Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There are two broad kinds of problems in science, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell . He calls the first category the “eye in the sandstorm” problem. That’s the kind of field where there is immense confusion (the sandstorm) and no pattern or map on how to navigate exists. “Quantum theory serves as a good example…. A shifted paradigm about this atomic/ subatomic world was required to get out of the sandstorm.”   The second category is the inverse of the above, what he calls the “sand in the eye” problem. “Everything makes perfect sense, except one ugly fact that just won’t fit the beautiful theory. It irritates the scientist like a sand grain lodged in the eye – why, why, she asks herself, won’t this one irritating contradictory fact go away?” He uses that as the runway to explain such a problem from the world of neurons, but that requires you to read the book to understand things. So I will cite an easily understandable example from the world of physics – when Me...

Pranay Kotasthane’s starts off with a deliberately provocative statement after the forced resignation of the Union Education Minister recently. “Let me propose an idea that sounds radical but isn’t: India does not need a Union Education Ministry.”   He elaborates why. How did the constitution originally envision education? “General education was a State List subject, meaning that states had exclusive legislative power over schools and colleges.” But yes, the center had control over central universities (AMU, BHU), certain technical institutions it considered as being of national importance and a few other areas. All central ministry ideas on school education were advisory, and states could reject or accept them as they wished.   Like so many things, all that changed during the Emergency. The 42 nd amendment added “education, including technical education, medical education and universities” to the Concurrent (center) List. And with that: “The Union gained le...

How fast can a camera take photos? Vaclav Slim talks about just that topic in Numbers Don’t Lie . In the early 1870’s, Leland Stanford challenged his employee, Easweard Muybridge, to develop a camera that could settle an old debate: Are all four legs of a horse in the air when it runs? To answer the question, Muybridge came up with a camera with a shutter speed of 1/1,000 of a second in 1878. The question could finally be answered, with (photographic) proof: Yes, all four hooves of a horse are indeed airborne at the same time.   Soon, the shutter speed increased to 1/10,000 of a second. By 1940, it hit the millionth of a second mark.   In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a rapid laser technique that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second). Today, we can detect events separated by attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second). It allows us to “s...

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee narrates an amusing incident from his younger days. He was still a very junior person in the medical chain, and his mentor was an Italian postdoc, Enzo Cerundolo, a garrulous man who nonetheless barely spoke to Mukherjee: “He rushed around the lab, navigating his way past me as if I were some irritating piece of equipment that someone had off-loaded in the wrong place.”   One aspect of the project the lab was working on at the time involved repeatedly freezing, then thawing a sample. The sequencing mattered – two thaws in a row, or two freezes in a row would kill whatever was in the sample. Unfortunately for Enzo, the assistant in charge of it (also an Italian) had gone on vacation. Nobody knew if the next step was to freeze or to thaw.   Mukherjee asked to see the tube. On its bottom, in barely visible ink, he saw the letters C, S, C, S, C, S. He asked Enzo what the Italian word for “freeze” was. Congelare . And the Ita...

The stereotype image on population growth is that only the southern states rates are declining while the rest of India is closer to the UP-Bihar end of the spectrum. Not true at all. While UP-Bihar are indeed the worst, most Indian states have low birth rates, not just the southern states. So much so that, as Raghu S Jaitley says : “We have gone from a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 3 to 2 in under 12 years; possibly the fastest such transition in the past century. Most of the developed economies of today took more than half a century for a similar drop.”   A generation back, we were told our population was one of the big reasons why India was poor, doing badly economically. So such a reduction in TFR must be a good thing, right? Well: “We have reached a TFR of under 2 now at a per capita of about US$3000, while such levels were reached by other economies at more than US$15,000.” Two major exceptions to that were Japan and China. Both overcame a low TFR before they becam...

If a country wants to keep its population unchanged, each couple should have 2.1 kids on average. The “extra” 0.1 is to adjust for the odd kid who dies early.   In Numbers Don’t Lie , Vaclav Slim points out that a radical change in the demographics of a country (increase or decrease) has historically “had enormous demographic, economic, and strategic implications”. As Europe’s share of global population fell from 18% in 1900 to 9.5% in 2020, so has its global significance. Asia, in the same period, has moved in the opposite direction on both fronts. From now to 2070, by this metric, Africa’s share should increase.   No country has ever managed to achieve exactly (or very close to) the replacement rate of 2.1. Japan, (in)famously dipped well below that number. But how far below 2.1 can a country go and still “recover”? Historical data suggests that below 1.5, such reversals are very unlikely. Spain, Italy, and Romania are at 1.3; Japan, Ukraine, Greece, and Croatia are...

The Zerodha article points out that slowly but steadily, Chinese manufacturing moved up the value chain. Patience and strategy matter. Uniquely, the Chinese government identified some sectors as critical (e.g. telecom) and poured money and helped arm-twist Western companies into sharing technological knowhow with Chinese partners. To help domestic companies grow in those sectors, when they were new and inferior initially, China would prevent Western (superior) tech from being sold, thereby creating a “protected home market to develop in”. “This model played out in multiple sectors — solar panels, electric vehicles, high-speed rail equipment. The value chain expanded.” Of course, this can be risky –local companies may stay at low quality only with no fear of competition from superior products. Remember the License Raj? ~~   China adopted a spray-and-pray approach. “They just threw money at everything and hoped something worked… even if the waste along the way was colossal… China go...

This Zerodha article analyzed how China became the manufacturing hub of the world. And whether India could replicate those steps. When Mao died, Deng Xiaoping took over. A major decision at this point was to learn from Singapore “a once backwater little fishing island had begun to cement its place in world conversations”. It was a good place to start because Singapore had started poor with a lot of Chinese origin citizens with little or no qualifications, a situation similar to China in ’79. ~~   A major outcome of the Singapore visit was the creation of the SEZ (Special Economic Zone): “These special enclaves didn’t have the same rules as the rest of China. Different rules applied — freer movement of capital, flexible labour laws, easy land acquisition, consistent, uninterrupted electricity. And quick customs clearances.” (India followed the same SEZ technique for the IT sector).   Crucially, one of the most famous SEZ’s was created in (now famous) Shenzhen bec...

The ethanol-as-fuel topic is in the news. Thankfully, it seems to be without too many politicians (for now, at least). And so the points being made by both sides make sense; they are not the usual mudslinging based on one’s political affiliations. I read two such well-written articles on the topic, one by Nithin Sasikumar and the other by Ajit Ranade in Deccan Herald . ~~   The drive to ethanol didn’t start recently; it has been going on steadily since 2013-14. The E20 target (The number ‘20’ here means 20% ethanol) has in fact been reached 5 years ahead of plan – imagine that, for government execution cutting across parties and spread over a decade! (India reached E10 in 2022; its target is 100% eventually). ~~   What are the reasons for the ethanol policy? The first one is that India imports a huge amount of oil; and that bill is only going to keep increasing. Saving money and forex was the primary driver. As the ratio of ethanol increases, the savings on that ...

A virus, so to speak, “goes native”, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell , i.e., it infiltrates the cell and hijacks the cell’s protein making apparatus to manufacture viral proteins.   This raises an intriguing question – since antibodies “cannot enter cells” (the cell membrane prevents them from entering), how then do they identify which cells have been infected?   If the antibody couldn’t “peek” inside the cell, was the viral protein coming out of the cell? Nope, that wasn’t the case either. The mystery only deepened – how then were the antibodies identifying which cell was infected?   The answer was found only in the 1980’s. Any cell, as we know, produces energy by processing the food we eat. And like every process in the universe, this produces waste by-products. “The cell’s meat grinder – the proteasome - … then chews them (the waste, including the viral protein) into smaller pieces.” The waste of course has to be ejected from the cell. And, as we ju...

Why should one write, asks (and answers) Shane Parrish. No, writing is “not just a vehicle to share ideas with others”. Rather: “Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.”   Paul Graham wrote the same thing: “A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”   In addition, writes Parrish: “Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding.” I guess that’s what summary writing at school was trying to teach!   Another purpose of writing is to understand things for yourself – this is often called the Feynman learning technique , after the p...

Penicillin . The most famous antibiotic of all time. In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee asks and answers two questions about penicillin that had never even occurred to me. How does penicillin differentiate microbial cells from human cells? How did it work so well against such a wide range of microbes? (Before our overuse of antibiotics undid its effectiveness)   A slight digression first. In my 11 yo daughter’s Biology book, there is a chapter on cells. It mentions bacteria as examples of unicellular plants. Plants, that’s right, bacteria are plants!   Though Mukherjee doesn’t mention it, that weird fact (bacteria are plants) is the starting point of the answer to both questions. A plant cell has a cell wall. Bacteria being plants have cell walls. To create those cell walls, they have a particular enzyme. Humans cells, being animal cells, don’t have cell walls – hence, human cells don’t need or have that enzyme.   Penicillin “kills” those enzymes that create...

In The Song of the Cell , Siddhartha Mukherjee writes : “In the history of biology, there are valleys of silence that follow the peaks of monumental discoveries.” Like when Benjamin Marten reasoned that TB was caused by microscopic organisms in 1720. It would take another century before Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur linked diseases to microbial cells. Or when Mendel discovered genes in 1865. It was followed by 40+ years of no mention of genes.   But the reality is different: “If you zoom into these valleys of history, they are far from silent or inactive. They represent extraordinarily fecund periods when scientists try to wrap their minds around the magnitude, generality, and explanatory power of a discovery.” More questions follow in this period. Does the new idea explain any other “previously inexplicable observations”? Are there any further levels of organization beyond what was proposed?   Quite often, writes Mukherjee, one needs new instruments and model...