forms of life

October 17 2008

Every evening I am interested to watch some shows on nature or on science, which sometimes blend into one. I had tried to instill the sense of wonder and a need to search for novelty in my kids, by asking them to watch science shows for kids when they were really young.

Watching nature shows is like seeing the life through a camera lens. The life as we perceive is very narrow in focus, some times not extending beyond our childhood perception of what life is supposed to be. Then I look at the life in different forms, in different environments, in different period in history and evolution of organism. It is overwhelming to see the diversities and possibilities. In most of the time human beings were not there, not to speak of me which has a very short existence.

What I see is a very simple goal of the life forms, feed and breed and propagation of the species by producing offspring in huge number, hoping that some will survive to propagate the species. So, they eat and eat and sometime breed. The life of vast majority of people is not very different from those except that most human cover themselves, decorate themselves and kill their own kind. Others usually don’t do that.

The increase in the size of the neocortex might have helped us to think more extensively. At the same time when we think of discordance between the human societies it is appalling. More than 50% of the human beings have no access to sanitation, while some of them are thinking of colonizing the Mars or thinking of building of computers which will surpass the capacity of the human brain. A lot of human qualities such as greed, hatred etc for its own kind developed in parallel with the development of the need for a divine being or a search for a meaning of existence after all.

Then there is the evolution of aesthetic values.

Comfort zone

Information and knowledge are power. However people do not necessarily embrace it. For example there are toothbrushes made out of bamboo sticks, plastic and even powered by electricity. But availability does not necessarily translate to utilization. People feel very comfortable in their own old ways and don’t feel a need or even feel threatened to move to an arena they are not familiar with or not in control. Indians still use fingers to eat and Chinese use chopsticks to cook. This kind of holding onto the culture, may be personal or little broader is also prevalent in science. Protocols and machines are getting upgraded constantly which can give new information or different information when implemented by the researchers. However, that sometimes pushes people to their discomfort zone and hence they resist, become calcitrant or even become defensive which might lead to offensive and altercation.
All over the world, we see principal investigators having a tendency to hire researchers who speak his or her native language. That may not be biased in nature but an outcome for choosing to be in the comfort zone to interact as language and culture barriers play major roles in science too.

Old wine in the new bottle

As a new day dawn
So many new things surround me
A day before, they all used to be old
Known, familiar and mundane
Like a spider building a web
Or a bee flying hastily to a flower hub

A feeling sinks into me
As if I am looking these for the first time
I try hard to connect to what I read
In science magazines
And to what I do in the lab or computer
I get lost in the puzzle of designs
Engineering, networking
All automated but with a beautiful
Simple shape hiding all of it

A sense of humility
And ignorance drowns me
I sit and look around
Becoming again a drop
In the ocean of creation.

May 17 2008

Fantasy, symbols and quest for demise

We love to fantasize, dread and get scared and enjoy it at the same time in movies, even though similar situation in real life or in dream will scare us to death. Fantasy has been with us all the time, from snow white and seven dwarfs to the Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter. We want to forget our reality by spreading rose petals on the bed after marriage. We like candle light to noon’s scorching sun’s rays. We like red balloons and confetti and colorful dresses to adore ourselves or our little girls so that they look out of this place. Often the fantasy is symbolic, in some way we are trying to send a message without being obvious, whether it is a necklace with a cross or a mark on the forehead. Symbols rule our lives and populate all our places, from the man’s toilet to Washington monument. There is some thing we can not live without even though we reject the so called nonrealistic pagan way of looking at life. At the same time there are sports teams with names, cars with names of animals that are mean, quick and rulers of their domains. The names we give to our children do not represent what the children would have liked but the projection of ourselves, our desires, our lost relatives, our infatuations.

At the same time I feel that violence and destruction has been the prime driver for human creativity. One can see that in movies as well as in the weapons of mass destruction in the arsenal of advanced nations. Most of the energy of human beings are used in killing others of the same species and faster and more dramatically with awe. I think there is some kind of disjunction between what we can do creatively and how that creativity is used to arm peoples to kill others and make money in the process. Then where does the money take us and how much is enough to guarantee our happiness and satisfaction?

primitive vs advanced

May 15 2008
Every day I get an email from Encyclopaedi Britannica about what happened on this day in history. It is so interesting to find out the evolution of human society as recorded by western civilization, that kept good records of their culture. In contrast eastern societies did not keep any record and hence all are speculation, even though they had progressed far in science, philiosphpy, art, music and engineering as demonstrated in the construction of giant temple complexes.

The email also points to the wars, to the injustice and violence done to one culture by another supposedly better and civilized one. To me it seems as if the concept of superiority based on bringing peace, happiness and satisfaction to a society, then the primitive societies were much better than the dog eats dog societies of the technocrats. It is obvious that modern amenities have brought many gadgets to make life much easier to live with, from GPS systems to air conditioning. However are we more content and human than our ancestors who lived thousands of years ago or than those who still live that way untouched by so called modernity?

I see more and more people including scientists turning to the processes established thousands of years ago to eliminate human suffering by means of yoga, mediation, chanting and introspection, thus eliminating the business aspect of health care, which is mostly designed to keep the patient alive and the disease uneliminated, so that there is a long term dependence on medicine that can sustain the drug industry. Of course there are some exceptions such as eradication of smallpox.

scientific means and ends

Yesterday in the afternoon attended the system biology workshop where speakers talked about different aspects of it, from sequence comparison, to transcription factors being derived from transposons to development in Drosophila. The approaches taken were unique in the sense that teasing out problems depends so much on the thoughts that get into designing the experiments. Analyzing the data without any bias is the next step. Often scientists have their pet genes or processes and every thing seems to lead towards that, subconsciously. Joining the bandwagon is not foreign to science, as fads come and go. Over all approach seems to be to start with a system which is not complicated, like studying bacteria instead of human to find out metabolic pathways. A good model system to work on and a methodology that is easy or straight forward to follow help in the reproduction of the results. However still the data could be mined to get what will prove one’s hypothesis and lead one astray.

natual and manmade calamities

In the morning today heard about the 7.8 earthquake in Chengdu, called Lina immediately. She is ok. So many natural disasters are now there and also much severe, from cyclone in Burma, to volcano eruption in Chile to tornado in south east states of USA. Death seems so much in mind all the time.

In PBS heard about how USA destroyed the culture of the Native Americans by putting them in boarding schools where they were give English names and were forbidden to utter a single word from their native language and were Christianized. Such a shameful way to cultures without any remorse and still thought to be most civilized.

Destroying another culture has been such a predominant part of a culture’s identity as a better one. Once the temples, statues and paintings etc are destroyed in the name of Jesus Christ or Mohamed or Vishnu, there is no way to get the creation back in track.

I hear and read about war and death and destruction, almost all the time. I see guys in army trucks or otherwise killing other guys as well as kids and women, while women are begging for food for their kids. Some cases it is most sophisticated killing like dropping bombs on people they don’t know. War and destruction have been part of men’s culture from the beginning of civilization, from Greeks, Roman to USA. The major difference is that early days those who choose to fight and die were getting killed, not with the armada countries like USA has kills mostly civilians and injure masses.

I always wondered why people watch sports or any other activities where they are not physically participating but only seeing some one else doing the task, may it be car racing or American football game. There might be certain centers in the brain which make these the audience or onlooker feel as if they are in real the players and executing the action. After the arrival of TV, spectator sports have become one of the major attractions, big businesses as well as cause for obesity and obsession. Intellectual pursuit has been mostly replaced by watching in TV some one playing cricket or golf.

too long and too short

Often my time is spent in looking for things. I put it somewhere and the action was not mindful. Now I spend hours looking for it, either in my computer or at home, not in the lab any more as I have no wetlab. The amount of time I spend in looking for things as well as organizing and removing what I thought I need but not any more is enormous. Out of the days of our lives, the real time we utilize to do some thing meaningful is very short, unless we add every thing from brushing teeth to talking over the phone as meaningful. Every one has the potential to do great, but in real we either have no time nor the interest to do something. We would rather watch something some one else is doing, be a consumer.

My life is too long when I look in one way and too short when I look differently. Daily incidents of the past get quickly overwritten by the event of the present and the memory often glosses over the past, making it more horrific or terrific. I have almost forgotten most of my childhood, even Amgen days are now seems so distant. When I was going to study at USC in the evening, it seemed as if those days will never end. Then suddenly every event becomes a spec of the past and shrouded by later events.

It is like the children, who were born and now they are adults. During the time they lived at home all the time, they slowly grew up, became teenager and then left for college. Some how it seems as if they grew up with a flick of a switch and there were no intermediates, unless I look at the photos. What happened to all those bodies, the cute toddlers, the naughty boy’s, the adorable girl’s and the teenagers’ when the hormones started metamorphosing the body?

Gene, the scapegoats

Soon after their discovery, genes have become a part of our social expression in addition to being the darling of research. They also have become the scapegoat for any thing that happens to us, from our anger to the diseases we get. First they were selfish, using our body to propagate themselves. Once we have transmitted them to our progeny, then genes don’t need us and lead us to the path of demise and death.
They were supposed to be the cause of cancer, the oncogenes. They were supposed to be the reason for our mental illness, for our behavior of all kinds, even if we shoot some one for fun, we can always blame the genes, they made me do it. I am not at fault.

I think the more I learn about genes, I feel that the gene excuse is less scientific than thought. For sure we can be predisposed due to certain mutation in our genes to get lung cancer. However if we refrain from smoking and from the polluted smog filled areas, there is much less chance of us getting it. The same is true for how long we live or what we can become. The potential is there, but unless it is triggered by one or more of our behavior, eating a lot, doing no exercise, eating wrong kind of food or being under stress to be millionaire instantly, the chance of genes leading us astray towards our destruction is kind of remote.

Today's thoughts, May 6, 2008

20 000 people might have died due to cyclone in Mynamar (Burma). Death is ever present and comes due to so many different factors. Death is teasing us every day in different accounts in newspapers, TV and online. Still we think it will not happen to us or to one of our loved ones.

Injection of a twist in the normal thinking process leads to eye opening of the mass and hence the recognition. Many have been recognized and appreciate long after they succumbed to death. But how that recognition benefits the deceased?

We fail to see most of the time the obvious. Every thing that looks familiar will cease to be that once we look close and hard enough. The simplicity hides the complexity and the ingenuity in common things or beings we encounter all the time and ignore its importance. It could be either or man made, such as a paper clip. Just think about the ingenuity behind those inventions or designs. We take fingers for granted. We don’t think about how effortlessly we are able to talk, even sing, unless we encounter some one with a defect, who can not speak a word. As long as we are not unfortunate enough to lose function of any one those, we ignore its importance and the complex engineering that has been in place to make us functionally active.

What does attract our eyes and our attention out of myriad things and phenomena that we conveniently ignore every day? What makes a girl heart throb and a picture that is worth thousand words? There has to be a common esthetic yard stick, a common beauty yardstick in our brain to make us agree in choosing what is beautiful.

all creatures large and small

The diversity of beings in the world is amazing. The evolution as such is a tinkering process, trying out small changes at one time to find out if it can survive. Some thing that is lost in the translation is the evolution of higher organisms, is that each organism as a specie, is capable of survival, adaptation to the changing environment.

Higher organisms have better brain capacity, so that they can carry out additional functions. But they are not necessarily better in the game of survival. Every being from unicellular to human have the basic engines to eat, grow, propagate one way or other and communicate with their kind and also with the environment.

Trees are amazing as they have very few needs and withstand a lot of insult including cutting of limbs. Each organism is fittest in its own way. Otherwise there would be no amoeba or crocodiles any more. Some organisms have better sights than us, better hearing, better tactile response and motor action. Some insects can jump 10 times or more of their body length. Some organisms like fish and bees can change sex when needed and have eggs develop without fertilization which we can not.

Her (Julie's) Prayer list got longer

The limits around us
Surround us

Sorround her
Like the layers of an onion
She can only think of you
And without the blink of her eyes
Connect you and upload all her wishes
To give her a hand
If you have one
To be patita paabana
Again and again
To heal the aching bodies
The aching stomachs
The aching hearts
Of all your children
By visitng us

as avatars

As mother Teresa
As Gandhi

As Martin Luther King

And
As others

I am too ignorant to know.