Tag: Science

Cancer is not so much a disease as it is a kind of existence

When I picked up The Emperor of All Maladies, I was seeking answers to some very specific questions – what exactly are the physical changes that arise when one has cancer; what is the difference in nature of the different types of cancer, when stripped away from the nature of the affected organ; and how close are we from its cure.

Mukherjee, an oncologist by profession, started toying with the idea for the book around 2004. Six years later, he shared the final drafts of this immensely well-researched book with the publisher. The book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Admittedly, cancer is not so much a disease as it is a kind of existence. Mukherjee mentions in the book how the clutches of cancer inure one to it, to the extent that a life outside it is not simply difficult to imagine, it sometimes becomes impossible to imagine. This is most vividly brought to the reader’s attention when Mukherjee quotes a cancer patient as saying that living with her disease “is the new normal”.

There are a few foundational reasons for this. I think the most important reason is that very few diseases in human history have remained not simply unexplained, but also without any preventive, palliative or curative solutions for so long – one of the first mentions of cancer, now believed to be that of breast cancer, can be found in the writings of Imhotep in Ancient Egypt nearly five millennia ago.

This long time interval has cloaked the disease with a psychological armor of invincibility, surrounded by an air almost of reverence and, finally, subjugation.

Mukherjee leaves no stone unturned as he charts out this history of cancer. Chapter by chapter, in a brilliant exposition, he carries the reader through the five distinct modern approaches to the cure of cancer, most of them having emerged after the late nineteenth century.

Prior to the nineteenth century, surgery of the afflicted organ was often chosen as one potential cure of cancer. It is only with hindsight that we are able to see how inappropriate this approach was.

Take the example of breast cancer. Not only did mastectomies cause immense pain in the pre-anesthesia times, they also led to severe physical disfigurement. To top it all, the women who had to undergo this harrowing emotional and physical experience, took it in stride as something they were morally obligated to bear. Mukherjee mentions the words of a pre-nineteenth century physician who said he had been so “loathe to disfigure [a patient]”; and of a woman who gave a short speech thanking the doctor after her mastectomy.

As we enter the second half of the nineteenth century, this surgery takes a more radical turn and even larger parts of the human body, especially in breast cancers, are beginning to be excised. As we realise now, this was a blind race and the surgeons were shooting arrows in the dark, incorrectly correlating the volume of organ removed with better chances of cure (this logic holds no water in cancers that have metastasised; and where it hasn’t, even a simple local surgery would have sufficed).

The second stage that followed was the use of radiation to kill off tumor cells.

The third was chemotherapy, which involved the consumption of pharmaceutical drugs by patients. These drugs were not targeted, thereby harming the normal cells as well along with the cancer cells.

The fourth was adjuvant chemotherapy. This was a more rigorous version of chemotherapy that was continued even after all visible signs of cancer were gone – this was to prevent cancer’s relapse (i.e. its return) which often, though not necessarily, happened due to the cancer cells’ ability to metastasise (move to other parts of the body that were not being treated for cancer).

And finally, advancements in genetic and molecular engineering gave rise to targeted therapy, which could kill cancer cells with specificity while not harming the normal cells.

In a parallel arc, he also covers some crucial political, legal and socio-economic developments in the story of cancer, which changed how the disease, and its patients, were perceived; how it led to new preventive strategies (for example, the landmark ruling to label warnings on cigarette packets) and how it precipitated research for its cure.

But, at the same time, it seems that Mukherjee failed to gauge the relevance of certain strands of the scientific and humanistic arcs of cancer, for a reader. In such sections of the book, he becomes a chronicler of history, giving the impression that he is almost obligated to present details on account of propriety.

Most frustratingly, so many scientists, researchers and activists are mentioned by name, that one sometimes misses the woods for the trees. Then again, Mukherjee doesn’t necessarily want us to remember each of them by name, but this profusion inhibits the reader’s ability to keep a track of even the most important characters of the story.

The second issue I had with the book was the slightly excessive focus given to the social and political activism that would understandably be very intrinsically linked with the historical developments of a disease with such a nature as cancer and though I would personally have preferred a book that covered only the scientific principles at work, the political, economic, legal and social biography that was covered may be useful for someone looking for a more comprehensive historical perspective of this dreaded disease. Indeed, I am willing to overlook this dissonance as more on account of my own expectations from the book, than as an indication of any issue with the book’s narrative.

Thankfully, Mukherjee spends the last chapter giving a condensed version of the developments in the search for a cure of cancer and these last few pages manage to contextualise the rest of the pages – thus evoking relief and dismay in equal measure, and each on two counts.

Charles Darwin, oh what have you done!

If one were to list the most important people in the history of mankind, few people would be as assured of their place as Charles Darwin. It would be safe to admit that Darwin shall feature in the list of the top five greatest scientists of all time, along with the likes of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

His magnum opus, The Origin of Species, is an astonishingly vast endeavour. Let us try to imagine man’s view of the natural system before Darwin revealed his hand.

Man had observed thousands of species in all parts of the world, all well-suited for their natural environment. Each animal was well-fitted in the economy of nature and occupied a certain place, and the mutual interactions of all the flora and fauna in any given region formed an organisational web that felt more or less complete in-itself.

For naturalists at that time, it was impossible to think that such a (visibly) perfect system could have come into existence in any way other than divine intervention, and so creationism, quite conveniently, was provided as an answer for the incomprehensible complexity of the entire web of life, throughout the world.

Some problems, though, stared them in the face. How was it possible, for example, that many European species managed to spread rapidly and even replace the endemic species of Australia? If each species had been created perfectly for the place it occupied, surely no other species could be better suited to live in that area. Additionally, if all species were specially created for any specific place, which would imply taking into account factors like climate and geography, then distinct regions of the world which had nearly identical physical and climatic conditions, for example certain regions in the Old World and New World, should have nearly identical flora and fauna. But this is far from the case, if you were to observe the fauna of, say, Australia and South America. In fact, the species residing in the plains of these continents are as different as they could possibly be. Just imagine an ant-eater and a kangaroo standing side by side.

The theory of natural selection expounded by Darwin now seems so self-evident, that it is difficult for us to fathom what reserves of imagination must have been needed to come up with it in the first place. This beautiful theory says that there is a constant struggle for resources among different species residing in any given region, and the species that are more adaptive, more receptive to change will outlive others. And as they spread far and wide they will replace the species less well adapted – extinction is an inevitable consequence of natural selection as there is only a limited number of living beings that any ecosystem can sustain.

Additionally, the species which thus kill off other species will have more members, meaning more variation and they will end up giving rise to more genera from their existing arsenal than others. In short, the more successful species will spread more widely, and determine the future rise of new genera and classes.

This idea germinated in the mind of Darwin when he noticed how, within a few centuries, breeders had managed to create so many different varieties of pigeons. The Pouter, the Fantail, the Tumbler, the Jacobin – all these varieties share a common progenitor – the rock pigeon. Darwin observed that these varieties arose when breeders mated pairs of pigeons which displayed certain characteristics very strongly – the tail feathers in the Fantail, for example. This was a clear example of artificial selection by humans, who were concentrating only on the external appearances of the creatures concerned.

Darwin deduced that a similar process was happening in the natural world, where members of the same species, and species of the same genera, were locked in a battle with each other for survival, resources and their place in the ecosystem.

In this herculean endeavour, Darwin gives details of many experiments he conducted in order to find answers to certain questions – like, plants of how many genera may grow from a given amount of soil; extrapolating the distance to which seeds of various plants could travel across the sea aided by vegetative matter, and still retain their vitality, based on conducting an experiment that was basically a stripped down version of this process; comparing half a day old chicks of various pigeon breeds to see if some of the differences present in their adult configurations have been inherited at birth, and many others.

Going through the book I wondered why the word genius isn’t traditionally associated with Darwin. Einstein introduced a paradigm shift in physics and his ideas were revolutionary to say the least, but so were Darwin’s. I think it is because even a person with average intelligence would be able to understand the ideas expounded in The Origin of Species, were he to read it, while this can surely not be said about the theory of relativity. In that sense, Darwin seems like that erudite professor who lives next door, and who shares his knowledge in engaging lectures when the two of you sit down to talk in the evening, whereas Einstein is someone whose ideas we can only appreciate from a distance, but never quite understand.

The real and timeless beauty of Darwin’s idea is that his theory isn’t just restricted to biological systems, but they represent certain foundational concepts that will come into play whenever there are competing elements vying for the same thing – so there will be social evolution due to social selection (the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer), economic evolution due to economic selection (different kinds of economic systems work in different regions of the world based on the kind of society, culture and philosophies that drive those people), political evolution due to political selection (no wonder Marx realised the significance of the idea in how political systems in a given place will change over time), and so on. The list can go on and on and on.

There are some books every person should read. This has to be one of those.

An Arpeggio of “Aha” moments

Do you know what is an “Aha” moment? It is not a moment when you learn something completely new. No, such moments are restricted to things that you think you know (whether consciously or subconsciously), but actually don’t know. These are those light-bulb moments that suddenly illuminate a darkened room in which you had been roaming for quite some time, and you end up realising that the origami plants on the window were in fact organic (I cannot deny the possibility of some of you having an “aha” moment on reading the definition of the moment itself).

One doesn’t usually get many such moments while reading. That is because we rarely pick up books on such topics since we subconsciously feel we already know about it. So, for example, most of the science books I have read taught me new things, but almost none have made me reinterpret things I already knew, to the extent this book has. One must note that the simple moments when you understand something are radically different from light-bulb moments. For example if someone were to explain, to those of us who have never played drums, why the notes of the bass drums last so much shorter than the notes of the cymbals, we will get the feeling of having understood something new, but it will never be that light-bulb moment, for we aren’t familiar with the instrument. But if you explain the same thing to someone who has played the instrument for some time, he will start nodding vociferously with a wide grin on his face. Say hello to the “aha” moment.

Pardon me if I have spent too much time explaining a term (the “aha” moment) which many people, including some of my friends, find very irritating. But this is really a crucial aspect of my experience of reading this book. As the pages turn, Powell builds up the lay-person’s theory of music, starting from notes, the alphabets of music.

Do you know what is a note? It is any sound which has a repeating waveform – which basically means our ears receive the same information again and again many times a second. This often, though not necessarily, has a physical basis. For example, when you hit your table, it will also produce a note for the layers and particles of wood will always vibrate in the same way (provided you hit at the same point with a similar force each time). That is why most of the solid objects give, more or less, the same sound on being hit again and again. Some of these notes will be crystal clear (like tapping a piece of good quality glass) while others we will hardly characterise as notes (like asbestos) – but that is because they aren’t producing notes but noises, which are themselves a chaotic combination of notes (and a different set each time you hit them) due to which there is no repeating pattern as such.

From notes emerges the idea of the octave (do you know the relation between the various notes in an octave?); the relations between the notes in an octave lead us to keys (do you know what major and minor keys really are? Theoretically there are many other possible keys, many of which have been tried at different points in history, and the fact that just two survive today is an example of musical evolution over the ages); keys lead us to chords, and chords to symphonies.

The fact that Powell has a great sense of humour adds to the experience of reading the book. It is not uncommon to find authors who try to sound funny but fail miserably. Thankfully though, Powell has a great sense of timing and execution in this regard and this lifts up his exposition by a few notches.

Reading this book was like walking into the kitchen with the chef as he told you the recipe of your favourite dish, and although you can’t make the dish yourself, you are still able to grasp the importance of each item, and its role in the final dish.

Now I know why the sound of a violin is much more rich and complex than that of a flute; why major keys seem to sound cheerful and minor keys sad; what exactly the role of a conductor in an orchestra is, and loads of other such things.

If you had asked me, a fortnight back, why plucking a particular guitar string at different places, without changing the fret, produces different sounds, I would have stared at you with a lost expression, and then blurted some random physical reason, in which I myself didn’t believe one bit. But now, I can tell you it is because plucking at different places leads to the generation of different combinations of harmonics, leading to a different sound.

Reading this book has enabled me to see an art form from a very close perspective. Many people love music, most of them listen to it passively, and that is not because they don’t want to be active listeners – they just don’t know how to interpret the structure of a given musical piece. This book is doing a great job of turning passive listeners to active listeners.

Talking about structure, there is one aspect in which the book does fall behind a bit. Towards the end the author tries to take up some topics, but does not cover them to the extent needed. As a reader I felt I would be learning them in slightly more detail, because of the importance of the topics chosen, but they are handled in a rushed, almost forced, manner.

However, that should not take anything away from the lucidity of the rest of the book and I am sure that by the time you finish reading it, you will learn a lot of new things you previously had no clue about – including why I chose this specific title for this review.

Say “Hi” to the most complex thing in the universe

I must start by congratulating OUP (Oxford University Press). In 1995 they came up with a stupendous idea and started working on it. Today, twenty years later, millions of readers like me are hooked on to it.

A Very Short Introduction series by OUP is a series of books that cover a wide range of topics. I have read a few titles in the series earlier, but this is the first time I am reviewing one of them.

As the name suggests, each book aims to give a short introduction to a topic, assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the reader. The beauty is, the authors manage to give an introduction to even the most difficult of topics within the scope they have been given. Rarely crossing two hundred pages, and small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans, this series is very helpful for any reader wishing to utilise the idle minutes he may find while travelling, or engaged in any other activity.

The brain. It is, within the limits of our present knowledge, the most complex thing in the universe and something that has emerged after billions of years of evolution. It has a hundred billion nerve cells – as many as there are stars in the Milky Way.

I concede that it is often difficult to really grasp the sheer ingenuity of our brain’s functioning. I can only say that, maybe, it is because our consciousness is itself an emergent property of the brain. After all, a prince needs a pauper to understand just how fortunate he is!

The book tries to give an introduction of the brain and its functioning from different perspectives – the structural perspective of neurons; the chemical perspective of neurotransmitters and receivers; the perceptual perspective of sensory processing and the perspective of how memories (both short term and long term) are formed (along with the differences in their formation and how it characterises the duration for which we can remember them).

I must admit, somewhere at the back of my head I was expecting to read a lot more about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. And a little bit less about the details of how the synapses work and get activated – the substances involved, the development of potential gradients and the like.

But the truth is, there is a certain dichotomy evident here. On the one hand, understanding the various processes going on in the brain is absolutely essential to get a grip of its internal organisation, from where we can hope to move forward in areas that could give rise to higher consciousness. We haven’t even taken the first baby steps in this direction yet. However, on the other hand, continuing research in the recent years has shown that even if we were to have a complete neurological understanding of the brain, it would still not be sufficient to explain exactly what it means to “experience a colour”, for instance.

The book mentions some exciting areas of research – such as how remarkably similar the mechanisms of memory formation are across various members of the animal kingdom. For example, research focused on observing how short term and long term memories are formed in Aplysia californica, a giant sea slug. The results can be extrapolated to humans, obviously with some necessary precautions.

The famous case of London taxi drivers having brains larger than usual is also discussed. It turns out that they have significantly larger hippocampi – a part of the brain related with storing spatial information.

The human brain, probably more than any other animal brain, is the perfect example of the marvels that natural selection can come up with, over billions of years. In fact, our brain has developed so as to relegate most of our bodily needs to our unconscious, so that our conscious thoughts can be focused on activities more crucial for our survival – dodging a car on the highway, for an instance.

Imagine being stuck in the middle of a highway, with cars whizzing past you at terrific speeds, and unable to decide whether you should be breathing at intervals of four seconds or three seconds; or when you have finally decided to make a dash for the edge of the road, your muscles start bugging you as they need extra power and, consequently, extra oxygen – and you are unable to decide whether your heart beat is increasing at the appropriate rate to deliver just that right amount of extra oxygen; or your uncertainties regarding the correct rate of blinking – you don’t want to spend too much time with your eyes closed during blinking when cars are approaching you at fifty meters a second.

In short, the brain is beautiful. It is remarkably well adapted to its purpose, unflinchingly devoted to its duty, and it is insanely underappreciated for the work it does. It never sleeps, it never stops. It creates you, and it can destroy you. If not a review, this last paragraph is certainly my short ode to the human brain.

The brain. Please appreciate it more, it deserves it!

The birth of popular cosmology

A Brief History of Time can undoubtedly be regarded as the moment when the genre of popular science (especially popular cosmology) writing came into its own and came to be accepted by the general audience. And that was principally because of the sheer profundity with which Hawking explained concepts that had hitherto been limited to the scientific community.

It is not that popular cosmology books had not been written before. A good example is The First Three Minutes, by 1979 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Steven Weinberg. However, the way A Brief History of Time captured the imagination of the masses was unprecedented, and it is hard to find any subsequent book that has managed to do the same.

The book tried to tackle questions that are fundamental for every human, yet which take a back-seat in our everyday lives. Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Is the universe endless? Was there a beginning of time? What is our place in the universe? Spend a few minutes staring at the night sky, preferably in a region where air pollution and smog aren’t restricting your view of the heavens, and you will find these questions resonating in some corner of your brain that has long been subdued to social networking, monthly bills and an overload of irrelevant information.

My interest in popular cosmology started when I read Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, where he discussed the possibility of the existence of higher dimensions. That was followed by The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which was on String Theory. I read a few more books, even read A Briefer History of Time by Hawking, which is an abridged version of this book, but somehow never got around to picking up the original one.

Having read other books on cosmology, I am now in a position to appreciate what really makes A Brief History of Time so good.

One of the more conspicuous tendencies of modern authors is to repeat things. You find yourself reading some paragraph, and suddenly realising that you had read something similar, if not identical, around a hundred and fifty pages back. Of course it is not like entire sentences are copied, but that whiff of familiarity is unquestionable.

It is not that A Brief History of Time does not have repetitions. But at least its repetitions don’t seem trivial – in contrast with those found in other books. For example, consider two questions – the existence and implications of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (a uniform radiation observed to be coming from all directions in the universe, and without much variation in its intensity, at a few degrees above absolute zero) and the relative abundance of force and matter particles in the universe.

In both these questions, cosmic inflation (the very initial phase in the life of the universe when, according to this hypothesis, the universe expanded extremely fast, leading to certain large scale (relative) uniformities that we observe in the universe at present) concept will need to be discussed. So although this amounts to repetition, the context in which that concept is now going to be discussed is different.

Considering the kinds of ideas that are presented in the book, Hawking does a very fine balancing job. The writing is concise and to-the-point. Hawking spends as much time on any given topic as is needed to properly explain it, and then quickly moves on to the next one. As a result, the process of reading this book has its own rhythm. Hawking doesn’t try to stretch a two hundred and fifty page book into a three hundred page one.

The one big complaint I have with Hawking is his introduction of God in the narrative. The first time he used the word, well into the second half of the book, it felt more like a restrained tongue-in-cheek comment. However, his repeated use of the word soon changed this feeling and I felt like he was saying something he actually believed in. In the few instances where he delves into the possible powers his deistic conception of god may have – for example at the beginning of the universe; or on the nature of choice he had while choosing the kind of physical laws the universe could have had to start out with – I momentarily sensed a positive Galilean twinge in his tone.

Nevertheless, reading A Brief History of Time , I felt I was back in the wonderland called cosmology which had first captivated me eight years ago in school. It was a pleasure to read it, except a couple of chapters which really went above my head, and it is going to delight any reader who likes the genre of popular science. This book opened the floodgates and paved the way for a genre where writers aim to explain the most difficult concepts at the frontiers of science to lay people, without resorting to equations at all. And thirty years back, Hawking had taken the first steps in a commendable fashion.

Profoundity, Profundity

My previous three reviews have been thousand word monsters. Remarkably, a thousand words seem too less to capture what Gleick manages to achieve in the book The Information, even though all I am writing is a review. So I’ll have to find a shorter way.

Gleick begins the arduous task by trying to explain what “information” actually is. This is a difficult task in itself – for most of human history, the focus has merely been on the ways of recording information and not on the nature of information itself, whether one takes old papyrus scrolls, animal hides, cuneiform tablets, or, later on, the printing press.

He begins by examining language and how it represents information – how a finite set of symbols can in various combinations seemingly represent an infinite number of messages. From there, he charts the growth of the telegraph, developed for sending such messages over long distances. He mentions how its advent made man feel he had conquered space and time, and draws a parallel with the modern world – managing to capture the human reaction and response whenever any new paradigms in information handling, and consequently communication, have emerged.

He covers Babbage and Ada Lovelace, with the former’s conception of the Analytic Engine that could solve all sorts of problems based on “mechanical programming”. He discusses Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA’s structure – what genetic information is and how can an organism develop merely on the basis of the combinations of the 4 nucleobases. He discusses Turing and the history of cryptography – which began with the statistical analysis of various combinations of letters of various lengths (in a given language), followed by an algorithmic approach to find similar patterns in the encoded messages. And finally he moves on to Claude Shannon, undoubtedly the protagonist of the book (just to clear it, the book isn’t biographical in nature). Shannon, the father of Information Theory, heralded a new way of looking at information – divorce it of its meaning. For transmitting purposes, said he, “meaning” was dispensable.

In effect, all of them were trying to understand what “information” is; what forms it can take; how it can be processed, understood, analysed, and what sorts of operations are possible on it.

Dictionaries, code books for telegraphic codes, logarithm tables, programs, algorithms, DNA, internet – all of them, he says, are nothing but attempts at capturing the essence and manipulating the properties of “information”.

Towards the end he talks about the information explosion that has taken place over the last few decades. This has not only led to a (parallel) rapid advancement in technologies to handle, process, make sense of and apply that information (we live in the IT age, remember?), but it has also affected the way humans perceive information. It has clear psychological effects, which we are not in a position to understand presently.

“Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom”.

Even if you thought you knew what ‘information’ actually is, which an overwhelming majority of us anyway don’t, it will still make you look at the idea from a new perspective. The kind of analogies, parallels and connections we are shown are too profound for a reading of one sitting. I recommend not finishing this book in a few days. Let its ideas seep into you, let the enormity of the messages conveyed make a gradual impression on your mind, and let it make you ask new questions – not just on new topics, but in new realms.

This is the second book I have read on this topic in the last 6-7 months. The other one was Information – a Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi. Undoubtedly that was a more erudite effort at conveying the same concepts, but due to the sheer size of the book – a book of the ‘A Very Short Introduction’ series (by Oxford University Press) rarely crosses 150 pages in page size octavo – the scope of the two works can’t be compared. Floridi tackles more of the theoretical and philosophical aspects related to information, whereas Gleick is tackling more of the historical and practical (read technological) narrative.

Pardon if my review has meandered too much. It is mostly a result of having too many thoughts and ideas from the book at the same time – and that is precisely what you’ll take back from this book.