Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

Kicking someone when they are down is cruel. Mocking them in that situation is slightly better. What follows is neither, even though it is about Greece and the mess it is in. One guy started an online campaign to collect money to pay a teeny, tiny fraction of Greece’s debt! It didn’t collect much. I could have told him that: the Internet only donates to shady Nigerian scams! Greece’s GDP is $250 billion; Apple alone has $280 billion in cash . Hence the jokes about Apple buying Greece and renaming things to iAcropolis and iOlives. It could then be the company sponsored vacation spot for Apple employees, they joke: Greece would be for geeks! Greece’s stock exchanges recently reopened after being closed for 5 weeks and the banking stocks crashed because nobody has any faith in them anymore. But how little faith is best articulated by a comparison: Uber, the cab ride sharing company, alone is worth over 5 times more than all of Greece’s listed banks put together ! The l...

Some weeks back, there was the news about how the US had considered blowing up the moon as a show of strength during the Cold War. This was around the time the Russians put the first man in space and the Americans felt they were woefully behind the Soviets. There followed the (inevitable) denials that it was never a serious idea, that the world (let alone the Americans) never had the firepower to blow up the moon, that even a massive nuclear explosion on the moon would have just been a blink-and-you-miss-it event in Moscow (and that’s assuming the sky was clear and someone was even looking)… On a more recent note, there was a petition filed in the US that the government build a Death Star, you know, the Star Wars kind. Well, the US government had to respond because the petition had collected the minimum signatures needed! Titled “This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For”, the US rejected the petition (obviously) and went on to list the reasons: -    ...