Ephemeral Reflections

The most imperative thing here is the reason why I started reading this book. Because this defines the context in which I saw its content. It has been some years since I started wondering what the cause of violence by religious people is. Violence is part of human nature. But if we blame certain religious beliefs incite violence then why, why Buddhist majority countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka persecuted their minorities. If religion does grant you peace then why another majorly Buddhist country, japan, turned out to be one the worst offenders of war crimes in world war II. Do their beliefs not create an inherent conflict? Where nationalism triumphs religion? And where religion directs nationalism. Most of the Tibetan protests have been non-violent. But at the same time, can you ignore the firebrand Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka? I wanted to know how such deeply religious people could live a life that is in complete contrast to the ​​original teachings of their dharma. Although this b...

I wonder how surfing internet sometimes become like falling down a rabbit hole. I was once looking up something for a friend during when I came across the 'standard essential patents'. This somehow lead me to gene patents. This term revived a distant memory. When I was in B.Sc., one of my friend told me that  the biotech industry stocks suffered a huge loss in single day when president Bill Clinton declared human genome sequences should be available freely ( see  Clinton - Blair Statement ). Of course, this was quite far from the day when their supreme court declared genes are not patent-able after long legal tussle (this I learned now, not then). So I have decided to simply collect the status of gene patents in India and abroad. I present a summary of what I learned and thoughts over here.  A little bit of history for the most famous gene patent litigation. BRCA1 and 2 are quite infamous genes. These genes are involved in DNA double stran...

 There is one thing on which I can absolutely count on to provide fodder for this blog. And that is talking about the books which made me recommend them to whoever is ready to listen.  But this, is more about the author.  I was introduced to history of science as by Sam Kean (rest of them then followed). And for that, I indebted to him. Let’s just say ‘The Disappearing Spoon’ and ‘The Violinist’s Thumb’ are two of the most enjoyable books I have read which do not belong to fiction category. Science. And pure joy.  In my Masters’ classes in JNU, many professors used to tell interesting stories about the interactions of scientists which led to the discovery (topic of the class). As much I enjoyed them, I used to think of them as superhuman story collectors. Blame that on my ignorance and on the small cache of book genres I read till then. And then I stumbled upon Sam Kean. He was the first science historian I came across (and then there was no looking back). Th...