Ephemeral Reflections

  artwork by@allison_horst     After framing the title I realised that it is reminiscent of The title of ‘my experiments with truth’ by Mahatma Gandhi. As, I have never read that book or its summary, so I can not put any disclaimer here whether or not this article is inspired by that work. Now these tidbits aside, let us move on to the topic. I was first introduced to this magical language called ‘R’ in my masters. To say that my masters course exposed me to the areas of research and methods of teaching for science which I was not exposed to in my graduate course (which was basically an extension of school work), would be an understatement. It widened my perspective on science which otherwise I would have treated in the same as textbooks. Even though we were taught bioinformatics in bachelors, the need for learning programming wasn’t mentioned even in passing. It will definitely not improve your career prospects. It was just about using a set of tools for some analysis an...

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...

 Now a union minister states ( in All India vaidic sammelan, no less) that Darwin's theory of evolution is wrong because none of historic texts mention sightings of ape turning into man.  ‎The idiocracy.  Okay, everybody is entitled to have their own view but not on the cost of playing with facts. Do our ancient texts mention dinosaurs and woolly mammoths ? But they sure did exist. Look at frozen carcass of woolly mammoths dug out from Siberia or partial dinosaur skeleton in our own India (Rajasaurus narmadensis) . Hey, but those are not mentioned in our ancient texts. So , here they go out of windows. Texts do not mention them as they were written by humans. Humans ( Homo sapiens , to be specific) date back to 195,000 years at max, while those poor chaps existed in completed different era (230-65 million years). Woolly mammoth went extinct 9-5000 years ago.   Prima facie , it appears that he has not studied the very theory he is advocating to remove  from...

 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...