Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an earlier blog , I mentioned the discovery of bacteriophages (viruses that kill bacteria) and asked why they weren’t used as treatment/prevention for bacterial diseases? Pranay Lal’s Invisible Empire answers that question.   First, says Lal, hierarchy matters. Some top biologists at the time offered alternate explanations – what if, they said, the killer wasn’t a virus but enzymes released by other bacteria? While d’Herelle was outranked, he used bacteriophages to treat a handful of patients suffering from bacterial dysentery. Years later, he cured a few more patients suffering from the bubonic plague. He tried his method in India to treat cholera outbreaks with great success. Sadly, his successes were few and even with the India case, where the effects were on large number of people, the trials had to stop due to the start of the Satyagraha movement (non-cooperation).   The few trials conducted after that didn’t help the case for various reasons: “The small-...

Ceridwen Dovey wrote an article titled “Can Reading Make You Happier?” . It all started off because she was gifted a “remote session with a bibliotherapist”. Biblio-what? “Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She’s not kidding: “Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia.” Some studies claim reading increases empathy, thus making you a better person. Other studies claim that: “Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.” Even if you feel that calling books therapeutic is going too far, you’d find it hard to see how a kid reading books i...