron spears and bars from iron ore, would not have been an easy joke.  There would have been people who thought about it day and night.

In every era there were milestone discoveries and inventions like iron; electricity, electric lamp, steam engine and aircraft to name a few.  In these cases did people have manuals or guidelines to have them produced? All of them where the products of human imagination. I am not going to debate on who invented what or how, the fact that they were made from nothing makes them so special. I guess no one is less imaginative than any other. It just the matter of how we train our minds from an early age.

To prove that everyone has awesome creative or imaginative powers here is a demo.

“‘Isn’t it that the miss universe? Oh my, I forgot her name.. .’ whispered Daniel almost putting his mouth into Sam’s ears. Sam jumped in excitement and shouted, ‘Miss universe, where? Where?’ On hearing the scream, the modest beautiful young lady wanted to get off the place and moved swiftly towards the entrance. She moved out of the shop so fast that she stumbled over a smart young man near the entrance to the shop ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. “

Now since you don't have the rest of the extract it’s left to your creative skills but you can find what I wanted to say in the story a little latter in the blog.

If you ask me does this above scene have any relevance to the content of the blog? Yes is the answer. The information presented here are like the facts present in a given area of research, so discovering or inventing something is like completing the scene.

“‘Isn’t it that the miss universe? Oh my, I forgot her name..’ whispered Daniel  almost putting his mouth into Sam’s ears. Sam jumped in excitement and shouted, ‘Miss universe, where? Where?’ On hearing the scream, the modest beautiful young lady wanted to get off the place and moved swiftly towards the entrance. She moved out of the shop so fast that she stumbled over a smart young man near the entrance to the shop. The young lady felt really bad for crashing into blind man and apologized. She helped him to get up and get a taxi. “

I know that was such a bad scene that I cooked up, but the fact is there is so much major information which is unknown in a given area of research so considering all that into the creative outlook, will help us solve most of the problems of the present age.

If you are still not convinced that you are creative enough to write a better scene than I did, I just have one question. How did you manage your parents when you played till late night at school and went back home late?

Even I really wasn’t convinced when people around me always said that when we are facing a problem we are sitting on a gold mine of solutions. I always used to murmur, “You fool, you should have my problem then you won’t be telling all this crap to me.” At one point, I realized they were correct and I was totally wrong in the way I saw the problem. I am not telling this just because I got up one fine day and found an answer to every single problem I have, but it’s because when I think of a problem now, thousands of possible answers just start running across my mind.

Those magical words, Why? What? Where? Who? How? Why not? What if? Most importantly the last two, can make so much difference to the way we think.

Have we thought how those crazy people in the 16th did and 17^th century, found out that the Earth was spherical and that the Earth was going around the sun?  Of course they had good analytical thinking, analyzing facts about the shadow on the moon and all those stuff but they never had satellites capture pictures on the solar system. It’s mind blowing amount of imagination.

I wanted to write about this after mulling over the fact that there haven’t been great inventions or discoveries that have come up in almost half a century. It can be speculated about what I say as ‘great’.  Newton’s laws, Edison’s lamp, Darwin’s origin of species, Einstein’s Relativity theory and things like these which are indisputably great landmarks in science.  

Something ground breaking has to happen other than the wars which are a regular happening these days, which will go down in history as the accomplishment of this era. I am not downgrading the imaginative powers of this generation which has produced the most number of learnt people on the planet than ever before. We are creative but our imaginative powers are just focused in so much available information and are trying to make minor changes here and there and want a Nobel Prize for it. We are allowing our powerful mind just to think within this range which is very safe to play with in science. We need to take our focus off this information and climb on it to have a better view of the universe around us, which has so much to teach us.

If we change our perspective towards science, not just work for a Nobel prize but work for a society at large we might have much better milestones to talk of from this present age. 

Why are we losing the battle of evolution to our unicellular counterparts?

As great thinkers always said everyday is a new learning experience, it's no different for our human body. The astoundingly complex design of our Human body with all its intricate networks place a million questions before the most advance science of this age. The best single solution to a bag of questions in the million available was provided by Charles Darwin. Evolution, a very simple term which explains the most complex design. Many people have a wide variety of views about his theory of the origin of species. A few people call the bottom-line of the theory as the 'survival of the fittest' but some call it the 'survival of the species which is most adaptive'.

Here we are the fittest species on the planet with all our might and wisdom, dominating the planet for centuries now, as the dinosaurs did for about 100 million years. Remarkably we have evolved a lot more than the dinosaurs did in a number of ways. But, we have forgotten to realize a major problem. The more complex we are, slower is our rate of evolution. So here is answer to one basic question, more simple organisms are, faster they evolve.

Coming to the bottom line of Darwin's theory, he had clearly stated the evolution of any given species more specifically a trait, just depends on how much the trait helps for the survival of the species. Darwin's classical examples of the tortoises in the Galápagos Islands. The tortoises with longer necks had a selective advantage to reach out to prickly pear for food in arid areas, whereas the tortoises with short necks were not able to reach out to food available at a considerable height above the ground. So the long neck tortoises dominated and survived.

In the same lines the species which require a much lesser time for reproduction, will be able to evolve traits which increase their chances of survival. And mind you they don't have too many rules or ethics and their genetic content is very simple. So when a certain species is facing a threat against survival, they can receive genes (which are the cause for the trait or the characteristic) from organisms which can give resistance to that particular threat.

Say for example when we use a particular antibiotic against a species which causes diseases to humans, so that species faces threat. In that case, when one individual in that particular species comes to contact with an other individual of a species which has resistance to this antibiotic, they may undergo conjugation and reproduce thereby exchange genes. This is of-course a chance event. But when there are millions of this species spread in an area this chance event will have a high occurrence rate. Now what happens is, since all the individuals which does not posses this antibiotic resistant gene die the ones resistant has more space for growth and multiple exponentially. So, we have a new species which is resistant to a drug.

This is not the only case, like all organisms the replication of the DNA of the microbes are also error prone. So when the protein targeted by the antibiotic undergoes random mutation through generations, the microbe again becomes resistant. Now one thing which should strike people strongly is the multiplication rate of microbes which is very high. An organism like E.coli has a doubling time of 20 minutes. So a simple math calculation will tell us that in a day the organism will have had 72 generation of descendants in a day. While we humans may take more than 3000 years to have so many generations and the best part is not more than the 69th to 71st generations would live to see the 72nd generation. While in the case of the microbes most of them will survive through most of these generations.

It does not mean that we human beings do not have these mechanisms in place. A best example of human evolution is in the Africa population where Malaria is a major killer disease till date. The survival rate is high with individuals who have one abnormal allele of the hemoglobin beta gene (which leads to formation of sickled RBCs) and one normal allele in the Red blood cells (human beings have two copy of every gene). So when a heterozygous (dissimilar allele carrier) person is affected with the malarial parasite, they have more chances of survival because the parasite is not able to affect the sickled RBCs. This selective pressure is very high in a few regions of Africa due to the malarial parasite, this has led to the predominant presence of heterozygous individuals in the region.

The present situation is we are training our bodies not to evolve. We just take medicines for granted. How many of us know that the antibiotics we use DO NOT fight viruses which are the cause of cold. Antibiotics can just fight against secondary infections caused by bacteria like sore throat. We are advised to take specific antibiotics which will fight the secondary infections and allow our immune system to concentrate combating the viruses. If we treat ourselves without proper consultation or proper diagnosis we are just wasting our money and giving more stress to our kidneys to clear the chemical waste.

There are many physicians who clearly understand the problem and just prescribe us a normal healthy diet. But, the sad part is there are physicians who are ignorant about this danger. The scientific community is trying to find new possible anti-biotic candidates to highly resistant microbes which are evolving at a steady pace. Now its just left to us to allow out immune system to evolve and adapt.

After-all in our struggle for survival, adaptation is the best cure for any given disease and circumstance in our day to day life.

P.S: This is my first pure scientific blog and the blog is to bring awareness among my counterparts with whom I share the 21st century Biosphere.

Hooo that's a weird name.. What does it mean???

That's what people keep asking me all the time when I introduce myself and invariably everyone needed a second chance to get my name right. So there you go, my name is 'Aloysius Wilfred Raj' and thanks to the Indian Passport office at Chennai for lengthening my already lengthy name by adding my father's name as my surname. To all who don't know, in south India it's a bit rare to find people with surnames.  So my name is officially, 'Aloysius Wilfred Raj Arokiaraj'. My uniqueness starts with my name. I started to learn my name when I was fairly young, there started my training for tongue twisters. 

People used to call me using all sorts of names starting from Alexander (I know its heights of mistaken identity but can't help) to Alshaeish (like one in Alsatian). But as a kid that never really got on my nerves. Once in my middle school, I asked my mom why exactly she chose this name. She had a very plain answer; she wanted to name me Aloysius because it started with an 'A' and it was rare to find someone with that name. Then St. Wilfred's feast falls on my Birthday and Raj comes in my Family (not like a family name but just because every guy from my grandfather had it in the last two generations so it was just added as a free entity).

When I started to get hold of a proper pronunciation for my name somewhere in middle school, I started to correct everyone who called me the wrong way. Of course, I had too many nick names from rubber mouth to Palaravaayan (Name which became famous for me during my 12th grade) literally meaning continuous flow of words like milk. There would not have been so many nick names, if my name was a bit easier to call. To be honest, I was one of the most talkative a teacher would ever find in his or her career. Coming to how I love myself to be called, "Aa-loy-she-S". But 90% of the time I have been unsuccessful in hearing it that way. Many of my friends even started calling me 'Wilfred' and 'Raj'.

One great problem I have been facing with having this name is when people attend calls. My sister calls me 'Alo', I have got used to being called so. I really get embarrassed when people attend calls from silent mode saying a hello and I respond to them. I had been always thinking that Aloysius was tough only for people in India but I was wrong. When interacting with people of other countries, I found out only the British were convenient with my name while everyone else had to train themselves to call me correctly but most just gave up. 

A few people had actually asked me what my name meant, I just went around telling them that it’s just another name or name of a great saint, the patron of young students. One fine day I asked this question myself and considering the fact that I had nothing to do I went on a search. I had a hard time hunting things down but found success. Aloysius is a very rare name which is the Latinisation of the English name 'Louis' having German origin meaning "fame and war". The fact was having interacted with a lot of Germans, they were the ones who found it most tough and gave much weird pronunciations which I totally disliked. But, having such a meaning in your name gives you unexplainable amount of valour. Making things more interesting was the second part of my name, Wilfred which is also of Germanic origin meaning “will" and "peace". Raj literally means King, ha ha so I have a name which has so much to do with Bravery, Will, Peace and Power. So do I need anything less to look up to than just be proud of my name and living my name? How much every people murder my name and make fun I am still the same old Aloysius Wilfred Raj. I guess only my friends should say if I have been any better...   

This blog was just to try my hand at writing. I thought writing about me is the best thing because there is nothing on the planet I know better. And sorry if there is something which hurts or is grammatically horrible.