Qais Al-Awqati: The Signal and the Noise

Feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims to his ken

2012-01-29T21:42:00.009-05:00

Sometimes when reading a book you are startled to discover that a long hidden memory of yours is suddenly brought to brilliant focus by the writer; as if he actually was you describing to another your innermost and most intimate thoughts. Of course they would be proclaimed eloquently and the description adds verbal vividness to what was only an overwhelming feeling you had that could not have been well articulated since you never told anyone about it. This happened to me last week just as I was reading a short story The Pearl Fishers by Colm Toibin in his new collection The Empty Family. In it a young teenager in a school in Ireland is sent with his classmates to a dress rehearsal of Bizet's Les Pecheurs de Perles in the Wexford Opera House. Here is the young boy's response:

Walking to he opera house that evening was like being an adult. I had never been to an opera before; I think I may have heard a live orchestra once or twice, but only a chamber orchestra. I was surprised by the lighting and the costumes and the set, how yellow and stylized everything was, and how rich the sound coming from the orchestra and chorus. But I was overwhelmed when the two men began to sing. When we were told about the difference between a baritone and a tenor I had understood it but it had not meant much to me. Now the tenor's voice seemed vulnerable and plaintive, and the other voice masculine and strong. I was surprised too at the real difference between the voices, much greater here than on the recording. You could hear each voice clearly when it came to the duet and when the voices finally merged in harmony. I was almost in tears. I could not take my eyes off the the two men. What they had done together in that aria was the beginning of a new life for me, not only because I would follow music and singing from then on, but because it had given me a glittering hint of something beyond the life I knew or had been told about. That made all the difference to me, and I presumed that it had made a difference to those around me as well.

The duet, a magical moment in the opera is Au fond du temple saint. But it is the sensitive description of the epiphany of the young boy that overwhelmed me for I had an identical experience. I must have been 12 or 13 in Baghdad where I was a student in Baghdad College, an American high school run by Jesuits from Boston. Our biology teacher was an opera enthusiast. On my first day in the biology laboratory while I was struggling to get the microscope into focus, suddenly an incredible sound came out from Father Gerry's desk. It was the most heavenly duet of (what I later learned) a soprano and a baritone singing in Italian. I was overwhelmed and could not do any work for what seemed like hours even though it must have been only a few minutes until the duet ended. It was the opening duet of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro where Figaro is measuring what was, he hoped to be his and Susanna's nupptial bed. Like the hero of Toibin's story what I felt was a certainty that my life after this is going to be different since I am going to learn about this magical art of singing in the western classical music tradition. We had several records at home of Beethoven symphonies and other pieces of music but it was the character of the voices that mesmerized me. Every time I read or hear about similar epiphanies I still get goose bumps thinking of what happened to a young boy in Baghdad whose life has been immeasurably enriched by music.

One year later

2011-10-10T12:33:00.008-04:00

It is hard to think that year has passed since Selma died. Everything in the apartment was chosen or arranged by her so whenever one wants to change something, I remember how that piece of furniture or carpet or whatever was put there by her sometimes after many minor quarrels where I would say this thing belongs here or there. After she put it in the place she chose it would become apparent to me that that is where it belonged. there was no point in arguing with an art historian who had organized many museum exhibitions but as she used to laughingly say, I never learned not to argue.
I went to the cemetery on the 7th and passed by the Monument people. The granite stone is not ready; the one we chose was cut but apparently was damaged so they have to try again. But the big problem is the calligraphy design which I had commissioned from an Iraq calligrapher in London. There are so many details that need to be worked out that it sounds almost impossible to put the thing together with the artist's design, the font needed, the point size what to write under her name, just dates? what about archeologist? and do we add restorer? all of these take space! I finally chose a special engraver's font similar to the one used on ancient Roman Monuments. J. thinks that her name should then be gilded as they did in Roman times!
Which brings me to the nature of monuments. A. designed the outline of the stone; being a modern or modernist architect, he chose an asymmetrical shape which hardly looks like a gravestone. I then chose something from the 'Amiriya to put on the dege so at least it reminds us of her work. But to put a Quranic verse would have been too much for K. So I chose a verse beautiful poem from Andalusia.
The last trip we took together was to go to Andalusia, and in Cordoba we went to see the ruins of Medinat Al-Zahara the ancient capital city outside Cordoba. Selma was too weak to walk around so we just sat there under a beautiful tree and I just then thought of the glorious poem by Ibn Zaidun (1003-1071) to his beloved Wallada which starts with "I thought of you in Al-Zahara". This is a photo taken by K while I was doing this. The verse I chose to go on her tombstone is as follows (in a very free translation):

May Allah never put my heart at peace
if whenever your name is brought up
it does not fly aflutter with longing

Pretty awkward translation but it has three negatives and is difficult to come up with a nice translation but am working on it. Many published translations exist but none is really satisfactory.Here is the calligraphers arty design.

So here we have a modernist gravestone for someone who actually hated modernist architecture; a verse of Arabic poetry that I am not sure she was really interested in, although she enjoyed my reciting it to her in Medinat Al-Zahra and now am seriously thinking of gilding her name which would probably have outraged her. On the verso of the stone we are going to incise one of Nuha's etchings of a tree with birds; she certainly would have liked this. Are memorials for the living or for the dead? WHo can answer this question? The wishes of the dead are unknown(unless explicitly written ante-mortem) and the longer the time afterwards the more their wishes are simply matter of attribution and imputation.

Worddsworth saying this to Egyptians

2011-02-03T17:20:00.002-05:00

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

William Wordsworth was very excited by the French Revolution and even went to Paris to see first hand
These two lines say it all (1805; especially to the Egyptian, Tunisian and all the other that are watching

The Hurt Song

2011-01-03T21:13:00.011-05:00

There is a type of Iraqi song called Aboudhiya (ابوذية)derived from two words which simply means "he who hurts". It is composed of four lines with the the first three lines rhyming together and the fourth rhyming with iyya. Often it is used as a follower song to a Maqam recital. I was introduced to this form when I was doing my military service in Iraq where I was posted in the south of Iraq. The soldiers in my medical unit knowing that I was interested in folk poetry took me to their many celebrations and found that I quickly learned to love their aboudhiyyas. The poems are usually those of loss; mostly of course loss of the beloved. However the form is versatile being used as a dirge for the martyrdom of Hussein during the annual celebration of this event. In Baghdad especially it is also used to celebrate the memory of the recently deceased where it is combined with Maqam recital in a ceremony called Mawlood. The Mawlood is an annual event to celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in most Islamic countries. In Baghdad, however it is also used with different poetry to remember the dead.
Well we organized a Mawlood for Selma in Amman on December 18th 2010. The great Iraqi Maqam singer Hamid Al-Saadi came with several of his students to do the recitation. There were plenty of abuthiyas sung also. During some of them the sad poems were so moving that every one was weeping including the singers! Of course like everything that deals with Iraq, even this private occasion acquired political overtones when it was reported on by Micheal Jansen of the Irish Times.
During the recital I kept thinking who was I doing this for? Selma never was a big fan of classical Iraqi music; every time I tried to listen to CD's she would say "Not now, it is out of context". Her idea of moving music was of course French Baroque, though of course with plenty of Bach Handel Mozart and every other composer of vocal music. AFter the ceremony we served dinner to all attendees and singers. Al-Saadi was chatting with me about how this ceremony has disappeared from Baghdadi society. He also mentioned that we should think of this particular ceremony as an effort to restore this tradition. The minute I heard that I felt that I did something for Selma actually, it was indeed a restoration and I am certain she would have liked it.

Selma in the Temple of the Queen of Sheba

2010-11-05T16:09:00.006-04:00

Lynn Davis sent me a beautiful photograph she had taken of Selma on a trip to Yemen. It was taken in the Temple of the Moon in Ma'arib.
Here is her photograph of the Temple on the same day.

Selma's Obituaries

2010-10-15T09:45:00.012-04:00

I will add them as they come along
The New York Times
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat
The Daily Telegraph
The Boston Globe
Al-Itihad
Illume
The Edmonton Journal
The National of Abu Dhabi
Al-Hayat
Arab News Blog
ICCROM
Yemen Observer
Humanities and Social Sciences Online
Archnet.org

Funeral Blues

2010-10-13T15:03:00.003-04:00

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden
(with apologies for changing the gender)

Selma's Funeral

2010-10-10T14:03:00.006-04:00

Selma, perhaps jokingly always used to tell me to bury her with her jewelry like an ancient Mesopotamian Queen . We took her body to the ritual Muslim washing place and her friends helped to wash her and as she was being wrapped in her shroud they slipped several silver rings next to her fingers and a few bracelets and a necklace in the appropriate places. The body was then covered with rose petals and a lot of Basil, which apparently is a Yemeni custom. The body was then taken to the Mosque, supposedly a "liberal" one where our infidel friends could attend the services. During the prayers men and women were separated and the women could not see the men. During the prayers there was a sudden eruption of giggles and the children chattering and when I turned around and saw a large group of young boys perhaps 7 or 8 yrs old who just could not be controlled by their proctor; they were constantly picking on each other. Apparently in the womens' section a similar class of young girls were also there. Among the boys a couple of girls were smuggled in and among the girls one boy was there with his "girl friend". I know that Selma would have loved the sight of the confusion among the boys brought there presumably to learn how to pray but were constantly tickling each other or pulling off their neighbor's socks.
We then went to the Green-Wood cemetery a beautiful park in Brooklyn that is a National Historic Landmark. The plot was beautifully situated under an great Elm tree and is the only one available that was at the top of a hill and was really sunny. We had to open the casket and put Selma on her right side (so she could face Mecca), I am so happy that I was able to touch her again. Finally it was over.
We then went to a Yemeni Restaurant called Bab Al-Yemen with waiters "in drag" wearing futas and nice head dresses. The food was excellent and amazingly we discovered that every Yemeni who worked in the Restaurant was from Rada'a. The cook as a child used to pray at the Amiriya with his cousins who were working on the restoration project. Selma coud not have asked for a better coincidence.

Selma Al-Radi 1939-2010

2010-10-09T10:11:00.004-04:00

Selma al-Radi, archaeologist and restorer of historical monuments, was a citizen of the world. She was born in Baghdad but lived part of her young life in Iran and India as a member of a diplomatic family, and attended schools there and in Egypt and Beirut. Her late father, Muhammad Selim al-Radi was one of the first Iraqis to obtain a doctorate, from UCLA, with training in agriculture and irrigation engineering. Her mother, Su’ad Abbas, was educated in Beirut. Both these remarkable parents encouraged their children to seek education, and Selma was among the first two Iraqi women to go abroad for training in archaeology, receiving a BA from Cambridge in England, an MA in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, using material from an excavation in Cyprus.
Upon her return to Baghdad from her BA training in the mid-1960s, she had a major role in the setting up of exhibitions in the newly finished building that was the greatly expanded Iraq Museum. She was the first woman to serve as an official government representative to a foreign excavation (Nimrud) in Iraq. She also worked at the sites of Abu Salabikh and Nippur in Iraq. During the 1970s, she taught for several years at the American University of Beirut. While there, she led an expedition to the Tabqa Dam salvage area in Syria.
Upon completion of her doctorate in 1977, she was hired as a special advisor to the Yemeni General Organization for Antiquities and Museums, initially tasked to reinstall the exhibits of the National Museum. She was to remain in Yemen for 28 years, reinstalling the museum in a much larger building and taking part in excavations and gradually being asked to help restore standing monuments. With Yemeni, Dutch, and other foreign funds she took on the task of restoring the ‘Amiriya, a remarkable building in the town of Rada’, about a hundred miles southeast of Sana’a. She was attracted to the building because it reminded her of architecture in Lodi, India, where she lived as a girl. Wanting to avoid the kind of damaging “restoration” that occurs in many countries when builders use cement, iron, and other inauthentic materials, she found a veteran master builder, who knew the traditional materials and methods that had been used to build the structure in 1600 AD and which were still being used in most of Yemen. With him, she trained a cadre of local men who have become the recognized experts in restoration in the region. Her work on this building won her the Aga Khan Award (2006). She authored two books on the building, demonstrating the Indian connection of the architecture and especially the painted decoration. She served on the Aga Khan committee to evaluate restoration of Islamic monuments in several countries, including the town and especially the bridge of Mostar in Bosnia (subsequently destroyed) and the historic center of Bukhara (Uzbekistan). She was also an advisor to the Prince Claus Fund in Holland and a member of the Board of the Getty Conservation Institute.

She was instrumental in helping to establish the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in 1978, which continually benefited from her advice and participation.

As a resident of New York since 1988 she was a frequent lecturer and media figure, addressing her work in Yemen and the crisis for archaeology and culture as a result of the Gulf War, Sanctions, and the 2003 War. After the 1991 war, she was among the first to go to the Iraq Museum, where she worked with the staff to prepare a list of more than 5,000 objects looted from eleven regional museums.
In early May, 2003, she was again among the first archaeologists to reach the Iraq Museum in order to assess the damage and looting that had occurred there.

She is survived by her husband, Qais Al-Awqati, Professor of Medicine and Physiology at Columbia, her son Rakan (Kiko/Zak) Zahawi , Director of the Las Cruces biological research station in southern Costa Rica, her mother Su’ad Abbas, of Baghdad and Beirut, and her brother Abbad Al-Radi, architect and planner of Abu Dhabi. Her sister, the artist and author (Baghdad Dairies) Nuha al-Radi, died in Beirut in 2004.

Memorials

2010-07-21T15:12:00.001-04:00

Attending memorial services for colleagues and friends is the price one pays for getting older and remaining ambulatory. Despite the fact that I have been to many such memorials and all of them were (by definition) for people that I felt strongly about I have rarely left these memorials without feeling disappointed about the quality and atmosphere of these events. In part I felt that most of the speakers rarely spoke of the deceased in an “active” manner. The speeches were mostly about the speaker and his relationship to the memorialized, always something of a letdown especially when one knows both the speaker and the spoken of. Rarely someone spoke so directly about the character and special idiosyncrasy of the person that the audience were jolted into that special recognition which makes memorials when they work such a wonderful experience.
The memorial I remember most was held more than 40 years ago at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a memorial for a Professor of Pediatrics who I had never met. While taking the elevator to my laboratory in the Blalock Building I often ran into Dr Helen Taussig, a giant of congenital heart disease and I think that she was then the Chair of the Department. We never talked to each other before but because our hours seemed to be similar we ran into each other often in the elevator, and more significantly in concerts in Baltimore. I being then an Infectious Disease Fellow and certainly knew of her, I doubt that she knew my name since she never asked and we never wore security badges then. Anyway one day in the elevator she told me to come to the memorial that she was hosting for a Professor of Pediatrics who had died a few months before. I went to the main auditorium there to find a full house, a sea of white coats really but the strange thing was that in the “pit” of the auditorium near the lectern was a grand piano. Dr Taussig then spoke; she never gave his curriculum vitae and only talked about the Professors love of music and how it has been his inspiration and consolation his entire career. He apparently was a singer himself and often sang for himself and for his friends as well. She then said after a few minutes of this that she wants to give an idea of what actually he was and what he liked by asking Hermann Prey, then a young baritone who was making his reputation as the baritone that will be replacing Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the greatest lieder singer in the world. Hermann Prey walked out resolutely and said that he will be singing Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe and asked the audience not clap during or after . At the end, he walked out of the room with everybody standing and then quickly came back to sing Schubert’s An die Musik.

BP and me

2010-05-17T11:20:00.004-04:00

BP is much in the news these days and its initials of course hide its real history. Formerly British Petroleum, it was in the heyday of the British Empire an arm of British imperialism where whenever it got into trouble the warships sailed to protect its interest. Its history in the Middle East was nefarious both in Iran and Iraq, I guess the oldest oil producing countries in the early 20th century. When I was growing up in Baghdad all of the gas stations were owned by BP and they were either the owners or major stockholders of the Iraq Petroleum Company. Everywhere one went in Baghdad we saw their logo, a shield with BP on it; the colors then as now were yellow and green but not like the new eco-friendly one. This is a long introduction to my short story. When I was ten years old my parents enrolled me in an American high school run by Jesuits from Boston. I lived very close to the school and so met often the Jesuit fathers who loved to chat up the boys and walk around in our lovely neighborhood full of date palm orchards and every house having a garden full of orange or lemon trees. Anyway my English was rudimentary but it did not stop me from talking to them and chattering away in the manner of 10 yr old show-offs. So one day one of the Fathers was asking me as we were walking on the banks of the river where I lived and I said very close. There was a gas station a block away. So I tried to come up with the word for gas station (benzene in colloquial Baghdadi) and couldn’t come up with it. So knowing what BP stood for, I said, “you know, on the street around the corner from where they sold British Petroleum”. There was a sudden silence and a worried look on my interlocutor’s face. I never understood what happened until much later on. My father had been released from jail (politics not stealing hubcaps, I should add) and everyone knew that he was in jail. So when I told this to my father he burst out laughing and gave me I guess my first lesson in political speech. Of course, that is where they sold british petroleum! Except I was then unaware of that

A very moving poem

2010-05-15T16:53:00.000-04:00

Meditation at Lagunitas

by Robert Hass
Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas” from Praise. Copyright © 1979 by Robert Hass. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Nessun dorma or My Night in the hospital

2009-12-24T08:40:00.007-05:00

When the BBC used a recording of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma as its theme song of the 1990 FIFA world cup in Italy this aria once only known to the opera cognoscenti suddenly became a pop hit. Now you often hear it in elevators; the ultimate sign of fame, I guess. What brought this aria to mind is that it ought to be the theme song not for football matches but rather for poor patients and their relatives who spend any night in a hospital. In Puccini's Turandot the prince Calaf is singinging that No one is sleeping. These words are made for insomniacs of course. In the hospital nessun’ in fact can dorma at all! Is this just the great Columbia Presbyterian Hospital? Probably not. Unfortunately hospitals are not a place for rest and certainly not for sleep especially if you are not sick yourself. We have to remember that it is difficult to check on patients without waking them up.
Here is my log of major interruptions of attempted sleep over a 12 hour period during yesterday’s stay in the hospital after S had an operation. There is also a machine that pumps air around her legs every two minutes so there is a continuous obligato of whoosh sounds twice a minute as the air comes in or out of the "socks" encasing her legs. In addition there is another whoosh of the air coming from the mattress as the high tech hospital bed as it adjusts to the weight of the patient when she moves a little it. All these sounds are of low decibel count but they are there and noticeable. The only thing that saved my sanity is that WKCR the Columbia radio station had already started its 24 hr Bachfest so I turned my laptop on for it and floated on Bach's sublime music.

7:00 PM The evening Nurse comes, introduces herself and checks the vital signs, everything is a bit higher than normal; temperature pulse and blood pressure, but otherwise OK
7:15 Blood transfusion is finished, the Nurse removes bag.
7:20 Toradol bag inserted into IV; better for pain than opiates, but maybe not so good for the kidneys, but I let it go
7:30 J arrives dressed in a white coat with a bottle of beer smuggled in a plastic bag; why plastic I ask since tradition dictates a brown paper bag; No he says “I put a bit of snow in it?; j, of course has always had standards. There was a snowstorm a few days ago and the ground is still covered in the white stuff.
8:24 Loudspeaker in the room calls very loudly for a Nurse with a garbled name to go to the station.
8:25 I try to turn off loudspeaker but it is not possible, I call the nurse and she says that it is not possible to interrupt these loudspeakers; the other patients always complain she says by way of consolation
8:37 New shift nurse comes to replace IV bottle
9:38 Nurse comes in to check on how we are doing; checks dressing; check vital signs, No difference from before but temperature is a bit lower
10:40 Nurse comes in to check to see if she is asleep
12:41 Nurse comes to check vital signs, temperature and blood pressure lower but pulse is still high
12:58 Blood drawing technician here to draw blood
2 50 Nurse comes to empty urine bag
5 14 IV pump beeps continuously: the bag needs change; luckily the beeping can be stopped without doing any harm
5: 20 vital signs taken temperature and blood pressure normal but the pulse rate is still high. The nurse says that the platelet count is very low and she has already alerted the doctor on call. She says maybe they will order a platelet transfusion. I say let us wait for the morning until the senior doctors come in.
5:41 IV bag changed
6 00 Bed bath and I leave the room and go out for a little walk in the corridor
6:30 S asleep looking pretty pink after three blood transfusions.

The Five Stages of the Response to Peer Review

2009-12-11T21:44:00.006-05:00

No scientist is immune to the trials of reading reviews of one's papers by our supposed peers. The response to these anonymous reviews usually follow a stereotyped path identical to that identified by Kubler-Ross in Death and Dying; there is:
1.Denial (the idiots dont know what they are talking about)
2. Anger (Rage is more like it)
3. Bargaining (let us try to do as few of the requested experiments as needed)
4. Depression (I am never sending a paper to these clowns again)
and finally
5. Acceptance (let us send it to another (lesser) journal.
The following YouTube excerpt is merely a representative sample of how all of us feel; note the emphasis on the "third reviewer"; there is ALWAYS a third reviewer who completely punctures one's self importance. So I hope you listen to the response of Herr Geheimrat Professor who has just received the reviews and he is NOT pleased!

A scientist reports on Mozart

2009-11-16T11:50:00.006-05:00

Mozart as a child was known to one and all as a genius and eyewitness reports are many. But was he a subject for a scientific study? apparently yes ! A Dr Daines Barrington saw him perform and submitted a scientific paper to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society dated November 28 1769. Here is a facsimile of the pages where he is described as a "very remarkable young Mufician"..

Q: a poem that appeared on my birthday in the New Yorker

2009-08-26T13:38:00.008-04:00

Q
by
Sharon Olds

Q belonged to Q.&A.,
to questions, and to foursomes, and fractions,
it belonged to the Queen, to Quakers, to quintets—
within its compound in the dictionary dwelt
the quill pig, and quince beetle,
and quetzal, and quail. Quailing was part of Q’s
quiddity—the Q quaked
and quivered, it quarrelled and quashed. No one was
quite sure where it had come from, but it had
travelled with the K, they were the two voiceless
velar Semitic consonants, they went
back to the desert, to caph and koph.
And K has done a lot better—
29 pages in Webster’s Third
to Q’s 13. And though Q has much
to be proud of, from Q.& I. detector
through quinoa, sometimes these days the letter
looks like what medical students called the
Q face—its tongue lolling out.
And sometimes when you pass a folded
newspaper you can hear from within it
a keening, from all the Q’s who are being
set in type, warboarded,
made to tell and tell of the quick and the
Iraq dead.

Le Poisson Rouge

2009-06-05T12:04:00.004-04:00

The hottest music venue in NYC is Le Poisson Rouge according to all music critics. But being hot cool and trendy, all their concerts start at 9 or 10 so somewhat difficult to go to. Located in former Village Gate (the coolest music venue of a different era) on Bleecker and Thompson Sts in the Village you enter into a black space (it is downtown so black is mandatory) with a large fish tank and a few Poissons Rouges (really orange). Downstairs is a bar and then you go to the concert hall a cabaret type of place. Last week we went to Opera Trash, a delightful set of mezzo soprano arias whether you call Carmen and others really trashy is a matter for discussion. The conductor Justin Bischof conducting (wait for this) the Canadian Opera Orchestra of New York. Everything was delightful, the food was too salty and more like a tapas bar than anything but the atmosphere was perfect. I hae not had such fun at a classical concert in ages.

I Heart Mahler

2009-05-08T19:24:00.006-04:00

On Wednesday Mahler fever swept New York; the numbers of the stricken far exceeded that of swine flu [now termed in kosher manner A(H1N1)]. To judge by the number of scalpers at the door of Carnegie Hall on Wednesday the 6th, this was a truly febrile ticket. Daniel Barenboim, as usual conducted everything from memory. His rendition of the 1st Symphony was dynamic and impetuous. By the time he came to the long drawn crescendo at the end everyone in the audience was ready to jump out of their seats in a tremendous applause. The critics of the Times were thrilled if somewhat apologetic about how their view could be read as quibbling with minor details when the overall conception was so overwhelming.
Mahler, a former New Yorker and director of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic has long been a pet favorite of the denizens of Gotham. But to my knowledge all of the major symphonic works had never been done together by the same orchestra with only two conductors. It should be a glorious couple of weeks. No wonder the Carnegie Hall people were selling buttons with I heart Mahler on them. Injecting a small pedantic note here, of course Mahler had rheumatic heart disease which is what killed him in his early fifties.
We need a portfolio of his photographs, Mahler was certainly the most photogenic composer and the program went to town using several of them.

Robot Scientists, the real not metaphoric kind

2009-04-10T16:18:00.004-04:00

As if it is not enough to have Dr Strangelove as a fictional character to give scientists a bad reputation, now it turns out that some scientists have designed and made a robot which they; what else Adam! This robot was able to design experiments in metabolism in yeast, conduct the experiments, trouble shoot the study and find a new result!
Basically what the robot did was first to analyze all the genes of Baker's Yeast (the best studied single cell eukaryote) and identify genes that look like enzymes (by searching the database and finding homologies to other enzymes). The robot then designed experiments to test the function of these new putative enzymes (called orphan enzymes because they are of unknown function). The authors then repeated some of the experiments by purifying the proteins and doing the same assays and came up with the same conclusion. One of the orphan enzymes they tested was actually new.
So is that it for us?

The Ideal Gas Law at the Inauguration

2009-01-26T21:38:00.007-05:00

Lost among the excitement of the Obama inauguration was a little story that is amusing. Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman et al played a nice if corny quartet composed for the occasion by movie score composer John Williams. Well, you all know how cold it was that morning, so as anybody who has played any musical instrument can tell you the sound is highly affected by temperature; not surprising when you think that the oscillation waves that make sound are simply a reflection of a special case of the Ideal Gas Law in which Temperature (T) plays a major role [PV=nRT]. So how could they play and sound so beautifully in tune? Well it turned out that they were not playing at all or barely. and said that thy played along in a make-believe way, they used soap on their bows to reduce the volume of sound produced; the pianist changed the action so no sound came out and only the clarinetist made some sounds and the gorgeous sound was pre-recorded! The piece received its official world premiere in Pittsburgh a few days later.
So why am I talking about it? It did not produce any negative reporting in the press either here or abroad (without any exhaustive checking on my part). Everybody thought that well, that is what we expect from the temperature apparently even the US Marine Band was prepared with a recording. Is this equivalent to lip synching? Or Karaoke? Compare this with the frenzied reporting on the lip synching occasion at the Chinese Olympics where if you put this in Google you get more than 130,000 pages. I know that this is somewhat different, the same people who played the quartet on stage were the ones who recorded it the day before unlike the Chinese girl who was simply lip synching.

Dressed to Kill? The end of the White Coat

2008-10-28T11:56:00.012-04:00

On a recent visit to the UK a local physician told me that the National Health Service has banned the use of ties (and other unnecessary items of clothing) by doctors. But a reading of the actual NHS directive was fuzzier ; they asserted that they wanted to ban the long sleeves as part of the battle against MRSA and C. dificile although also stating that there is no evidence that white coats carry transmit the bacteria. Amusingly the title of the report implies that it is evidence-based though worded in a somewhat coy manner. However all newspapers trumpeted the story that it was the white coat that was to be jettisoned. What next? Ban the stethoscope? In 1992 we started at Columbia a widely copied ceremony where entering medical students are given a White Coat in the presence of their professors and often their parents, followed by lectures ostensibly to inculcate in them the humanistic aspects of medicine. But you don’t have to be an anthropologist to recognize that investing (literally) them with a white coat is an induction ritual into a guild. Uniforms have always been a way of separating Us from Them and have a long history going at least as far back as 2550 BC when the celebrated Stele of the Vultures (now in the Louvre) shows a platoon of soldiers wearing identical helmets and other items of dress. In this victory Stele the foot soldiers are shown marching on the back of their defeated enemies who are shown naked. Thus clothes had been used as an instrument of power and differentiation.
White coats like all uniforms have a kind of aura about them that is somewhat different from that of a military uniform. I remember when I first came to America I and what seemed like all doctors in Baltimore used to religiously attend Medical Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins Hospital. This was truly a grand affair, the audience first came early and no one sat in the first two or three rows of the very large auditorium. A few minutes before the hour, in trooped the Osler Medical House staff dressed in crisp white short jackets, followed by the Chief Resident and the Chief of Medicine dressed in long white coats and all sat in what appeared to be pre-designated seats. It was a thrilling sight full of pomp and circumstance and gave a sense of occasion magnified by the fact that it was held on Saturday mornings when the audience were in “civilian” clothing. Was I the only one who expected these white-clad celebrants to suddenly break out into the ecstatic chorus that closes the first act of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute where the Priests sing: Then is the Earth a heavenly kingdom And mortals immediately are Gods.
Like all uniforms, military or otherwise, white coats have both a functional and symbolic roles. The need to protect the doctor’s clothing and to prevent transmission of infectious particles to patients is obvious and emphasized by the white color. Because of its similarity to a lab coat the white coat also invests the doctor with the power of science giving them the aura of having precise and verifiable knowledge. The move to a hospital based practice in the 19th century with its possibility of having laboratories cemented this conjunction allowing doctors to assume the powerful and authoritative role of scientific healers . With the beginnings of the germ theory and the discovery of the importance of hand washing by Semmelweiss and the use of disinfectants the idea of protection from the spread of germs must have been the driving force for wearing protective garb.The chronology of the development of the white coat is dramatically illustrated in two paintings by Thomas Eakins of Philadelphia. He painted Dr Gross performing surgery at the Jefferson Medical College in his frock coat in 1875. Fourteen years later, he painted Dr Agnew performing a dissection in front of the class of the University of Pennsylvania, this time the doctor and his assistants were wearing crisp white coats. In between these dates Pasteur had discovered that anaerobic fermentation could be due to bacteria and Lister published his first paper on the need for sterility in surgery.The contrast in these paintings is an advertisement for this new view; Dr Gross is pictured in a gloomy and dark amphitheater while Dr Agnew is bathed in light.
It is sad that white coats as an emblem of cleanliness is the one that is being challenged. The NHS says that white uniforms can kill by spreading MRSA and the long sleeves are the biggest culprits; but the evidence is really non-existent. While it has been possible to culture Staphylococcus aureus from about 10% of white coats of hospital doctors, disease transmission has never been tested let alone shown. Of course it has always been known that uniforms can kill although most of the evidence is that they are fatal to the wearer. Most of the defeats of Napoleon, the man most obsessed with uniforms (there is even an Encyclopedia of his uniforms) could be ascribed to uniforms. When he invaded Egypt in the height of summer, his woolen uniforms caused massive numbers of deaths from heat exhaustion and dehydration. During the retreat from Moscow, when these heavy woolens should have been protective, they turned out to harbor all sorts of disease carrying parasites. Recent studies on exhumed corpses and uniforms of his Grande Armée showed that the uniforms contained lice which harbored DNA of Bartonella quintana the agent of trench fever. Lice (which also transmit typhus) were found in as many as one third of these uniforms . Despite the anecdotal nature of the evidence the Minister of Health in the UK already formulated a “Naked below the elbow” policy which means that white coats as we know them will no longer exist but since uniforms will still have to be worn for both the practical and symbolic reasons new designs will have to be generated.
So does this mean that we will have to wear OR type scrubs? That might work for surgeons or house staff but, for the attending staff new “real” uniforms will have to be designed. This should come as great news for the fashion-conscious; I can’t wait to get my first Giorgio Armani white coat. Apparently the more fashionable doctors on Park Avenue are already getting their white coats from a chic supplier in Paris where it seems that having Nehru collars and a more flattering silhouette is the latest thing . The fashion industry has always been interested in the aura of the white coat though to them, one feels it signified more the aura of the mad scientist that the beneficent healer. One Paris couturier actually began his show this year with a single girl in a white coat. But a more “serious” fashionista such as Valerie Steele, of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, has already argued darkly (although it is difficult to decipher fashionspeak) that the white coat provides "a combination of the minimal and the medical, with a sort of creepy sadomasochistic edge to it, and it plays into our fears about technology and biotechnology. You are choosing to look as though you are the one who has the power over life and death" . Without the poor white coat to kick around a deep hole in the culture is opening.
Although I think we should all be prepared to dress in new garb, we still have to be concerned about the patient’s feeling about all of this? Unfortunately it seems that patients prefer to see their doctors in white coats . Detailed questionnaires suggest that a patient’s trust in physicians required at least two of the following items; white coat, dress pants, dress shirts or tie. But all confidence would dissipate if a nose ring was worn; (I am not making this up!) The older the patient the more they want a white coat but teenagers had no real preference for a specific type of dress. I am sure that if we throw away the white coat we will have to replace it by another uniform since the authority of the profession needs to be maintained. Regardless of the priestly garb issue, we have to wear something that would make it easier for patients to tell who the doctors are, let alone manage the infection control issues.

Mark Sykes and Influenza Research: Will he have as bad an influence on Science as on politics?

2008-10-05T15:35:00.007-04:00

There is an amusing incident where recent Middle East history intersects with modern scientific research. During the last days of the Ottomon Empire, The French and British surreptitiously decided to divide up the middle east into zones under their own influence. Two diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes a young protege of Lord Kitchener and "scholar" of the region and Francois Georges Picot decided to grant Iraq and what is now Jordan and Palestine to the Brits while France took Syria and Lebanon. The original Sykes-Picot map was later modified to include Mosul given to France will now go to the Brits as well.
During the 1919 peace conference in Paris, Mark Sykes became ill and quickly died from the "Spanish Influenza" the deadly pandmic then in its late stages. But no infected person was then allowed to be transferred to its country of origin. But the family of Mark Sykes wealthy Yorkshire aristocrats had his remains encased in a hermetically sealed lead lined coffin and transferred to the chapel on their ancestral grounds. The remains were exhumed two weeks ago to serve the cause of scientific research.
The 1918 flu pandemic was caused by a highly mutable virus called H1N1 which is realted to the new deadly H5N1the cause of avian flu the cause of much fear and trepidation in public health circles. Scientists have already sequenced the 1918 virus using exhumed remains of people dying in the arctic and preserved in the permafrost. A virologist wanted to sequence the virus again using remains from epople who died in the late phases of the disease. The idea of a a corpse buried in a hermetically sealed lead coffin was very attractive since presumably the tissues will be rapidly depleted of oxygen causing cessation of deterioration. The family gave permission but not before much jingoistic rhetoric about how SIr Mark put his mark on the wrld of today and how now he will continue to put his mark on modern science. No mention of course that the whole Sykes-Picot agreement not to mention the Balfour Decalation in which Sykes was an early promoter has caused a whole region to smoulder and go up in flames periodcally.
Regardless, it took three years to tackle the bureaucracy. Once the coffin was uncovered a crack was seen in the lead, meaning that the corpse had deteriorated after 90+ years of burial. Still apparently samples were taken to see if any viral DNA could recovered.

Stop Making sense!

2008-09-02T15:21:00.002-04:00

How many times have you been speaking at rounds or seminars and after going through a complex argument about a convoluted process requiring what you think is some attentiveness when the questioner would answer you with what you know to be a fake look of understanding, yes it makes sense! The correct response should have been Wow! Who would have thought? It doesn’t make sense at all!
Making sense seems to me to be the most trivial attribute of any scientific or medical issue. What is the point of research? Surely it is not finding something that merely makes sense? To make sense, all one has to do is to rely on “conventional wisdom” which is simply the product of our accumulated knowledge. We acquire knowledge throughout our life by experiencing the world, and seeing how it looks, hearing how it sounds and so on. Philosophers have always worried about the problem of intellection, i.e. how we experience and know the world and ourselves in it. These ideas were formalized by Ibn Sina (Avicenna in the West) who states that there are four types of internal thinking (the soul in his terminology) two of which are relevant to this discussion; common sense and imaginative thinking. Common sense was seen to be the mechanism of generating an object of knowledge by fusing the information obtained from our senses. Imaginative thinking on the other hand combines a variety of images stored in our memory and fuses them to form a new image.
While common sense is useful for ordinary interaction among people, it is of little use in finding out new things. In scientific research, common sense often leads to trivial insights. This is due to at least two factors. The first is that our sensory input is severely limited. For example, we only see or hear a mere fraction of the wavelengths that are possible hence our knowledge of the other types of radiant energy is beyond our experience. On the other hand, we do possess a reasonable sense of temperature and pressure since these could be felt directly by our senses. We find it easier to understand the science of these phenomena that are dominated by our sensory perception; the classical theory of color, elementary aspects of energy balance (that is the relationships of temperature and pressure). It helps that many of these phenomena can be described in qualitative prose. Once one enters into a quantitative analysis, the glazed look becomes the natural response.
The second reason for our limited scientific intuition is that our experience of life is dominated by our size. Because of that we experience the world around us with a unique sense of what is large and small, a sense that is likely to be very different from that of flies or whales. Our experience thus is dominated by gravity but we have no firsthand knowledge of surface tension for instance; were we an insect that lives on the surface of water our notion of classical mechanics would be incredibly different. Hence one can easily assert that evolution of mankind was dominated by our need for survival within these dimensions. Thus our brain (the product of this evolution) can only interpret the world within these limitations, limitations that are not conducive to coming up with general insights into the laws of nature which require understanding of atoms and universes.
It is clear that mankind acquired knowledge by observation and cultural transmission and thus developed an intuition based on personal experience that allows us to make deductions from the observable facts that can be verified by our experience. These conclusions appear to be “naturally” correct because they fit with our “instinctive” understanding of science and problem solving. Ancient physicists eventually codified this knowledge and this is probably part of the reason that Greeks, in particular Aristotle are held in such high regard, their conclusions sound so “natural” that they must be correct. We of course, now know better; as always in science we have to guard against having beauty substitute for truth.
Of course the reality of science is completely different and even counter-intuitive. We have difficulties understanding the big and the small; the universe and subatomic particles. Even classical mechanics is not easy to grasp; how could Newton’s Laws of Motion be intuitive when our experience with throwing a ball tells us that uniformly they fall to the ground. On the basis of our senses alone we cannot believe what solid state physics tells us that a hard rock is a crystal of atoms and that most of the volume in that rock is actually a void. Try telling that to the man who is hit by a stone. We cannot see that the universe is expanding. The list is interminable. One or two examples will suffice. Is there any sense behind why proteins are made only of L-amino acids but carbohydrates are composed only of D- sugars? These stereo-isomers are identical in any chemical function you can think of except that their use in biology is strictly determined by one or the other isomer. From our own field, we know that the congenital absence of one kidney is a common occurrence; how could this happen? We know that we have two identical kidneys and their development is occurs simultaneously, unlike the heart and some other organs the kidneys are bilaterally symmetrical.
Despite all of these problems we can learn to think about the invisible, the immaterial and the counterintuitive. It is here that learning resembles most the type of Imaginative Thinking of Ibn Sina. We learn to develop new intuitions that are far from those obtained by common sense. We can easily learn about friction in the observable universe such that it becomes “second nature” to us. Or we can learn to recognize the importance of surface tension during cooking. Each of us can learn to discuss transport of molecules across membranes, yet we actually have no conception of Brownian motion ourselves, we are just too heavy to “feel” it. Some subjects remain almost impenetrable; the two pillars of modern science quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics rarely if ever become second nature to most people. This suggests that there is a hierarchy of difficulties that we must overcome before we can be comfortable in a statistical or quantum world. The closer subject is to our perceptual abilities and to our scale the easier it is, and the more quantitative the basis of the phenomenon the more difficult it becomes.
This hierarchy is not difficult to discern we notice it when we teach students; the function of the heart and the cardiovascular system is relatively easy to understand and teach. The action of the heart as a pump is readily quantifiable, but understanding its most clinically significant functions needs no equations. Compare that with the kidney, an organ whose study was (and is) dominated by transport physiology, a subfield actually of physical chemistry. When we get to modern biological science with its emphasis on molecules, pathways and other things that are not within our immediate sensory understanding our intuition gets completely befuddled. Hence, one can categorically state that new discoveries in this area will never be in the purview of common sense. The corollary that if it makes sense the conclusion is probably wrong although you might think this is arguable; it is more often the case than not the case.
While it is possible that this analysis is an idiosyncrasy of mine, I think we all share it; I bring as evidence the letters that we all write in support of granting awards, prizes and promotions of colleagues where we need to describe their work in a positive light. Those letters are always full of adjectival phrases of the form; she had this unexpected finding or he made the surprising observation… and so on. No one recommends somebody by saying that they discovered something that made sense, in other words it could be predicted because it made sense. We end by agreeing with JBS Haldane who said that the Universe is not only “queerer than we can suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose” .

How to turn Wine into Water: An editor's perspective

2008-06-18T11:41:00.004-04:00

The process of editing manuscript invariably attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. The problem is that sometimes personal animosity can get the best of one. So how do you "destroy" something that is really good? Here one has to turn to that great master Honore de Balzac. In Lost Illusions Lousteau advises his young friend Lucien to:

“You must turn its beauties into faults…
In the first place, you begin by saying that you consider the book a fine piece of work, and you can amuse yourself by writing what you really think about it. The reader will think to himself, ‘This critic is not jealous, he must be impartial.’ …
Here you digress, for the benefit of the bourgeois reader, into a eulogy of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. You go on to explain that the French language is ruthlessly exacting and prove that it is like a varnish spread over thought. You let fall a few axioms like, ‘a great writer in France is always a great man, for he is held within bounds by a language that compels him to think; this is not so in other countries’—and so on …
Once on that ground, you can put in a brief summary, for the benefit of the ignorant, of the principles of our men of genius during the last century, and call their works the ‘literature of ideas.’ Armed with that phrase, you hurl all the illustrious dead at the heads of living authors. And then you explain that nowadays a new literature is growing up that relies upon dialogue (the easiest of all literary forms) and descriptions, that dispense with the necessity for thought. You contrast the novels of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact, with the modern novel that consists of nothing but descriptions, so dear to Walter Scott. In such a genre there is scope for invention, but for little else. ‘The novels of Walter Scott are a literary fashion, but not a literary style,’ you will say. You proceed to fulminate against this lamentable fashion, in which ideas are diluted, and beaten thin, a style easily imitated by anyone …
Then you allow the weight of this argument to descend upon Nathan, showing that he is an imitator, who has only an appearance of talent … you proceed to prove that instead of giving us ideas the author has given us events. Action is not life, and pictures are not ideas! Be liberal with phrases like that, and the public will repeat them.
… don’t forget to say in conclusion that you regret that Nathan, a writer from whom contemporary literature may expect great things if he mends his ways, should have fallen into this mistake.”
Lucien was dumbfounded as he listened to Lousteau; as the journalist talked, the scales fell from his eyes, and he realized literary truths that he had not so much as suspected
“But everything that you have just said is full of good sense and perfectly true!” he said.
“If it were not, how could you hope to batter a breach in Nathan’s book?” said Lousteau. “Listen to me, my boy; that is the first type of article that is used for the purpose of demolishing a book—the pick-axe method. But there are plenty of other formulae—you will learn them in time.”

With thanks to Jeremy Denk (see link to the side) for pointing this out

Advertisement as Divertissement

2008-04-16T13:50:00.003-04:00

I guess everybody knows that the advertising industry is the source of more creative art than most of what is on offer in Chelsea galleries. Here is an amusing one for a Dutch company; you don't need to read Dutch to enjoy it. But after you log on, wait for it to start !

THE LOOTING OF THE IRAQ MUSEUM: 5 YRS ON

2008-04-10T19:28:00.003-04:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of the looting of the treasures of the Iraq Museum in Bagdad done under the watchful eyes of a US tank and soldiers. So what? you might say; It pales in comparison to to the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis (the count varies now between 60 and 1 million) an 4 million refugees (2 million internal and two external) all in a country of no more than 25 million, this cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow it still is a cultural disaster of great proportions. But this disaster is now dwarfed by the illegal excavation of tens or even hundreds of sites all over Iraq. Read what Zainab Bahrani an Iraqi-born archaeologist and a Professor at Columbia.

Baghdad: 5 Years of Chaos

2008-04-09T16:00:00.008-04:00

Today, the fifth anniversary of the entry of US troops into Baghdad was greeted by a massive attack by the US and Iraqi police and army on Sadr City causing at least 20 people to die. IS there no end to this bloodshed? The fight between Muqtada Al-Sadr (always described in Homeric epithets, the radical Shi'ite Cleric M A-A). The government overplayed its hand in thinking it could confront him and win in a bloodless manner.
What they continue to forget is that most (?all) members of the government are exiles, some (like the other radical Shi'ite cleric Abdul Azziz Al-Hakim were exiles for more than half of their lives). Exiles do not have constituencies hence they need foreign troops to support their roles. Muqtada had always lived in Iraq and now he is reaping the loyalty that comes from that fact and remarkably is seen by many Iraqis of different groups as a "nationalist" fighting a government imposed from the outside. See the superb article on him by Patrick Cockburn, one of the few journalists with genuine first hand knowledge of the country and a wide network of local friends.
Who is the winner here? Despite the chorus of idiots constantly going on about the surge and how it resolved all violence; Iran of course is the hands down winner. The Badr brigade (Al-Hakim's) militia composed of young Iraqis most of who were born in Iran as exiles and now returned after spending most of their adult lives there. I dont know how much control Iran has over Muqtada but the rest of the government is clearly under their thumb. Witness that after the Basra debacle (our own Tet offensive, as Frank Rich of the New York Times has so clearly said) The Iraqi government had to go to Iran (and to Qum no less, the home of the Ayotallahs there) to beg for intercession.
So is Muqtada an agent of Iran? I doubt it. Iraqis as a stereotype are a prickly lot and have a large sense of entitlement. My prediction is that no Iraqi Ayotallah born and raised in Najaf would feel like playing second violin to an Iranian one. They feel like they are the holders of the flame and everybody else has to come and be a supplicant.

Efficiency and the Thermodynamics of Teaching Medical Students

2008-03-26T16:13:00.006-04:00

I started my second year medicine course and as often the case not everybody showed up the first day; perhaps one half of the students. The second day had only a quarter. It is spring and young men's (and women's) thoughts turn to love rather than to renal pathophysiology. Many of the other class sections had the same "problem". In the past the instructors would come and complain to me about this and get angry about wasting their time on teaching a fewer than the full complement of students; but I remind them that their irritation will only affect the students who are actually attending the class not the ones who are absent. It seems that we are living in the cafeteria age of medical education when students pick and choose what they like to listen to and who they want to hear it from since they have their own underground system of evaluating the instructors which is handed down from one year to another. Over the past decade we have had a kind of statistical analysis of the response of students to their instructors and they vary, but the variation is not as large as I had feared; the difference between the most and least popular is the difference between 7 and 10 out of 10.
But an important issue deals with what our goal is in teaching. Do we want to make everybody an expert in the kidney? To examine this we need to go to basic principles. The Flux of information between teacher and student (like the transport of anything in the observable universe) is proportional to the Gradient. Presumably teachers know more so they can impart more and hence there is an actual gradient of information. But again like the flux of matter or energy, it is not enough to have a gradient to produce a flux; there has to be a permeability term to relate the two together. Permeability here is as they say a "function of State"; so it depends on the teacher (how exciting or interesting they are in presenting the problems) and the student (how interested s/he is in this or any subject). But, we have to discuss another term which is the efficiency of transport of information. Unlike designing engines, efficiency is not my goal! If one can excite or inspire one person with the subject; I would be the happiest person that year. Luckily for me, every year there is one person at least who sounds like he or she wants to really understand what is going on. And that is what keeps my engine going

Learning and Regret (but also Desire)

2008-03-14T09:56:00.006-04:00

I was reading this article in Science magazine on the subway in which the authors who do research in game theory were studying the simple reciprocal interaction between two individuals and testing various models of learning. The study tried to answer the question: Are we influenced by regret when we make a decision in a learning environment; Imagine two people are interacting with each other; when person X has to respond to a step that person Y did, is his behavior determined (or influenced) by the knowledge that a previous step that X did was wrong. In other words does regret play a role in these calculations. So they built a theoretical model and they found that indeed regret played an important role. After I came to this somewhat self-evident conclusion (I am not a game theorist, so somebody must have thought that this was a big deal otherwise it would not have appeared in Science), I lifted my eye and there was in front of me the following poem by Vera Pavlova translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.

If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.

If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.

If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

It seems that Pavlova provided the better answer to the question posed by Marchiori and Warglein without the neural network theory.

The Art of Losing

2008-02-15T14:16:00.005-05:00

Sometimes you run across a poem and it hits you between the eyes; how could the Poet describe your feelings so well in all their particularity which you thought was yours only. Well here is one of those

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Life Created from Scratch ?

2008-01-25T09:08:00.000-05:00

Under the amazing headline of "Scientists take new steps towards man-made life" The NY Times today continues its muddled thinking into what would make man-made life possible. What actually was done? Craig Venter has apparently synthesized a complete genome of Mycoplasma genitalis, a bacteria with the smallest genome known. Using state of the art synthetic methods they were able to construct the whole bacterial chromosome. This is a great technical achievement. But is this really the first step towards creating man-made life? I can understand the excitement if this finding is really was really the first step towards creating life. The media (understandably) have been on this kick for a long time but I think they are somewhat taken in by J. Craig Venter, who despite my belief that he is a great scientist also happens to be the greatest manipulator of the naive media. He has been on feeding the media tidbits of information about this idea of creating life in a test tube before; first with sequencing many Mycoplasma species and then finding that they share only 70% of their genome; therefore he concludes somewhat naively that therefore this 70% of the genome is the minimal genome that would allow life!! Now comes the complete sequence of this sexually transmitted bug with a few deletions here and there and additions of tags for identification purposes.
OK; Why is this not a step towards creating man-made life? The reason is that to create life you need Cells! The Mycoplasma chromosome in order to "create" life has to be inserted into a cell, it cannot live alone, so that ought to destroy the idea of a minimal genome allowing life in the first place. Second, Mycoplasma can only invade eukaryotic cells i.e. cells like ours not other bacteria; hence more complexity is needed. Supposing you have this chromosome invade a generic laboratory cell line; it will then produce more Mycoplasma? have you really created life? or simply had a humble cell substitute for the massive synthetic machines of the J.C. Venter Institute in Rockville Maryland. Where is the step towards life creation? As they say in chemical reactions the rate-limiting step (that is the most difficult step) is the fact that you need a cell first. If Venter can create as he might like to say a "minimal" cell, then I would be ecstatic; but he does not seem to be even aware of this problem.

Bach at WKCR 89.9

2007-12-26T12:09:00.000-05:00

Once again, WKCR 89.9 the Columbia radio station has its Christmas Spectacular of 24 hr Bach festival. This New York musical tradition, long awaited for the whole year by the cognoscenti remains one of the great pleasures of the Holiday season. You will by now need an escape mechanism from the hundreds of Jingle Bells tinkling in your head. Here is the answer. In the past only New Yorkers were fortunate enough to have this festival but thanks to the internet you can log on the WKCR website and enjoy.

The Mental Kitchen

2007-12-19T10:15:00.000-05:00

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden is slowly being published by Princeton University Press and here are two gems from Volume III-Prose

In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen-alcohol, tobacco, benzedrine etc.,- but these mechanisms are very crude; liable to affect the health of the cook and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: Nearly everything has to be done by hand.

Poetry in primitive societies-more static in their structure and more immediately governed by ritual practices- express simple things in a contorted manner; the sentiments are direct, the poetic form is complicated and complex. The poetry of our disintegrated society, which has little respect for ritual, seeks a direct expression of complicated things; the sentiments are subtle and ambiguous, the poetic form is "everyday language".

Mentoring and Mentor

2007-12-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

The world of academia is abuzz with new ideas for mentoring, committees to make it work, assignments of mentors to each young actual or prospective faculty member and so on. I have no problem with any of these efforts; it is a good way of making administrators think that they are addressing serious issues. The problem with mentoring starts with the name. Mentor, you may recall is the friend who Ulysses on his departure to the Trojan War asked to be the guide, care-taker and adviser (in other words mentor) of Ulysses's son, Telemachus. Is this really the right model for us? Let us ignore for the time being that in the archaic Greek period the assignment of an older man to take care of a teenage boy has meanings that are unacceptable to the modern age. Regardless; it turns out that Mentor had no no sexual designs on the younger man since every time he needed to "mentor" him, Athena, the Chaste goddess would appear in the guise of Mentor to tell Telemachus what to do. Hence, mentoring was done by the Goddess who could overcome any obstacle by providing the most improbable means to the desired outcome and more importantly could see into the future and when she did not like what she saw, she prevented it by appropriate divine intervention. So as is often the case with the West's obsessions with its supposed origins in ancient Greece, this idea of Mentor and mentoring is based on a myth buried inside a legend which when you dissect it appears to be exactly what you don't want to happen.

Mentoring is not about predicting the future of a career nor averting disasters; nor is it about guidance or care-taking. Most importantly it is not about giving advice at all. It is about preparing younger individuals to be independent thinkers who can take care of their own careers. As such it is a subset of friendship even though mentor and mentee have different ages and stations in life. Most friendships are not among equals, a counter-intuitive idea but one that is proved by reflection. Each of us may have similarities or common interests with our dearest friends but we are rarely equal. The principle of friendship is simply that we recognize our friends as being worthy of listening to; that each idea or statement or behavioral pattern is a reflection of a personality that has value; they may be profound or outrightly crazy but they describe a personality in its multi-faceted form and the mentor revels in the quirks as well as the central aspects of this personality. When younger individuals see that their opinion is valued, that their comments mean something, that their wrong ideas can be listened to and more importantly that their correct ideas can be challenged such that eventually they are sharpened; it is then that the task of mentoring is accomplished. Like all friendships, it is a two way street, the mentor benefits as much as the mentee. To develop these relationships one needs a common goal which allows for frequent discussions of ideas small and great. The common goal needs to be something concrete, a project that both mentor and mentee are invested in and forms an important part of their life; often an important research project. This will guarantee the frequency of interaction. That is why when a Dean or a chairman assigns mentors in a large organization this is merely a gesture and not a program. It is bound to fail because it lacks the fundamental basis of development of the relationship.

Treaty or No Treaty: When will they ever learn?

2007-11-27T16:37:00.001-05:00

In the '20s the English gave Iraq its "independence" but had their henchmen sign a treaty that was largely secret but included the use of military bases as well as preferential treatment for British Petroleum in extracting and using oil. Well, guess what? The new Iraqi government is doing the same. Although the White House has announced that it is not a treaty but rather a "declaration of principles" whereby the US beside its friends, it includes the same provisions as the older treaty. I guess Bush et al felt that the British did well almost a century ago and that the people they put in power lasted a long time. But then by the time they face the same fate many billions of dollars will have changed hands so who cares; it will just be Iraqis killing Iraqis, already the default diagnosis of the cause of the problems in Iraq given by many Neocons who led us into this.

Do you read the books that you talk about?

2007-11-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

A recently published book has the delightful title of "How to talk about books you have not read" by Pierre Bayard a professor of Literature in Paris. The title is superb, but it seems to me to be a redundant book. All of us who are avid readers of book reviews have been doing this every day! Maybe we need the instruction from Professor Bayard, but I doubt it. But the amusing thing is that the reviews of this book stimulated many responses from readers largely similar to mine. But a few quoted an aphorism that I always use but have attributed to Samuel Johnson which is "One should never read a book one is reviewing because it introduces a prejudice!" This was ascribed to Oscar Wilde in the NY Times book review. Many letter writers answered this review back and ascribed this aphorism neither to Wilde nor to Johnson but to Sydney Smith. The latter being mainly a preacher, we have not had the pleasure of reading a review of his collected sermons. As to Wilde, as recently quoted in another review of Bayard's book he said that one should spend only 6 minutes in reading a book one is reviewing and then use the occasion to talk about oneself.

No Music Day for You?

2007-11-21T12:26:00.000-05:00

November 21st has been declared a No Music Day by Bill Drummond a rock band (KLF) frontman. Amazingly the word is spreading and now BBC Scotland has decided today to join the No Music Day where they will play no music not even jingles on their broadcasts. The choice of the day is interesting; tomorrow November 22nd is St Cecilia's Day, the patron saint of music. So it is like fasting before a feast; you leave your iPod at home and refuse to listen to Jingle Bells, already being played in NY in every store. There have been many direct or indirect supporters. Daniel Barenboim in his Reith Lectures last year commented on the plague of Muzak following us in every elevator and every public space. Is the answer to have a No Music Day? I dont know but the abundance of music certainly has had an effect on all of us; I don't buy that many CD's any more and I rarely listen to the ones I actually have. What about the consoling power of music? Well it come through better after a bit of abstinence; I just listened to An Die Musik (Schubert) and its first stanza says it all:

"Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!

O gracious Art, in how many grey hours
When life's fierce orbit encompassed me,
Hast thou kindled my heart to warm love,
Hast charmed me into a better world!

You can listen to Janet Baker doing this maybe tomorrow on St St Cecilia's Day.

On Mentoring

2007-11-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

I gave a talk at a giant meeting recently during which I acknowledged the role of my mentors and students in my work but before and after there was much discussion with many of my colleagues about the role of mentors in the life of an academic. I came up with the following speculations. We now have many committees established by Deans and Chairmen which aim to establish structures of mentoring among senior and junior people. The problem in my view is that these are bound to fail. For mentoring cannot be mandated nor established from above. The misconception probably started by the choice of the word Mentor. In the Odyssey, Odysseus leaves his son Telemachus in the care of his friend Mentor who was supposed to guide him. But it becomes clear early in the Odyssey that "Mentor" is really Athena who is there to protect Telemachus. Hence even the original idea of Mentor is a myth within a myth; Athena is a goddess and she simply implants in Telemachus's head whatever she wants and prevents the suitors from harming him.
Real mentorship, in my view is a form of friendship. Many friendships exist between people of unequal stations in life; unequal wealth unequal social standing or position, unequal brilliance etc. The principle of friendship is that both sides acknowledge that what each says is valuable and needs to be listened to. This behavior must "come from within" i.e. each of them must actually believe that what the other says is important and in the immortal words of Arthur Miller "Attention must be paid" to it. This also implies that while each will retain the individuality and sense of self when it comes to this plane of interaction they are more equal than is usually assumed in mentor/mentee interaction. Unless there is this mutual ability to listen to and to hear each other it will be impossible to transmit any of the obvious things that mentorship is supposed to be all about; transmission of more advanced scientific thinking skills, the ability to draw appropriate conclusions from the evidence presented, but in my view the most important is the transmission of standards. While this interaction need not have the affection so characteristic of friendship it eventually leads to a kind of empathy that is as close to affection as one would want. When you reflect on these issues you will immediately find that the transmission is a two way street. The senior person can and does learn as much or more from the junior person. That is what true mentorship is all about. And as you can see this relationship cannot be mandated.

Australian Violin delivered by Mercenary in Baghdad

2007-10-29T12:04:00.000-04:00

It is difficult to come up with a story from Baghdad these days that makes you feel good but I just got one. I have a cousin who is a violinist with the Baghdad Philharmonic; Baghdad Philharmonic you say? Yes officially it is called the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra established about 1950 and has been in continuous operation since then. Many of us who grew up there have fond memories of their performances where we first heard this or that great work of music. Several members of my family played in that orchestra and even now one of my cousins is one of the second violinists. Recently however he was attacked by hoodlums and they took his violin and broke it over his head!! The poor guy had no more money to buy anything; last year he was kidnapped and his family had to ransom him giving all their savings plus contributions from family and friends totaling $40,000 to release him. The loss of the violin following the ransom was reported by an Australian newspaper as just yet another typical Baghdad horror story. But an instrument maker in Australia reading the piece and was moved to donate a new violin to him. He contacted the newspaper who told their correspondent in Baghdad. However, my cousin waited and waited and there was no violin "in the mail". Neither the paper nor the violin maker knew of a way to deliver anything to anybody; I could have told them this, everything has to be hand delivered. So the violin maker, obviously a resourceful fellow found out that there are Australians working for one of the security agencies; for all I know he was a Blackwater employee. He gave him the violin and within a few days the violin appeared at my cousin's door who is now "happily" back in the orchestra playing with his colleagues.

Haydn's Creation and Colin Davis

2007-10-24T09:38:00.000-04:00

We arrived on Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall full of anticipation. Haydn's Die Schopfung a masterwork of the classical tradition in the same league as Beethoven's 9th Symphony was going to be performed by a great ensemble led by an awesome conductor. At the first performance, Haydn aged more than 60 and frail was brought in on a chair and sat in the front row and (I think) Beethoven was the conductor. The work was received ecstatically by the sophisticated Viennese audience. The choral work influenced by Handel has all the narrative drama of the oratorio tradition established by Handel and the marvelous text written by an anonymous poet weaves strands from Genesis and Paradise Lost is full of felicitous phrases and sudden turns. Colin Davis and the London Symphony played played the music in a way that emphasized the drama. The opening lines (In the beginning...) were enunciated with a soft confident and intimate manner by a great baritone and as the choir slowly reduced its volume to the famous line (Then God said let there be light and there was light) the explosion in sound loud without losing clarity. It so went from great moment to another. We felt lucky to be there. I kept thinking would it erase the wonderful Karajan sound from one's ear; maybe. The voices here were wonderful Ian Bostridge, Dietrich Henschel and Sally Mathews but no match for Gundula Janowits Dietrich Fischer Dieskau and Fritz Wunderlich. But, hey as they say; this was so close that we need only be grateful for this occasion! We were all at the edge of our seats and only in the intermission could I think of something else, such as how Genesis had even the order of Creation wrong true first there was chaos and then the earth and waters but the whole history of animal and plant development was somehow confused. But then I don't think Haydn was thinking about such earth-bound trivia when he had heavenly ideas in his head.

Who are these people who are pushing for Partition of Iraq?

2007-10-23T16:28:00.000-04:00

Today yet another salvo from Peter Galbraith who from the beginning has been the promoter of Iraq's partition. Here is somebody who does not speak any of the languages; probably has not been there and yet he finds that he has absolutely no problem in declaiming about the future of a country he neither really knows nor one he cares about. The question is why? and what is it to him? Is it a romantic infatuation with Kurdish independence? The history of the Middle East is full of this kind of person. When is this poor region going to be rid of all romantics? First it was the Brits who for a variety of reasons became infatuated with Arabs, for a multitude of reason, many of them had these ideas of the Arab Bedouin as a Noble Savage, although we cannot ignore the sexual freedom many of these Englishmen felt when going far away from their societies, reasons similar to those of pedophiles who now go to Cambodia or Thailand to satisfy their urges. But Galbraith seems to have everybody's ear in the US. He is the son of a famous economist and has worked in the Senate as a staffer which has given him access to all the Senate which now has passed a bill that for all I know he wrote.

Ghosts in the Medical Literature

2007-10-15T13:40:00.000-04:00

There is an amazing article which describes what seems to be common knowledge in certain quarters but nobody I talked to knows about it. There is a large cadre of medical writers who are employed by MECC's (medical education and communication company). They design and write papers for the pharmaceutical industry after clinical trials have been conducted by CRO's (clinical research organizations). The CRO conducts the research but because it is on contract, it does not "own" either the methods or the data. The MECC then shops around for academic authors who then put their name on the papers and then the MECC manages the rest, submission, re-writing the revisions reprints etc. Teh actual writers get no credit in the author list and are not even acknowledged. It has been estimated that as many as 40% of articles of n a new drug are managed by MECC's and are "ghost-authored". Many of the major MECC's are also owned by important medical publishing houses which presumably give access to Editors and Editorial Boards as a consequence of "vertical integration". All MECC's are hired by the Pharmaceutical Industry. These companies (Pharma and MECC) have invented a new discipline with of "strategic publication planning" where everything is planned from beginning of the project to the choice of method to choosing the right authors and the right journals for maximum impact. The remarkable thing is that many of these articles end up in the most prestigious journals and get cited and quoted again and again. Yet close reading always shows that they are positive statements about the function of the drug with much less emphasis on the side effects (when compared to other studies on the same drugs performed by others).
Ghost writers are common, most celebrities don't write books, they hire ghost writers who often though not always are acknowledged. Yet this new development in the medical literature is pretty galling. There is an American Association of Medical Writers and an International Publication Planning Association; both associations and many MECC's are accessible on the web and easy to find, s apparently no secrecy or conspiracy needs to be invoked. How is one to fight these encroachments on the objectivity of the medical literature?

Bad manners on display at Columbia: Bollinger and Ahmedinejad

2007-09-26T08:47:00.000-04:00

Last year The School of International and Public Affairs invited Ahmedinejad to give a talk followed by a student discussion. The morning of the talk Bollinger, the President of Columbia University canceled it stating that he will not allow an anti-Semite and holocaust denier to speak at our University. This year the same thing happened but he allowed it without explaining what had changed in Ahmedinejad's behavior. However he did mouth the usual pablum about freedom of expression, education of students etc all of which were also present last year. On arrival, nobody received Ahmedinejad nor anybody shook his hand or introduced him. Instead Bollinger arrived from the other end of the stage gave a diatribe calling him a variety of names "petty cruel dictator" is the one that seemed to resonate in the media and then left not waiting to hear what the students had to ask; presumably the educational purpose of the visit that he touted. There was a vigorous question and answer with the students. No water was provided on the podium. The stage was covered in a black cloth so that Columbia's name would not be seen behind the speaker. What was the point of the invitation if it was only to insult the guest of the University? Did Bollinger get any credit with the Israel Lobby? Apparently so since the next morning the NY Sun, the voice of the Lobby had a favorable headline but inside the article there was a stinging attack on him by Jewish leaders. What is the lesson to be drawn? Bad manners do not pay? Or is the lesson drawn by Bollinger that of the first Law of Advertising "There is no such things as bad publicity". The sad thing is that what was lost in the scuffle was the absence of any serious discussion about Iran and its role in the Middle East and most importantly, the fate of the (non gay) Iranians under this regime. Serious discussions of these would have clearly benefited the students of SIPA, but as usual for such examples of political theater, the meeting was hijacked by those with a specific agenda, this time the host Bollingerwho should have been above it all. This was allowed to happen because there was no serious moderator of the discussion who could restrict the discussion to important issues one of which is clearly Israel but there were other issues needed to be discussed. Bollinger left after giving his diatribe and the Dean of SIPA just sat there.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture

2007-09-21T14:20:00.000-04:00

Selma, my wife just received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the most prestigious Award in her field. She got that for restoration of the Amiriya Palace and Mosque in Yemen, a project that took more than 25 years to complete.
For many images of the restoration click here. During this restoration Selma was able to re-invent many of the medieval building methods especially of the water-proofing plaster called Qudad. The interior of the mosque is exuberantly painted in a magnificent array of designs, here is one of the domes from the outside. From the inside the small mosque is completely covered in paintings.

Preventive Release of Corruption Report

2007-09-21T13:19:00.000-04:00

The Iraqi government is trying to show that it is not a stooge of the US Administration and hence responded to all the killings by Blackwater by making many noises of kicking the mercenaries out. Within a few days, the US Embassy quietly released an investigative report showing the extent of graft and corruption in every department of the government. This unclassified document was released to or obtained by IraqSlogger.com (see Yahoo New story) is called a document in progress. Within the day the Embassy staff started going out of the Green Zone guarded by Blackwater personnel. The Iraqi Government is obviously no match for the thousand man staff of the US Embassy in these political battles, since they do not yet have their own Karl Rove.

Food for the Gods

2007-09-12T08:46:00.000-04:00

Do you like to eat kidney? If not why not? Here is a little article that I wrote about eating

PARADE OF TRACTORS

2007-08-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

In Granges sur Lot (pop 486) every first Sunday in August there is a fair described usually as vide grenier, i.e.emptying one's attic, literally a garage sale but this year when we walked towards the fair from our house we found more than twenty tractors sitting there abandoned. Since many of the tractors had seen better days we thought that they were also part of grandpa's material heritage that was going to be disposed of. However, a few minutes later there was an older man with a trumpet and suddenly he raised the trumpet to his lips and he came out with a blast of sound and music actually came out with reasonable musical fanfare. At the sound of the trumpet many guys young and old got on the tractors and they started to move around the central square to the great joy of the children who ran after them clapping and shouting to their fathers or uncles or brothers who were driving these tractors. There was also a sign vide maison so we went to the house around the corner, it had a lovely entrance which was likely a carriage house and in that space many pots and pans glasses and plates and all the usual findings of a garage sale. But the table was set with a nice et of dishes and suddenly one noticed a large saad plate full of delicious salad with its dressing strongly aromatic, clearly the maison family was going to sit to their sunday lunch and no amount of commerce was going to disturb that. We took the hint went home and prepared our lunch and waited for our guest flying in from Amsterdam via Bordeaux to arrive for this repast.

Objective Opinions

2007-07-13T10:02:00.000-04:00

The International Herald Tribune had a great article by Richard Bulliet, A professor of History at Columbia which makes for great reading. It is followed in the same issue by another article in which some neocon parroting Bernard Lewis talks about how islamists want to establish a caliphate!! These guys scour the literature and find some idiot who says this and the IHT gives them the space to talk about it as if it is a reality representing a mass movement. That is what objective journalism is about I guess; you give space to some person who knows what he is talking about and then you turn and say who is saying the opposite, regardless of the content the opposing view gets equal space.

Thirst and (bottled) Water everywhere

2007-07-08T09:32:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wondered when did the epidemic (really pandemic) of carrying bottled water begin? or Why? If you are curious, you might be interested in reading my article on the subject.

Medicine and Terrorism

2007-07-05T13:08:00.001-04:00

The news that young doctors or medical students in the UK have been accused of being terrorists should not to be as surprising as it seems. Accompanying this incident there has been much talk about all the sacred task of doctors, the Hippocratic Oath and of "First do no harm". At the same time in other contexts there has been an increasing realization that doctors are merely human beings with the same biases, needs and now psychopathology that characterize the rest of humanity. The media, the general public and their representatives have already demoted the physician to the status of "health care provider". So why would young physicians who already have managed to snag a plum job that could make them citizens of the UK do something like this? Luckily, they were so incompetent they could not produce more than a fire that scorched one of them.
Young people especially in the Third World enter medical school often as a way to enter the middle class rather from a burning desire to "serve the people"; in this of course they are similar to young men and women everywhere including the US. What does a teenager know of the practice of medicine and whether their temperament is compatible with this career choice. Hence most of these choices are simply based on other goals. The best thing about medicine is that it is a career choice that no one can ever question its societal utility, hence young college students with a social conscience and those who simply want a comfortable future can both apply to medical school and find rewarding work. In the third world of course young men go to medical school straight from high school when they are barely post-pubertal! There medical school becomes a way to be educated and discover the world of ideas. It is no wonder that many of the leaders of political parties are doctors who after medical school rarely if ever practiced medicine. Among these politicians are many extremists including Ayman Zawahiri of Al-Qaida notoriety, but he is not alone, there is a long line of people.
Extremism in my view is a habit of mind, some people are extremists regardless of whatever ideology they believe in. After all, a milder form of this is pretty obvious, many politicians start life on the edge of say left wing politics but when they get older they switch to the edge of right wing politics without passing through a centrist phase! Education itself, alas does not guarantee tolerance of diverse political opinion; in fact it probably increases the vehemence of one's ideology since such knowledge (partial one always says) increases one's certitude. Wisdom is what is needed and for that to develop education is necessary (we hope) but not sufficient. Hence, I bet most of the terrorists are found to be schooled and probably college graduates. Of course, education also allows you to see through the propaganda of the other side and to confirm your suspicions that you or your party or country or whatever is being victimized and this will feed your fury and extremism.
So although we have heard little about the background of these young doctors or the other terrorists before them, the example of Al-Zawahiri is there before us every day. Nobody should be surprised that the next terrorists will be engineers doctors nurses or lawyers.

2007-07-05T13:08:00.000-04:00

The news that young doctors or medical students in the UK have been accused of being terrorists should not to be as surprising as it seems. Despite all the hokey talk of the higher plane at which doctors are supposed to operate, the Hippocratic Oath and of "First do no harm" there has been an increasing realization that doctors are human beings with the same biases, needs and now psychopathology that characterize the rest of humanity. This incident at least should provide one more demotion for the status of doctors in the eyes of the general public. Of course the general public or at least their representatives have already demoted the physician to the status of "health care provider".

Hope that your Road is a long one

2007-06-13T16:11:00.000-04:00

A number of students had asked me where I got the title of the long disquisition in the previous post. I got it from Efraim Racker, a great biochemist at Cornell and one of the fathers of the field of oxidative phosphorylation who was a chatty and inspiring mentor. He said that there are two routes to science, the direct one where you reach your goal in the shortest time possible and the scenic route. If you have the choice, he said, take the scenic route, you will learn more and maybe the end is not as valuable as one thought anyway. My favorite poet Cavafy, as usual said it best

ITHAKA Constantine P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find the things like that on your way
as long as you keep thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony.
sensual perfume of every kind-
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

The Scenic Route

2007-06-11T09:13:00.000-04:00

I recently heard that I am to receive the Homer W. Smith Award which is the highest award given to a basic scientists working in the field of kidney research. This has led to many requests of biographical nature regarding how my career developed. All the publications that will be printing these interviews sent me sample pages that past winners have given and the results seem remarkably dry and of the form he did this first followed by the next discovery. Unfortunately that is the standard so, I had to comply. But I want actually to write something that represents a close approximation to the truth of what happened. So here is how real development happened.
My career as a research scientist in the kidney has been dominated by random walks through mental and physical geography resembling more the life of an itinerant medieval scholar than a modern day biomedical scientist. I was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq where I obtained my medical degree at the University of Baghdad College Of Medicine. During that time I came under the influence of a wonderful renal physiologist called Faisal S. Nashat who had just returned from England after obtaining his PhD. I worked in his lab on a variety of small projects. When I finished my Physiology Course he told me that I should get Homer Smith’s “Principles of Renal Physiology”, it is the first time I had heard of his name and I read the book with great interest although I was pretty mystified by his treatment of acid base balance. I still have this book; and I am now re-reading it to see if I understand it better now. In 1966 Iraq suffered its first major epidemic of cholera in recent memory, a consequence of the spread of Vibrio choleri ElTor, the causative agent of the “seventh pandemic”. I was then the Chief Resident in medicine and with two of my professors we were given a Tuberculosis hospital long deserted to establish a special treatment unit. By then recent research in cholera had identified that fact that it is a self limiting disease provided you can tide the patient over with intravenous therapy. Our treatment program was so successful that only one patient died out of more than 400 admitted, and he had renal failure before the onset of cholera. I tried to find a residency position in the US in an academic medical center but like so many other physicians from the third world, the only one I was accepted to a chronic disease unit in Baltimore which I took. But luckily, it was on the same campus as Baltimore City Hospital (Bayview Medical center today) and being one of the teaching hospitals of Johns Hopkins I was able to attend many great academic teaching conferences. Its Chief of Medicine was Julius R. Krevans who took a great interest in my career and appointed me as a senior medical resident the second year I was there; this appointment lifted my career to a new plane and I believe that none of what followed could have been achieved without Juli's initial career push. By a stroke of luck, William B Greenough, one of the best scientists in cholera research returned to Johns Hopkins from Dhaka and he asked me to join him in research on the mechanisms of development of diarrhea in cholera . As a Fellow in Infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins I worked under the supervision of Greenough and Michael Field (at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston) and we discovered that cholera toxin causes chloride secretion in the intestinal mucosa through stimulation of adenyl cyclase. This experience also provided me with two life-long friends, a friendship that has never stopped to inspire and instruct. These studies in the short-circuited small intestine introduced me to the principles of ion transport across epithelia and I wanted to learn more, so I applied and was accepted to work in the laboratory of Alexander Leaf at the Massachusetts General Hospital (a Homer Smith awardee) where I worked from 1970 to 1974. Although I am not sure I achieved anything concrete there, the almost daily conversations with Alex Leaf made me think like a scientist and to understand the role of the physician-scientist in the the world today. He thus had the most influence on my way of thinking. But I did not think my research project was leading anywhere significant so I accepted Philip Steinmetz’s (another Homer Smith awardee) invitation to go with him to the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor. In Iowa, I met David Dawson who like me was recently recruited there; David a real “professional” having obtained a Ph.D. in epithelial transport (with Peter Curran and Stanley Schultz) taught me all I know about this subject. But it was Philip Steinmetz who taught me all the intricacies of working on acid base transport which is the field that I think I am working in to this day, although it is difficult to discern that when you read the titles of my papers. But within a few years I became restless, Iowa City had wonderful music and the best Cello teacher I ever had, but somehow I felt that I was socially isolated there and I started to look at many positions. By then Daniel Kimberg, who I met through Michael Field had been asked to return to Columbia to be the Chief of Medicine, and it took me one millisecond to agree. I arrived there in 1977 and within a few minutes of my arrival, I knew that I would never leave there. It was the environment of Columbia, but also New York City that had made such an impression on me. Within a year I became the Chief of the Kidney Disease Division at Columbia which lasted too long, 25 years; I don’t think that I was suited to this post not knowing anything about finances or the running of a clinical enterprise. Luckily I was able to recruit a cadre of great clinician investigators who seemed to be happy to do what they wanted without any direction or importantly interference. It was there that I had a string of incredibly talented young physician-scientists who decided to work in my laboratory many from our own house staff. But the environment of New York City, scientific and cultural is the one that had the greatest impact on my development as a scientist. New York City was and still remains the capital of world cell biology. I became a cell biologist not through rigorous training but through deep friendships with cell biologists in the City whose work was so spectacular that it inspired emulation.
So when I look back, I am startled at the astonishing randomness of what had happened; there just seemed to be no volition there, no actual decision was made that consciously guided or changed my direction. There was some internal drive giving momentum, but it is the momentum of a ricocheting bullet in an enclosed space. Where in the careers of others I see so much planning and direction from inside that I occasionally get a momentary sense of regret; Why didn’t I go to work with this or that great scientist in the ‘70s? But that feeling quickly dissipates when I realize how many great people I had met, how much influence I had received from mentors but especially from friends whose trust and confidence taught me that a life in science a worthwhile endeavor. Most of all, it was my wife whose wonderful work as an archaeologist and restorer always put my much more abstract works in the correct perspective; it is one thing to make some modest scientific advance but it is quite another to take ancient buildings and make them shine again, especially when this is done in regions of the world that are most in need of these monuments.

Forty Years Ago today

2007-06-05T14:43:00.000-04:00

I still remember vividly what I was doing 40 years ago when the six day war started. During this period I had already gotten my permission to come to the US for further training. In late May the drums of war began and the atmosphere in the Middle East became unbelievably hot and oppressive. Most people were glued to their short wave radios listening to the BBC, Radio Cairo (called The Voice of the Arabs) Radio Moscow and Radio Israel. My friends and I walked or drove around Baghdad trying to figure out who was starting this war, the Israelis or Nasser. The Voice of the Arabs had blaring martial music followed by various impassioned speeches by various and sundry demagogues . Nasser kept pumping the people's confidence. But the biggest surprise to me was that despite the transparent imbalance of power there was a delusional confidence that Nasser and his supporters exhibited. My friend and I went around in total disoriented astonishment at this. When the war started, suddenly the Israeli radio stopped broadcasting anything except slow movements of classical symphonies or even string quartets, interrupted every now and then with understated news reports. I am sure this was deliberate to demonstrate the difference between them and Cairo Radio which interrupted its loud martial music with reports that seemed completely wild; downing 6 planes here and two there when it was pretty clear from listening to the BBC that the Egyptian Air Force was wiped out within the first hour of the war. Eventually when the truth sank in, there was mass depression and the need to find scapegoats, although eventually it was the Egyptian Chief of Staff who committed suicide and Nasser who later died of a heart attack.
When I arrived in the US in Baltimore I was confronted by an another kind of euphoria; here the myth of David beating Goliath was the idea of the day and was trumpeted daily and nobody seemed to believe that Israel is a western country with an army that is well-trained in the highest technology of the day; hence it was not surprising that it could defeat third world countries that have none of its advantages. Moreover it was supported by a population inside and outside of Israel that was totally committed to its material war effort while the Arabs were drunk on their delusions of grandeur.
Total victory in war always gives the victor the illusion that the "moral" conflict has also been settled. Given that two religious groups were fighting, this became yet another testament where God's sympathies lied. Before any modern probably before any war there is always talk of what constitutes a just cause for war and poor St Augustine gets dusted off and read and re-read to see if his lessons could be applied here. We are still living in this period except that recently many Israeli historians have started to remove the tissues of triumphalism from this war and have shed new light on what produced this war and more importantly what are its consequences, the best being the new book by T. Segev.

The Phases of the Iraq Invasion

2007-05-29T12:47:00.000-04:00

The strategy of the the Bushies in Iraq seems to go in different phases all characterized by Blame.
Phase I Blame Saddam for 9/11 Too mnay books have been written about this for us to now discuss this
Phase II Blame Saddam for WMD ditto
Phase III Blame "Saddamites" (note the allusive use of language)for insurgency.I think this was partly true
Phase IV Blame Al-Qaida for insurgency. I think this too is partly true
Phase V Blame militias for disorder. Too obvious to comment on.
Phase VI Blame Iran for disorder. We are in this phase now.
But I am now going to make a prediction of the next phase
Phase VI Blame (all)Iraqis for the disaster in Iraq. This phase has just begun. Bolton (the former Ambassador to the UN) sstarted this last week. this was picked up by Fox Noise and I predict it will be the new mantra before long. The only unknown is "How long will it take for the mainstream media and the general population to fall in line". I hope Never. Blaming Iraqis for their own disasters is useful, it allows everybody to feel good, we tried to help, but you know it is medieval out there! Will this be followed by a total embargo on everything Iraqi? Like what happened in Vietnam?

The Panda and the Beaver

2007-05-11T09:29:00.000-04:00

It is near the end of the academic year and many students have come to say goodbye and to chat about their future and i am amazed at how many of them say "I want to find a niche for myself in ..." I am alwys turned off by this since I feel that the student wants a secure place that provides a soft landing and a covered area that protects them from the difficulties of dealing with the real world; a literal niche. I am writing this in an actual ecological niche in Costa Rica where we are visiting our son who is a restoration ecologist living in a research station in the middle of a gorgeous botanical garden. We are awakened everyday by tucans crashing into the windows and look out on cloud forests. We talk of nothing but nichs here and this has made me think differently about what the students want.
One reason I get irritated by the use of the word niche in the context of a career choice is that it implies that there is a ceratin sense of passivity after the choice is made; you choose your niche and then loll about enjoying the fruits that the niche offers. The problem is that if you are really "adapted" perfectly to the niche, you are at risk for any small change in the environment. Take the Panda, a cute animal beloved by everybody but so well adapted to its niche which supplied enough bamboo shoots that small changes in this niche, such as the expansion of human habitats and destruction of the bamboo forests has now led to its being placed on the endangered list. Even in zoos, the poor Pandas are so out of it that they have to rely on artificial insemination for breeding.
But what I learned here is that often the animals and plants actually make or change their niches. They actively participate in the generation of a suitable environment that romotes their growth and reproduction. Think of the beaver here who sometimes alone and others with his mates creates impressive architectural construction that promote creation of specific environmental regions that promote the developmen of his own niche.
oung physicians and scientists should create their own niches and not simply try to find one that is conducive to their development and progress. Finding the right mentors ought to e the primary goal; but this is an active process that needs a large input of energy. One should try to contact as many people who could be ootential mentors and one ofthem will "click"; again this is a darwinian idea; produce many random mutations and one of them will promote your growth. Similarly, test many environments before settling down in the right place.
So the message is ; don't find a niche, make your own!

Baghdad Today

2007-04-03T15:07:00.000-04:00

We had dinner with the chief of the Baghdad Bureau of one of the networks and you would think that things could not be more depressing but they are even worse than we think. The surge has forced much of the action to move from Baghdad to Baquba in Diyala Province. I have fond memories of that Province, a region around the meeting of the Diyala River with the Tigris and full of orchards where we used to go for picnics and nice vacations.A cousin sent me this picture of an orchard similar to where we used to go to as children. It made one nostalgic but with an awareness of the pain (algia) that is always associated with nostalgia. Now apparently behind every palm tree is a guy with a machine gun.
The journalists do not as a rule leave their hotels; they often rely on second hand information. Their only contact with the natives amusingly are wwith barbers and hairdressers who come in to offer their services. The Green Zone where the government and the US Embassy personnel live is under daily mortar attacks. Suicide bombers are everywhere; formerly only Al-Qaeda types but now they include Iraqis, a new phenomenon. The people who are suffering the most pain are the "mixed" marriages; Shi'a and Sunni mixed marriages were so common in the past and apparently continue today, but with the present ethnic cleansing projects; these poor people don't know where to turn to. Everybody is afraid to go out to the markets but there is a surreal aspect to life here, people seem to go out to new Pizza places in their own neighborhoods but are afraid of going elsewhere in Baghdad. So I guess everybody's horizons are being slowly constricted. Needless to say the big unknown is what will happen when the US troops leave, as they must. Will the militias start their ethnic cleansing campaigns and we get a full blown civil war or will the politicians come to their senses. No predictions are possible, after the US gave the country over to exiles who had no grass roots support and no credibility with the people, hence they had to fall back on their sectarian identities to generate legitimacy. Four years is too short to develop political credibiiltiy, so one fears that the worst is still to come and we will see more massacres in the orchards.

Looted Baghdad Museum Artifacts exhibited in NY Gallery

2007-02-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

The looting of the Baghdad Museum just after the invasion generated intense international outrage at the time. The Museum, one of the richest in the world for ancient Near Eastern Art had marvelous and famous artifacts. Some of the looted material were returned. But artists and archeologists have not forgotten and a book had appeared "The Looting of the Iraq Museum" written by many archeologists with a personal view of the Museum or its collection. Selma wrote about carrying the objects from the Old to the New Museum and Lamya Gailani had an interesting history of Gertrude Bell who was had set up the Museum. The tragedy of course had receded into the background and not only because the systematic looting of archeological sites has converted many Mesopotamian treasure into commodities that can be traded freely everywhere. Needless to say the appearance of Civil War and the 3000 deaths a month makes the pain of archeological looting seem frivolous. Frivolous but not forgotten as shown with great insight by the wonderful young artist Michael Rakowitz. Michael has Iraqi roots; his grandfather left Baghdad in 1946 to settle like many Iraqi Jews in Long Island. He studied all of the great objects that were stolen some of which were returned, as described with great verve by Matthew Bogdanos in his recent book The Theives of Baghdad.
Rakowitz then made papier maché sculptures wrapped in iraqi and other newspapers or advertising copy. The results are enchanting and oddly moving. Several of the objects have the severe majesty of the originals but now have jokey and whimsical colored advertising or magazine covers. Others have the reserved looks that one associated with ancient Mesopotamian figures with a peaceful pose that belies the horrors that statue has seen. Now dressed in yellow paper with Farsi script advertising tea, the covering does not detract from the pose or the emanation from the statue as if it is saying "This too shall pass". We went twice to the exhibition (at the Lombard-Freid Projects in Chelsea) each time taking several friends and the response was similar everybody was enchanted but also quite affected by the atmosphere. It is the remarkable power of art to transform something as base as papier maché into a work that speaks to many. After all it is rather improbable that copies of objects made in paper covered by newsprint could remind you not only of the originals but also of what had happened to them. For us the effect of the exhibition was even more powerful. It reminded Selma and I of the art work of her sister Nuha who died two years ago. It had the same flair, the same sense of happy color the same whimsy and disregard for the sobriety of the occasion. At the end of this exhibition you felt gratitude for having seen something that transcended a horrible event and changed it into a moving experience without the maudlin sentimentality that accompanies such tributes.

Water, Water Everywhere

2007-02-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

I thought I had heard all of the misconceptions that someone or other holds about water intake until I read about what happened in Sacramento California. A radio station ran a competition to win a video game console apparently the gift du saison during the past Christmas holidays. The stupid trick was who could drink more water and faster during a specified period without going to the bathroom. One woman drank what appears to be 6 liters within 3 hours which resulted in her death few hours later. A student at a California college was forced to drink water from a 20 liter bottle while doing heavy exercise and eventually developed seizures and died. Almost a sixth of marathoners develop severe dilution during the competition. This was due to drinking large amounts of water during running.
Where did all this come from? This is a new craze brought about by two things; one was the discovery that bottled water could be incredibly profitable and the other is the ridiculous perpetuation by so called health experts of the idea that we need a lot of water to remain healthy. You don't have to be a cynic to be certain that the second derives from the first. It was estimated that last year consumers all over the world spent $100 billion on bottled water!! A fraction of this could lead to potable water for all who need it. About one fourth of bottled water in the US is simply municipal tap water run through a filter and then placed in a plastic bottle. It has been estimated that the doubling in use of plastic to manufacture bottles in the past ten years is largely due to the consumption of bottled water. In this article reviewing a book on the subject) we are told that this giant industry employs only 6,000 low wage people. So on top of plastic pollution and thoughtless consumerism it is not even socially useful.
But what about the biology. Despite what Jane Brody of the New York Times thinks, there is no need for her 8 by 8 rule; 8 ounces 8 times a day. We actually have a remarkably efficient system to tell us when we need water. It is called thirst. This is one of the most powerful sensation we have. The minute we become dehydrated, i.e. the osmotic pressure of our body fluids rise by as little as one half of 1% we feel this powerful urge to drink. This does not happen often because we actually drink a lot of water regardless of the 8x8 rule. All the tea, coffee and sodas you drink are water. Even the food one eats is 80% water. But somebody is making a killing literally on drinking water; the poor woman who died recently was given a massive number of plastic bottles containing water and she died from water intoxication. Luckily, most of the time this does not happen because the kidney is able to excrete large volumes of water, as much as 1 liter an hour. But if you drink much more than that then the water will retain diluting the body fluids. The cells will swell and problems result especially for the brain which is enclosed in a rigid container.
So trust you own sensations; if you need water your body will tell you so.

Thermodynamics of Happiness

2007-01-12T15:03:00.000-05:00

Every time I ask somebody here "How are you doing" there is always a loud response of "Great!" said with a rising intonation at the end of the word. How come everybody seems to be so sure ? Is there nobody who is just OK? or Not bad? or "Good considering everything" or is everybody afraid to sound skeptical?
The reason I say this is because I am certain that the universe has another undiscovered Conservative Law; like Conservation of Mass or of Energy there is a Law of Conservation of Happiness! So when somebody says that they are happy, they are withdrawing from the happiness bank in the world and therefore somebody else is going to be miserable.
This brings up another problem if happiness is conserved t what exactly is the opposite of Happiness; is it misery ? or worry or insecurity ? whichever you choose there is clear evidence that this quantity is not conserved but keeps increasing. Perhaps happiness is like Energy while misery is like Entropy the former is conserved while the latter always increases (whenever there are real processes). Many years ago Claude Shannon produced the astonishing idea when he began to analyze (or really invent) Information Theory ; he found that Information is equivalent to Entropy, having the same units and always increasing. He is the scientist who analyzed rigorously the concepts of signal and noise in the traffic of information. So we need now to develop a set of principles to relate the total flux of misery (worry... etc) to set it up as an entropic function. I hope to be able to do that in the future but I hope some of you will contribute to this effort.

Guantanamo Anniversary

2007-01-11T19:37:00.000-05:00

Torture and its proponents continue to stalk us, even here in the US. Arguments for it have essentially intimidated most people into silence, a silence that reigns despite the presence of many images. Yesterday, the anniversary date saw many demonstrations in various capitals of the "free" world; at no time does this term ring more hollow than when these issues are discussed. Proponents and apologists led by Alan Dershowitz continue to write strange hypothetical situations that they feel necessitate torture, these arguments have eclipsed the facts, that there has not been any evidence that torture actually led to saving innocent lives. As always we rely on poets to save our sanity and provide the Signal that we hope will drown the Noise from the torturers and their supporters. Here is one from Marvin Bell

BAGRAM, AFGHANISTAN, 2002

The interrogation celebrated spikes and cuffs,
the inky blue that invades a blackened eye,
the eyeball that bulges like a radish,
that incarnadine only blood can create.

They asked the young taxi driver questions
he could not answer, and they beat his legs
until he could no longer kneel on their command.
They chained him by the wrists to the ceiling.

They may have admired the human form then,
stretched out, for the soldiers were also athletes
trained to shout in unison and be buddies.
By the time his legs had stiffened, a blood clot
was already tracing a vein into his heart.

They said he was dead when they cut him down,
but he was dead the day they arrested him.
Are they feeding the prisoners gravel now?
To make them skillful orators as they confess?

Here stands Demosthenes in the military court,
unable to form the words "my country". What
shall we do, we who are at war but are asked
to pretend we are not? Do we need another
naïve apologist to crown us with clichés
that would turn the grass brown above a grave?

They called the carcass Mr. Dilawar. They
believed he was innocent. Their orders were
to step on the necks of the prisoners, to
break their will, to make them say something
in a sleep-deprived delirium of fractures,
rising to the occasion, or, like Mr. Dilawar,
leaving his few possessions and his body.

- Marvin Bell: The New Yorker, 8 Jan. 2007

The End of Saddam Hussein

2007-01-03T11:02:00.000-05:00

Nobody's hanging should bring joy to any one even those most aggrieved and vengeful. Saddam was an equal opportunity murderer who killed anybody who stood in his way and that included many Sunnis. Hardly a family in Iraq escaped his vicious and ruthless rule. Born and raised in a humble family, he rose like many third world dictators of his time by eliminating everybody who stood in his way. After coming to power in 1968 first as director of intelligence and General Secretary of the Ba'ath Party and later as President in 1979, he did what again many third world dictators did; a reign of paranoia was coupled with agrarian reform, mass education and building the Iraqi infrastructure. Oil wealth enriched him and his clique; but it was not enough for he had delusions of grandeur. He saw himself as another legendary leader of Mesopotamia and like Nebuchadnezzar inscribed his name on the restored ceremonial walls and avenues of Babylon. These delusions prevented him from navigating the difficult waters of regional alliances and diplomacy and he eventually destroyed all that he had built by invading Iran and later Kuwait, the latter leading to a US-led embargo after the first Gulf War that reduced the country to penury. After three years of US rule in Iraq, he became a marginal figure with no real support and his hanging became the stuff of tabloid journalism. But perhaps he got his revenge on his enemies by appearing dignified though angry under continuous taunting by his guards and executioners reducing the Maliki government to what the Bush administration usually does in face of a crisis; trying to find the man who leaked the cell phone video instead of questioning the style in which the execution was handled. He was hanged on a day of religious celebration with a metaphoric overtone; the day when supposedly Abraham instead of sacrificing his son Ismael was told by his god to sacrifice a lamb. He was no lamb sacrificial or otherwise, a tyrant who was not loved in his life nor missed or mourned in his death.

IRAQ 2006 : Three Horrors behind the News

2006-12-29T09:51:00.000-05:00

No day passed this year without horrible news from Iraq. But three things that will produce an irreversible damage to the country has passed without being a focus of discussion and debate.
1. Immigration and Exile
Unlike many other countries in the region, Iraq had rarely produced a massive wave of immigration. But now we are seeing the second wave, more like a tsunami of immigration. The first started in the 1990's during the US led embargo after the invasion of Kuwait. The economic situation was so severely affected that almost a million Iraqis left Iraq. Since 2003 the pace of immigration has accelerated so that it seems that there are 1 million Iraqis in Jordan and close to another million in Syria and uncounted hundreds of thousands in Iran and Turkey. A quick and unscientific survey on a trip to Amman showed that the city is teeming with Iraqi exiles with an over-representation of the educated elite of Baghdad and other cities. More than two million from a country of only 24 million is a massive and irreparable loss.
2. Death and Destruction
Well reported but the diagnosis is much worse than you think. A group of epidemiologists from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health estimated that 650,000 had been killed since the invasion began. The great epidemiologist at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has questioned the methodology even though the authors of the report are professionals and the method is a standard one. The most important insight of the report in my view is not the number, but the fact that the carnage is everywhere in the country giving the lie to the Bush administration idea that it is limited to Baghdad.
3. Government given over to Pro-Iranian Religious Groups
You never hear this discussed in the news media but this is the most serious mistake the Bush people had done. the country was handed over to the fundamentalists based on the ridiculous idea that they represent the majority Shi'a. The US allowed them in with their armies (not militias but real armies of more than 30,000 strong) from Iran and now it is too late to do anything. Abdul-Azziz Al-Hakim has been living in Iran for more than 20 years and he is pretty young, so he has spent most of his adult life in Iran. His connection to Iraq is pretty marginal, yet the financial and military support of Iran allowed him to get organized quickly and "win" an election before a legitimate local representation could be developed. Similarly, Al-Maliki has been in exile in Syria for decades. These are the two parties that have the highest representation in the new Iraqi Parliament. The US wanted an election fast hoping that it will then be able to show that it was developing a democracy and what they ended up with is a theocracy that could not rule effectively and is floundering.

Jimmy Carter: Profile in Courage

2006-12-27T13:47:00.000-05:00

Though hardly naive, the former President seems to not have been prepared for the attacks by The Israel Lobby on his new book Palestine:Peace not Apartheid. He was forced to write an OpEdarticle in the LA Times explaining all the ways he has been attacked. The list is familar to anybody who has criticized Israel and its treatment of Palestinians and Lebanese. All of us have been accused of being participants in conspiracy theory, anti-semitism, holocaust denials and the new word applied to Tony Judt recently an Israel Denial! Luckily for Carter, and probably for all of us, there seems to be hope. The book is climbing fast the NY Times best-seller list so that it was #6 last sunday. Will it make a difference? I hope so, but the realist in me says not likely. The parameters of the discussion are already set by the Israel Lobby and everybody on the other side is simply a terrorist or an anti-semite.

Il Bambino Capricioso who has abandoned the stage

2006-12-20T12:11:00.000-05:00

You all have heard of Roberto Alagna walking off the stage at La Scala after he finished the first act aria of Aida. He was booed (appropriately I think just listen to the last note); Alagna was so incensed that he walked off the stage never to return. But without missing a beat (not really about 4 or 5 beats were missed) the tenor covering the role who "just" happened to be in the wings strode on to the stage to continue as if nothing happened. He was not in costume, but who cares. Here is the video with the commentary by the RAI newscaster saying what a spoiled baby Alagna was. Who said that the age of the Diva has disappeared.

Here is my Prediction: U.S. will declare that there is a Civil War in Iraq

2006-10-22T13:36:00.000-04:00

The fact that Iraqis have been killing Iraqis for the past 3 years, (i.e. since the U.S. invasion) has been reported widely. But when can one call something like that Civil War? Of course things have gotten worse and seem to be spiralling towards an even more gruesome end. Already more than 1 million Iraqis have fled the country not to mention hundreds of thousands who have left their cities to go to somewhere else which they hope to be safer. But the U.S. have been insisting all along that this just a "security" situation and new terms are being invented such as sectarian violence. Now that the situation is so bad that even U.S. and British generals are saying that things are getting worse, I am going to predict that the U.S. will declare that there is now Civil War in Iraq and hence, our presence there is no longer tenable hence we have to leave a "war-torn" country. This declaration will only come after the election so that nobody can accuse the the Republicans of having "cut and run" their tired macho attack motto. There will be Fox News serious discussions about the impossibility of being present in the middle of Civil War but nobody will know what changed suddenly so that yesterday's sectarian violence is today's civil war. Only the cynics will say we told you so.

The Pope: His Speech and its meaning

2006-09-19T20:59:00.000-04:00

Yet another mass uprising in the Muslim World wit burning effigies and even burning churches. There seem to be no end to these images of destruction; Easy to roil and easy to use by the unscrupulous no doubt. But it does not relieve the original instigator of these oubursts from responsibility. The Vatican spokesman says once people read the whole text they will immediately find out that the comments were taken out of context. So finally I read the speech of the Pope to the University of Regensburg. Well first let us dispose of the comments of the Byzantine Emperor who says or claims that Islam converted everybody by the sword. The pope was "merely" quoting it, but in fact it was not difficult to gather that it was also his own view. Let us forget about the truth of this and even say that if it is true the Catholic Church should be the last organization on earth to accuse any other of converting people by the sword. There will be legions of Conquistadors and their priests who would be happy to testify that they killed for Christ. The proverbial pot should not call the kettle black! But this issue comes very early in the speech and the rest of the speech is an academic disquisition on the relation between Reason and Faith.
The amazing part of the speech itself was his notion how the Church was actually interested in reason and he tries to make the case that reason is the basis of cultural harmony and understanding. Is this a different Church from the one that Giordano Bruno or Galileo knew? No it is the same ancient Church he says. He says bemusedly that it all began with the Greek Philosophers who being the founders of reason and he says that there is an "inner rapprochement" between Greek Philosophy and Faith. He continues "it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe". In other words, even though Christianity started in the East (i.e. irrational) it only achieved its glory in the West. Even though he quotes Ibn Hazm (misspelt as Ibn Hazn) he does not get the idea that Islam like Christianity is a diverse faith under whose umbrella many opposing views live. So, unfortunately here, the Pope appears as yet another western supremacist. He continues in this vein by describing the attempts at what he calls dehellenization of the Faith and says that he rejoices in the fruits of Science but he says we will succeed only if reason and faith come together; but what is the price? He says we have to "overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable" So I guess we must be back to dehellenization with a modern twist. He says only then will we be able to have a "dialogue of cultures and religions that is so urgently needed". He ends by saying "The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time." OK, one might say but you cannot do that without repecting the revealed truth of others; if you want us to accept your own revealed truth. That is why it is best to be a scientist; that way you can accept everybody as humans first and last. The irrational positions of the Church and of the demagogues in the Islamic world tht way will be exposed and side-lined.
But I want to go back to the problems caused by this speech. When you carefully read the speech you find that it is a dry academic exercise in the history of the Catholic Church and an attempt is made (unsuccessfully, in my view) to ally the Church with the forces of reason in the world. The backhanded comment on Islam was entirely gratuitous and played no part in the argument the Pope was making. Hence, the comments that his supporters are saying that it was taken out of context was ridiculous. It was the Pope that quoted the Emperor out of context unless the Pope wanted to agree with him that teh Catholic Church and the West are the guardians of reason while Islam was the hom of irrationality. All in all an unfortunate incident where the man who pretends to be reasonable turns out to have such deep biases that he remains as yet another soldier in the War on Islam.

Tomatoes in the French Countryside

2006-08-12T08:11:00.000-04:00

We are in France in the South West region half-way between Bordeaux and Toulouse in the ancient region that the Romans called Aquitania. The whole area was the dowry of Eleanor of the Aquitaine in the middle ages. Everywhere you go you are reeminded of the 100 year war. The village close to us, Montpezat d'Agenais began the war by invading the village of St Sardos; one was English and the other French and the battle began the 135 year horror. Almost every day there is a farmer's market in one of the villages or towns nearby. The atmosphre in these marchés is festive and the farmers know many of their customers even though they go from town to town throughout the week. Why people go there is obvious, for the pleasure of the interaction with the sellers all of whom look like characters out of a French movie or even a photograph on a calendar. But all supermarkets here have an incredibly good variety of local produce as well and recently a French sociologist studied this phenomenon to explain why people (local people not tourists like us) go there and buy the same produce at a higher price and she concluded that it is the social interaction that is the premium for which people are paying.
Even by the standards of the Union Square farmers market the tomatoes here are beyond belief. When you go to a french marché in any village surrounding us here you find most of the buyers are the local agricultural people themselves. They toil in their wonderful orchards of mostly peaches and plums and prunes but to prepare their own food, nothing but the freshest is accpetable. But the tomatoes are something else altogether. First they look completely organic, i.e. their shapes are not round and they clearly have not been bred to withstand long distance shipping, not to mention long shelf life in super markets. Our local epiciére gets hers from the kitchen gardens of her friends in the village. They are large juicy tomatoes and when you smell them, they exude a fragrance that is simply not something that one can smell anywhere in an US supermarket or even farmers market.
I was hoping that the scientists at a biotech company in California (Calgene sounds right but I am not sure of the name) knocked out the gene that causes softness when the tomatoes ripen (chitinase, I think). For tomatoe afficionados we had hoped that this will allow farmers in big tomatoe farms to allow the fruit to ripen on the vine without fear of them going soft. Instead what happened is that the agribusiness people decided that the knockout tomatoes would give them a few more weeks of shelf lie in supermarkets arguing, I guess that the population had already gotten used to the taste of the red colored styrofoam fruit that they cal tomatoes. I saw once in a paper a gas liquid chromatogram of extracts of a tomato ripened on the vine until near soft and one from the supermarket and the complexity of the pattern of the ripened tomato was astounding, there must have been hundreds more peaks in them than in the supermarket tomato. You can taste these peaks right here in France!

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson: Schlummert Ein

2006-07-07T11:39:00.000-04:00

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson mezzo sporano and the most moving singer of our day died at 52. Her haunting performance of Bach's Cantata Ich habe genug (BWV82) a few years ago at Lincoln Center staged by Peter Sellars is one of the most memorable concerts of the recent past. She performed the cantata as a patient in a flimsy hospital gown, attached to a pole on which intravenous fluids were hung and infused the words with the pain and suffering of the terminally ill patient who "has had enough" of this life. When the aria comes Schlummert ein ihr matte Augen a hushed quiet suddenly became palpable only broken by the suppressed sniffles of the many. Last Novemeber at Carnegie Hall she sang Peter Lieberson Neruda songs written for her by her husband; the fifth and last of them "My love, when I die and you don't", the music was poignant and her performance was mesmerizing and it is painful to think now that it was to be an autobiographical song.

The Physical Chemistry of Subway Travel

2006-07-03T10:28:00.000-04:00

In this heat and humidity going into the subway system especially in the 168th St. station is more like going into a Turkish bath; although this is only said by people who have never been to the pleasant interiors of real Turkish baths. Seven floors below street level, barely any ventilation except what comes form the rushing trains. You get the picture. Even worse is the crush of people which is more oppressive when the temperature is like it has been the past week.
But I keep thinking of physical chemistry, and really of two things in P Chem that makes the problems of travels on the subway worse. The first is that all calculations of physical chemistry are done at infinite dilution where the molecules are sufficiently separated from each other that they do not interact with each other. But inside the cell, molecular crowding is so prevalent that new pathways and biochemical reactions happen because molecules are so close that they can interact with each other in strange ways; they clump together; they bind to each other faster than they would in dilute solutions, they bend and they literally "clot". The principal issue here is something called the Excluded Volume effect. Here we must think that molecules can never penetrate each other; each of them occupies an inviolable space Black dots in the figure). Further like us in the subway, each molecule prevents another from getting near by what is called "steric" effects; that is we all repel others (sounds familiar?)(pink areas in the figure). So the available space (in blue) is the breathing space for us in the subway car at rush hour, we get packed for maximum proximity because we are not spherical, but we cannot interpenetrate each other (no smirks please!) unless some of us are ghosts.
So, when somebody walks in and their shape is very irregular the space they occupy is much greater than each of us; so the available space (breathing room is smaller). Over the past decade our shapes in the subways have changed dramatically. Some, (too many) have gotten more globular. But that does not bother me a lot. What kills me is the presence of large globular protuberances that suddenly sprang up on people. In the bad old days (before my time) there many hunchback; now we have back packs!!In the picture, backpacks are in red. Why do people carry such large backpacks and what the hell are they filled with? and of course; have you noticed that the backpacker always turns with a jerky movement and zaps you with the incredibly hard object trapped in his/her backpack. Look at the excluded volume of the backpackers and the little blue breathing space they have left for us. The excluded volume of the backpacker is so much larger than yours or mine. They occupy more space and more irregular space, causiung all of us to be as they say in P Chem to be de-natured. What can we do about this?

Where did Civilization start?

2006-06-30T16:29:00.000-04:00

Archaeologists have always said that urban civilization began in Southern Iraq; but now Andrew Lawler, the roving reporter of Science Magazine has written a news article about recent excavations in Syria which he says show that things are not so clear and civilization may have started in the more northern reaches of the Euphrates Valley. As one born and raised in Mesopotamia I feel a proprietary interest in this issue; somehow one has always to belong to a country which is either the best or was the best at some time in its history. So I am here raising my objections to Lawler's article. The reason people are saying this is that there has been no significant archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia for the past 20 years or more thanks to the Iran-Iraq war and the two Gulf wars. Excavation brings with it discovery and all it takes to say that something is older is to use the most modern methods of dating. When you don't dig in the right place you will not know how old that place actually is.
I am reminded of the famous joke of the drunk who lost his keys and was kneeling on the ground looking for them. A passerby asks him what is he doing and he answers "I am looking for my keys"; so the guy asks him "Where did you lose them" and he answers "Over there"; so "Why are you looking here then"? The guy says "Because here there is a street lamp so I can see better"

On first looking at the world with fresh eyes

2006-06-29T11:36:00.000-04:00

It is such a cliché to say let us look at the world with a fresh perspective; let us think outside the box, let us look at this withour any pre-conceived ideas; let us ignore the conventional wisdom and start afresh. All of us had said this but obviously neither the past nor our knowledge of it can be erased to allow a genuinely new perspective. I was reminded of these recently when I was talking to a young Columbia student who just graduated with a major in English. Looking at things from a fresh perspective is best thought of as an ideal not something that can be achieved. Poets had claimed that they saw new worlds and Keats in his famous
"On first looking into Chapman's Homer"
wrote probably one of the most popular poems in English trying to give the sense of what it is like to see things anew; but my friend had not heard of this poem! so here it is:

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The next day we went to the movies with Caterina and she told us the ultimate story about seeing the world with fresh eyes. That is really what we need. Apparently our friend Pamela has severe myopia but has insisted on limiting the use of her glasses on the plausible basis that one ought to exercise the muscles of the eye. So she has been going around the world seeing it in a blur. She finally had laser corrective surgery and saw Caterina in Rome. She told her that after being to Rome easily ten times, she was seeing the Eternal City clearly for the first time and she could not beleieve how beautiful the monuments were and how wonderful the new paint on the older buildings (Pamela is a restoration architect). It would have been great if Keats had myopia and had gone somewhere before and after corrective surgery; then we would have been able to see whether he would have looked with a wild surmise silent on a peak in the Giannicolo.

Brain Size Racism and Genetics

2006-06-20T12:21:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal had a long article on brain size and race; they dont call it that, but they are as usual up to their usual right wing tricks. They discuss a paper by Bruce Lahn on microcephalin. Mutation of this gene results in microcephaly which is characterized by a small brain size of normal appearance and no epilepsy but mental retardation. In the paper by Lahn they show that a polymorphism in the gene has appeared recently in human evolution, an estimated 37000 years ago. This polymorphism is claimed to have been under positive selection since it appeared and spread rather too rapidly for a random evolution model. They found that the geographic variation of this haplotype is much greater in Eurasian population than in sub-saharan Africa. The writer in the WSJ jumped on this fact immeidately making the suggestion that this proves that genetically Eurasian have larger brains and hence are genetically more intelligent than Africans. They bring up the discredited book The Bell Curve and start quoting how modern genetics will prove racial superiority. Lahn, who sounds like a naive Chinese researcher whose knowledge of western racisim is somewhat dim is talking about the thought police, political correctness and other WSJ favorite objects of derision. Luckily he just got tenure at the University of Chicago, so we are spared the issue of martyrdom to truth.
Studies like those are merely correlative, it seems that neither staistical geneticists nor science reporters are aware that causality requires not just a little more evidence than corelation but something of a different level of understanding of the function of this gene. Clearly microcephalin has something to do with brain size, but in what way and is brain size related to intelligence? A long history of this debate has shown no relation. The function of microcephalin is unknown. A recent study suggests that it might be a centrosomal protein involved in cell proliferation. It is not clear at all whether this polymorphism alters the function of the protein; that is what will be required to draw a strong correlation, we are still not talking about causality! Now a new paper measures the actual brain size of 120 people with the various haplotypes identified in the Lahn paper, no relation to brain size was found. So even at the level of correlation there is no strong case of a relation between brain size and the polymorphism. We still have not even got to the relation of microcephalin and inteligence.

Suicide at Guantanomo: George Orwell where are you?

2006-06-15T19:55:00.000-04:00

Rear Admiral Harry Harris the commander of the Guantanomo Bay Prison has characterized the suicides of three inmates at the facility as an act of "Asymmetric warfare against us". We can't let these detainees, he added "win the battle with their lack of regard for human life". Colleen Gaffy at the State Department, hired to improve the US image in the Islamic world had a more benign view of the problem; she told the BBC that the suicides were a "good P.R. move" and a tactic to "further the jihadi cause against us". The logical response, one presumes should have been preventive i.e. to kill them before they killed themselves.

Genealogy of Science & Scientists

2006-06-14T05:07:00.000-04:00

In Japan for a meeting, I found myself having dinner with Donald Seldin now in his eighties but still as sharp as anything. He reminded me of somethng that I said about a colleague (ISE) who talked to me as he was dying of metastatic cancer about his disapointment that there was one piece of work that he was working on and has not finished and continued by saying that in fact he looked back on his career and found that many of the things he did were either left unfinished or were not worth finishing. These kinds of ideas occr to everybody at a cerytain time in life and are not trivial but hae to be taken with a grain of salt. Seldin told me that I ahd mentioned to our common friend that what counts in a career is not what one has done in one's own work but the influence that he has had on others or on institutions. My point has been that it is the rare scientist (or artist) whose work in and of itself has long term impact on others. Even for great scientists such as say James Watson; it is unequivocal that his discovery of the structure of DNA started a whole field or even era in biological researchy; yet the work itself for which he is so deservedly celebrated while ushering the era was rapidly superseded: its half time, so to speak was probably no more than a decad. But his impact on converting Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratories from an interesting rather obscure laboratory to one of the major institutions of molecular research will likely last for decades to come. Similarly for lesser scientists their influence on their field depends more on the number of successful students they trained or great departments that they created rather than on their individual discoveries.
But this capacity for influence, of course is related to creativity in science. In order to have influence one has to be seen as somebody who is able to influence others. This is not entirely a tautology. To attract students of the highest caliber, students who will end up being successful and therefore spreading the influecne of the mentor, a scientist must be seen by the young generation as somebody who is doing exciting work. But that is not enough. There are many great scientists who have never trained anybody of significance likely because of some quirk in their personalities; most likely due to excessive focus on the progress of their work and the selfishness that comes from such focus which prevents building a group composed of exciting young scientists. Nurturing requires that trainees feel that they are "equal" to the mentor. This equality, of course is not in the realm of power and influence but in the realm of ideas; and it has to be sincerely felt by the mentor and trainee. Once a trainee senses that his ideas are respected and encouraged because they contribute to the progress of the work at hand, the role of the mentor becomes that of one who does not dictate the course of work but rather tries to generate from the combined ideas of mentor and mentee a new program. When successful it would be difficult to disentangle who originated the most creative parts of these combined ideas. It is of this discussion that mentorship of the highest form develops and whose impact on the career of future generations will depend. In this regard there probably is no greater mentor than Donald Seldin. Not only has he produced many great kidney physiologists but he has single handedly established the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School such that it is now one of the leading research institutions in the world. It is , I think the only medical school with 4 Nobel Laureates including one as a Dean. So here is to you Don, may you stay with us to quote various operatic arias and poems of WB Yeats to your heart;s content as long as we are here.

Follow the Leader?

2006-06-11T12:02:00.000-04:00

The Sunday New York Times has just published an article on Genghis Khan and his progeny? Talk about coincidence?

Are you descended from Genghis Khan?

2006-06-09T15:52:00.000-04:00

The reputation of Genghis Khan has improved with time. From a vile rapist and murderer he now is seen to be a great leader of men. Is that due to the emergence of Mongolia, where he is the national hero? Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody is not already writing a potential best-seller on the Ten Great Secrets of Leadership the Great Khan written by a business guru. Now in anticipation of this great publishing event, let us consider how you might be descended from him. Well although his "hordes" were not that great, they loved raping women in all the cities they conquered. Sweeping from Central Asia to the middle east and Europe the army must have impregnated tens (hundreds?) of thousands of women. I am also including here, not only Genghis himself but also his (in)famous grandhildren Hulegu and Kublai going west and east respectively.
Apparently it is easy to find out if you are related. Genealogy is a growth industry now that molecular biology has gotten in on the act. No longer does one have to depend on a spinster aunt or an elderly dysfunctional uncle to write the family history (as they used to say in Baghdad). All you need is a couple of hundred dollars and you logon to the DNA Ancestory Project, a joint venture between National Geographic and IBM. You send in the money and you get a kit with a swab which after you scrape the inner cheeks can be sent back to have your DNA anlyzed. You can have maternal DNA (mitochondrial DNA) or paternal (Y chromosome)tested. They will send you back your haplotypes and where your ancestors came from. The project leader was interested in human migrations nad had collected samples from various regions of the world and found in Mongolia that about 8% of the population carried a marker on their Y chromosome that seemed to have arisen about 1000 years ago. It was present in "one of Genghis Khan's descendants". This marker is a haplotype composed of short tandem repeat located in the Y chromosome.
In a study of a number of tribal, ethnic or language groups in Pakistan it was possible to show that the Hazara tribe had this "Genghis Khan" marker; the oral history of the Hazara is that they descended from the armies of the Mongol Invader. They also found that the Parsi people in Pakistan shared many markers with Iranian (as their name suggested) but the oral history or others such as Syrian Greek or others. So now we can actually solve the great mystery of the Middle Ages : Was Timur (Tamerlane) a direct descendant of Genghis Khan; he claimed so.
It should be easy to test; he is buried in a beautiful mausoleum in Samarkand. in a jade tomb. When we went there one day, the guide book says that the Russians in 1940 decided to open the tomb to see if he was actually lame as was said. When they did, they found a curse saying "May you have a more ruthless invader destroy your land should you dare to open my Tomb". The guide-book then says with what seems like an appropiate bated breath "The next day Hitler invaded Russia".
Meandering blog you say? That is what I am into.

Biologic Designs by Engineers and Tinkerers

2006-06-06T12:50:00.000-04:00

There is a hope among many of us that new organs will be manufactured in test tubes to be implanted into patients with defective hearts, lungs kidneys or heaven forbid brains. This field more hype and hope than reality, on occasion does not go beyond wishful thinking. However, most scientists believe that this will be a reality in the not too distant future. One problem I see here is that there is a sense that new organs need to replicate our own in design. That is new kidneys should filter the blood and excrete the waste products the same way as ours do. But I think it is worth speculating here on this particular issue, since I believe that one should take a fresh approach based enirely on evolutionary not engineering principles.
How do new designs appear in nature? I was reminded of this question on discussing with my colleagues whether the kidney of humans is actually a well designed organ. Teleology being what it is everybody thinks that what we have is the best possible design. François Jacob in a delightful little book full of insights The Possible and the Actual starts by comparing how an engineer and a tinkerer work . An engineer starts by defining the problem then develops new methods and new equipment to come up with a novel set of solutions (that could be patented!). Novelty is paramount; the less one uses older methods the better; the light bulb designer did not copy the candle, the jet engine is not related to the internal combustion one, nor was there any precedent for phonographs and tape-recorders. Evolution, however is more like a tinkerer than an engineer. A tinkerer is somebody who works happily using pieces of string, metal plate, propellers, bicycle tires, mirrors whatever is around in his garage to make his machine. Charles Darwin, himself had actually come up with this description in his book on the evolution of orchids. Further, different engineers working on the same problem often come up with similar solutions since they are pushing the limits of the technologically possible; it is difficult to distinguish between Boeing and Airbus planes. Intelligently designed kidneys would all look as alike as cars (Kolff’s design of the artificial kidney hardly changed in 60 years).
The evolutionary tinkerer on the other hand produced different types, vertebrate kidneys are quite different from insect kidneys; one filters and absorbs the other secretes. Finally, Jacob stated that engineers strive and achieve perfection (as far as the technology of their age allows). Evolutionary tinkering on the other hand results in many organs whose functions get superseded and hence were examples of bad design; think of the pronephros and mesonephros. At an even more drastic level, the extreme design failure i.e. extinction, is fairly common it is estimated that 500 million species have been eliminated since the beginning of life on earth.
Hence, when we want to think about new designs let us not only think of replicating our own designs which had been simply the product of the history of our species but think of how insects works arthropods etc have solved the same problems and we may end up finding more novel and appropriate solutions thereby combining engineering and tinkering in producing genuine bio-mimetic designs.

Horace and The Pursuit of Happiness

2006-05-24T09:15:00.000-04:00

I was reading some nice article in the New Yorker about an Englishman who during the Second World War kidnapped a German General in Crete and one snowy morning he saw the general looking at a snow-covered mountain and heard him reciting parts of Horace's Ode 1.9 (in Latin, of course) and the Englishman completed the stanza and from then on, a kind of bond developed between the prisoner and the jailer, a sense of belonging to the same culture to which they both were dismantling. It was a poetic moment, too much like (or even inspired) by the famous film on WWI. If you know it, here it is to re-read; if you don't I hoe you will enjoy reading it.

Horace Ode 1.9 Translated Franklin P. Adams

How snowy white Soracte stands!
How still the streams with cold!
Pile the logs higher upon the fire!
Decant that four-year old!

Leave to the gods the other things!
The ash and cypress trees
Shall fall asleep when on the deep
Blows not the battling breeze.

Ask not about the morrow morn;
Take what the gods may give,
Nor scorn the dance and sweet romance --
Life is not long to live.

Come seek the Campus and the squares,
As fall the shades of night,
Where many a maid, all unafraid,
Laughs absolute delight.

II

Soracte's snowy crest behold!
The forecast is "Continued Cold."
Come, turn the oil-burner up a notch,
And let us crack a quart of Scotch.

Fear not tomorrow's tragic tricks!
What boots who wins in '36?
Neglect not now the useful chance
For wine and women, song and dance.

And that reminds me: let us fare
To see the doings round the Square,
Where, if we play our cards aright,
We may find ladies out tonight.

Chaos and the murder of Iraqi Academics

2006-05-18T09:34:00.000-04:00

There has been a whirlwind of emails and comments in the Blogosphere about the kidnapping and murder of many academics in Iraq. Between 180 and 300 have been killed recently, and intmidation is continuing. There have been two conferences in Madrid and Amman. There is a website for signing petitions and hundreds if not thousands of academics like myself have signed it. I was interviewed on WBAI, the altrnative NYC radio station on this subject recently. A new statistical analysis shows that the majority of professors killed were in Baghdad but also elsewhere, hardly a city with a uinversity has escaped. Who is doing this? and Why? Are academics really being targeted? These are the questions on everybody's mind and unfortunately my interviewer at WBAI was not happy with my response.
The sad truth about Iraq is much worse than any possible theory about who would benefit from depelting the intellectual capital of Iraq, the obvious starting point of analysis of the problem. I am afraid the problem is much much worse. The situation in Iraq is such that it has become a magnet for criminals of every known stripe from the region. The number of deaths in Iraq has been estimated by many organizations including even now President Bush and his Defense Department which refused to do that until recently. Their estimate is about 30,000. But the most scientifically rigorous study was done by Robers et al.,and published in the Lancet in September 2004. In it these professional epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health performed a cluster analysis whereby they chose representative regions in Iraq and then they went and intervewed everybody in this region (or neighborhood). Their estimate (as of end of summer 2004) was that there have been 100,000 people killed as a consequence of the war. This is now almost two years ago now and one expects since the killing has actually increased that the number now may be twice as many.
Two hundred thousand people killed! in a population that is close to 20 million; almost 1% of the population has been killed! A tragedy beyond comprehension. When you look at these numbers and say 200 academics have been killed i.e. 0.1% of those killed are academics. What is the proportion of academics in the population killed; 1 in 1000 does not sound implausible; so can one actually say that academics have been specifically targeted? It is probably part of the crime wave sweeping Iraq. Academic being educated and thus capable og holding political opinions are more likely to be killed as a part of a political crime wave. Since they are also middle class, they also would likely have more money than the average Iraqi and hence will become the target of kidnapping and extortion. Is this the explanation; "merely" chaos and a massive crime wave. Lack of public order, police composed largely of militias whose allegiance is to a political or sectarian group, corruption and porous borders allowing regional gangs to come in and prey on the defenseless population all contribute to this.
We need to weep for all those killed, academics and non-academics alike; the thousands of people killed without any cause; they and their dependents are the one who are suffering from this horrid situation.

Zakaria Mousaoui the Cockroach

2006-05-17T15:52:00.000-04:00

The end of the Zakaria Mousaoui affair reminded me of a short story I once read many years ago by Gogol (I think I am remmebring this correctly). In it a low level bureaucrat is gets humiliated by his superiors who themselves are low level civil servants, but the story is a description of the exercise of power on the powerless. After a particularly unnecessary reprimand, the hero (if he can be called that) stands up from his shabby desk and chair, walks to the door only to see a large cockroach scurrying out of his wway. He parries here and there and eventually he strikes the roach with his boot and crushes him into the gorund. Here is our man Zakaria, a proven liar and braggart and somewhat unhinged mentally. It was abundantly clear that he was neither one of the 19 nor was he connected to them. Eventually a few jurors realized that. But our Society has been wounded and humiliated by the attack of the 19, a sense of powerlessness is pervasive in the land; so much so that we let our government do anything it wants in order to protect us. We lash out at Iraq where now more than 100,000 had died. Of course, they are far away and it is now obvious to all that they are not part of the conspiracy. But here is the roach, running away from the boot and a good case was made that even if he was not one of the 19, he wanted to be one of them. So the boot came down on him, to do something worse than crushing him; solitary confinement for life.

The FBI and Me

2006-05-12T15:48:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning thinking of the FBI; I am not sure what brought that on; maybe the Congessional debate about phone tapping and how I am sure my phone is being listened to especially when I speak to my sisters or brothers in Arabic. I have been interrogated by the FBI three times; they say interviewed. Two of them were phone interviews of a benign "due diligence" type; one of these rather amusing. They called me after 9/11 and started by asking "Did you see OSama Bin Laden on TV last night"; I said No. They said, "Well you know he has kidney failure" I said I dont know that he does. They said "Well, we are told that his Nephrologist is an Iraqi doctor and in that film we think he was standing next to OBL; Since you are the most prominent Iraqi Nephrologist (You see! They knew that flattery will get them everywhere with me; it comes from careful wire-tapping) if we showed you the film would you recognize him? I said it depends on his age; Since I left Baghdad in 1967, if he was my age I might but if he is younger I wouldnt. So they said "thank you very much" and that was that.
Then after the invasion of Bgahdad, sometime around this time in 2003, I was sitting at home at night when the doorbell downstairs rang and when I asked who it was (since I wasn't expecting anybody) They answered ; "Please let us in; We are with the Police"!.They came and "politely" forced their way in by saying they are the FBI and they want to come in,; I said No, we can talk at the door, to which they replied; I don't thin you want your neighbors to know that the FBI is talking to you. Good point I said. They walked in; the agent was a white serious looking woman in her late thirties, early forties accompanied by a flunky who was a tall skinny and kind of obsequious wearing a "flasher" raincoat. They sat down and she started to ask me all sorts of ordinary questions while he took notes; how long have I been in the US, in NY, Who do I live with, what do I do, what is my social security number, do I have a car, etc. I kept replying them in an angry tone of voice that all of this information is public knowledge and can be obtained from my website; Her answer was that we give them too much credit, it is all the effect of the movies she said we are not that technologically advanced!; Then the flunky said that he wants to go to the bathroom, obviously to look at all the spaces in the apartment; so when he came back; they asked me do I know any terrorists; I broke put laughing and went into my professorial mode, telling them one should never ask a question whose answer is known beforehand; would anybody tell an FBO agent that he would know a terrorist? They were not amused. They liked the apartment and tried to make some chatty conversation which I immediately stopped them saying that I am not interested in their views on interior design. As they were leavig they told that could I please call them if I notice any suspicious activity anywhere and then she gave me her card and left.
Few days later, the NY Times had an article saying that the FBI had interrogated 18,000 Iraqi Americans. Does that make sense? In those days, you may remember, the story being pushed by the Administration is that we were being welcomed as liberators with flowers and sweets, in the words of one of their defenders (kenan Mekkiya, I think). Given that we, Iraqi-Americans are here in the US it follows, almost by definition that we are not Saddamites, or as Rummy says, Saddamite dead-enders. SO how do you explain that?

God Is Great ! or Greater !!!

2006-05-08T20:28:00.000-04:00

Every time I open a newspaper or a book or anything that deals with Islam or Muslims there is always the word Allahu Akbar; the battle cry of Muslims, always translated ad nauseam by one and all, Muslims and others as God is Great! First let me say, that it is true that it is a battle cry; but much more so since over the centuries it became part of the common language of Arabs and Muslims.
But its translation is not, repeat, not God is Great. The correct translation is God is Greater; (read Greater than my enemies); which is what a battle cry should say; you shout at your enemy that God is Greater (than you; you scum) and since (by definition of all battle cries) God is on your side; therefore you will win.
How could anybody think that a long civilization full of philospophers would allow a tautology such as God is Great to be part of the parlance of Faith. God is Great? Really? I thought this is by definition!! You cannot be Allah without being Great!! But being Greater implies much more, I know, here I am being pedantic. So why doesn't anybody write to the New York Times to tell them this. The problem, shocking as it may sound, is that many non-arab Muslims also think that the translation of Allahu Akbar is God is Great. You see, the word has become so much part of the language that it is no longer used simply as the battle cry. Rather, it is the kind of thing a Muslim would say in times of trouble, of anger (at his wife or children) of frustration; or even jubilation (to imply humility in the face of excess or undeserved beneficence). Think of what Beyond the Pale means; everybody knows what it means, but nobody knows that it refers to The Pale in Ireland and what actually beyond it signified.

The Art of Science

2006-05-05T12:36:00.000-04:00

Readers of this blog may enjoy the results of the competition held by the pharmaceutical company Novartis for beautiful photographs that are scientifically inspired. Their Visions of Science web site has many of the winning pictures some of which are marvelous. Look especially at one of the 2005 winners which looks like a group of people with raised hands but is in fact "just" a few drops of blue ink diffusing into water.

Common Sense and Scientific Insight

2006-05-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

The word "conventional wisdom" invented by John Kenneth Galbraith (who died last week) is a wonderful phrase, though always used as a something of a pejorative. Conventional wisdom is there to be attacked and shown to be neither wise nor true but merely common. In this respect it is similar to common sense; though common sense is always used as a positive statement. I, myself have always detested common sense when it is applied to sicentific findings and get very irritated when some one says "Ah yes, it makes sense". Most important discoveries in science especially in biomedical science have shown that common sense explanations are wrong. Every time I discuss this with students, they think that this is just a witty way of forcing them to think in a new way. My retort is that common sense is just the accumulation of our biases and intuitions; it is not based on a clear understanding of the mechanism of any phenomenon. But is there a way of actually proving that this is indeed the case? Can one actually show that scientific discoveries are "counter-intuitive"? Well, recently, Jasienki invented a clever and simple way of finding out. He asked; how often do scientists use the word surprising, unexpected, unusual in their publications. He examined the whole scientific database of 30 million abstracts finding that "surprising" appeared 10 times more frequently than in standard English texts and "unexpected" was 39 times more frequent.
This, however should not be taken as a "proof" of my idea above. Does the use of the term in a paper really reflect actual surprise? We should be careful since here we are in the murky realm of psychology and public relations rather than rigorous investigation. Scientists get more kudos if their results are actually surprising or unexpected; no scientist wants to conclude that his results are predictable. So how does one really get at the problem of distinguishing between truth and common sense?
This is especially difficult since humans have a kind of intuition about how the world works based on observation, this intuition is of course the basis of our notions of common sense. Anthropologists have discovered that our way of classifying animals, plants and minerals have been proven to be the same as the scientific system of classification. A systematic way of seeing whether any intuition is correct is to often test ourselves; for instance when reflecting on some natural phenomenon (metabolsim, reproduction, gravity, light, etc) we should make a hypothesis about its mechanism, then open a Physics or Biology book and compare. I bet that we will be closer in physics (classical physics that is not the quantum variety) than in biology. Because in biology, it was evolution that determined the mechanism. Evolution works in a random manner; a mutation happened in one gene and if the environment was the right kind (say temperature or altitutde) at the time of the mutation, then the mutation will be propagated and cause a new function. But the environment on earth is so varied that we could have the opposite case happen somewhere else. Fracois Jacob in his wonderful little book The Possible and the Actual made a brilliant metaphor when he said that evolution when it discovers a new "machine" did not do it as an engineer would, that is start from a blueprint and design something from a priori conclusions based on common knowledge of things that work. Rather evolution functioned much as a tinkerer, that is somebody who uses whatever there is to hand to cut and paste and patch up until he comes up with a machine that works that day in that garage.

The Past is a Foreign Country or is It?

2006-04-24T15:34:00.000-04:00

I have always wondered why we can never read the medical history and analyse the illnesses in past generations. Is it because physicians of old could not measure temperature or blood pressure. Or are we discovering new illnesses (No, that is not the explanation, even though we are discovering new illnesses all the time). These ruminations were on my mind last Sunday as I sauntered over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to look at an exhibition on medicine in Egyptian Antiquity. The centerpiece of this delightfully small exhibition is the Edwin Smith Papyrus with the pages newly restored, remounted and translated. This celebrated text, beautifully written in black and red ink dates from the 18th Dynasty, c.1600 BC, though scholars think that much of the information is based on more ancient sources . A beautiful catalogue accompanies this exhibition and presents the complete translation of the 18 pages of text.

The papyrus, obviously part of a textbook of Surgery lists a number of cases. The amazing findings of this marvelous text are the ease with which a modern physician can readily understand what is being said and agree with the diagnosis and prognosis. One of the cases listed on page 8 reads as follows:

Case 22 Fracture of the Temporal Bone
Title Practices for a fracture in his temple
Examination and Prognosis
If you treat a man for a fracture in his temple, you have to put your finger on his chin and your finger on the end of his ramus. Blood will fall from his nostrils and the interior of his ears from that fracture. Wipe for him with a plug of cloth until you see its chips inside his ears. If you have called to him and he is dazed and does not speak, then you say about him “One who has a fracture in his temple, who bleeds from his nostrils and his ears, is dazed and suffers stiffness in his neck : an ailment for which nothing is done”
Explanations
As for “the end of the ramus” it is the end of his jawbone. The ramus ends in his temple, like the claw of a plover taking hold of something.
As for “you see its chips inside the ears” it means that chips of bone keep coming to adhere to the plug inserted to wipe his ears.
As for “he is dazed”, it means that he is continually still and in depression, without speaking, like one who has paralysis, because of something that will has entered from outside.

How come we recognize everything the ancient Egytptian physician says? I think it is because he is describing a surgical condition rather than a medical one. Our brains have not evolved over the past 50,000 years; so the ancients already had the same powers of observation and analysis as we do. Humans have an intuitive sense of biology and medicine. This includes anatomy, physiology and taxonomy. Anthropologists now have a consensus that most “primitive” humans classify animals, minerals and plants in a similar manner. One of Aristotle’s most successful and lasting contributions have been his insights into biology. He was a keen observer of nature and made conclusions based on observations that remain astonishing to this day, for instance to decide that a dolphin is a mammal is a remarkable achievement. This intuitive medicine was especially strong among Surgical Scientists especially those that dealt with trauma. It is likely that the need to do something urgent forced many ancient physicians to intervene and study the wounds, try to do something about them and later follow the patients and see how and if they recovered. As seen in Case 22 above, the conclusions remain correct to this day. Very little in terms of analysis of the hidden life of the organism was needed; the wound exposed that which was covered. No knowledge of the core body temperature, blood pressure, kidney function tests or whatever was needed to make a prognosis. It is wonderful to hear that voice talking to us across the millenia telling in these measured tones and serious phrases that things have not changed; when your patient has a temporal bone fracture he will bleed from the ear and the nose and his consciousness could be impaired and that this actually does not require an emergency MRI. His prognosis is bad, or as we say these days guarded; but probably the only thing the patient's family would not do in ancient Egypt is sue the doctor consoling themselves only with bringing curses on his head when the inevitable happened .

We are all Connected

2006-04-22T11:27:00.000-04:00

I had invited my colleague Duncan Watts to give a before dinner talk at our annual Departmental Retreat and he gave a talk that managed to enthrall neuroscientists, physiologists and a variety of friends. Although Duncan is a mathematical physicist by training and is one of the world's foremost Network theorists, he is a Professr of Sociology. He is the author of two enchanting books, Six Degrees and Small Worlds which are great primers of this exciting field. His talk was based on his recent article in Science magazine on the creation of an artificial cultural market. The idea attempted to investigate scientifically the problem of why certain books, songs, plays etc become wildly popular. Why was the original Harry Potter book rejected by all major publishers who reviewed it? How come Titanic a trite film became such a phenomenon? He asked teen-agers who log on to a music web site to download songs of unknown bands. He tried to influence the kids by also telling them which song had been downloaded many times and which was not. Social influence turned out to be a strong predictor but, happpily, inherent quality does play a part in popularity since the best songs never did poorly and the worst songs never rose to the top of the charts; but the noise in the system was deafening. Advertisers are going to increase their fees after this paper! Duncan had also provided the best evidence for the famous Six Degrees of Separation idea; i.e. that we are all connected to every one in the world by only a few steps. He used email to study this phenomenon finding, in another paper finding that the search can reach its target in about 6 steps; but the paper has a wealth of insights about how actually the message travels through the network and what does it take to get it to go.
All the data were impressive but it was his ruminations at the end that were remarkable. He discussed the difficulty of doing sociological research given the fact that to study social interactions seriously one has to have a large number of subjects. Here he thought that Sociology might be enetering into a growth period in large part because of the internet. He was able to get 27,000 teenagres to do this study; in the email study 60,000 people participated. Despite these impressive numbers, he thought that more numbers are needed but that the internet was capable of providing these massive numbers of subjects.
Netowrks are the most exciting frontier of science of organizations today whether one is talking about games, politics electric grids, airports or genetic interactions one is bound to eventualy come up against this new branch of science. But the exciting thing I found in Watts's analysis is that theory is not everything; every network has to be analyzed with knowledge of the startegies,and even motives and perceptions of the individual embedded in the network. Hence, there is hope for those of us working only on a limited number of components interacting in a small network. Our intense focus on a small number of "particles" may not all lead to naught

Bitter Insights into Evolution

2006-04-20T08:29:00.000-04:00

Bitter taste in the life of humans living in the industrial world would seem to be the least "useful" sensation. Unlike pain, it does not save us from harmful environments; we think of life without vision as a bleak nightmare; even the idea of a nightmare is visual. All metaphors and similes we use have allusions to our preferred sensations. Aristotle placed sensations in a hierarchy with sight and hearing at the top. But among salt, sour sweet bitter and umami tastes; sweet must be the most favored. As molecular biology begins to shed some light (there we go again with our metaphors of senses) on these processes, a surprising finding has come about. Sweet taste is encoded by two receptor molecules, but it seems that bitter is subserved by 25 or more? So why do we need so many?
Bitter sensation is what the brain interprets when we don't like a substance and therefore have to avoid it. Since Nature is "Red in tooth and claw"as Tennyson reminds us, that is we only eat other living things, all organisms have evolved toxins to prevent others from eating them. Of course, if you are the "Eaten" you don't want to kill the "Eater" otherwise no lesson will be learnt and you will have to kill everybody (This may explain why mankind appears to be the least evolved animal). What you want to do is to induce a conditioned response, when some animal chews on you it should get intense nasty feeling that causes you to spit it out; so next time it comes near you it will remember that you tasted nasty. So bitter sensation is a great example of plant-animal co-evolution. The plants evolve the bitter compounds and we evolve the avoidance behavior. It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 bitter tasting compounds. Now comes the human genome project showing that all of us have 25 bitter receptors and detailed studies need to be done to categorize these 25 receptors into groups each of which tastes one class of compounds or more.
But do all related animals have the same receptors? They are certainly homologous in amino acid sequence. But the fact that our evolution and diet is so different must mean that there are important differences. The first amazing discovery was that it turned out that there is an insertion in the sweet receptor of cats which completely knocks out its function. Cats cannot therefore taste sweet things and this insertion is proposed to be the reason why cats became carnivores.
A new study in bitter taste gives another strange insight. The chimpanzee genome was recently completed and as is well known ours is incredibly close to it in sequence. For almost a century evolutionary biologists have stated that we have evolved from a common ancestor. One evidence (among many) is that the bitter taste of chimps exhibits the same variation as ours. A significant fraction of mankind cannot taste the bitter compound PTC (phenylthiocarbamide), a mutation inherited as an autosomal recessive though with much complexity. It is so common that many high school biology students use sticks impregnated with PTC to test their families and develop a sense of Mendelian genetics. Chimps also have a common defect in PTC sensation. In a classic study done in 1939 Fisher and Huxley showed that chimps exhibit the same PTC non-tasting behavior as humans and this was considered to be one of the major evidences for our common ancestry. Now, studies of a large cohort of chimps showed that the DNA sequence of the bitter receptor bears some mutations in the human which can explain the lack of function of the receptor; one of three amino acids are changed and they prevent activation or binding of PTC to its receptor. But when the same receptors were studied in the non-taster chimps, the results were surprisingly different. The mutation in the chimp receptor knocked out expression of the protein rather than change the amino acid composition. Hence the mutations arose independently from that of huamn. The human mutation is pretty ancient and has been estimated to have arisen before we left Africa. But what is important in these studies is that it directs the attention of biologists away from the business of saying which arose from whom towards a more complex but individual view of evolution. Each species lives in an ecologic niche; each of us have to evolve according to our needs, and yes even taste. We may not like bananas (or apples, which is apparently what the chimps liked in the study discussed above) but our taste sensations evolved to avoid the things that we come in contact with, and the things we like. Adding complexity to these discussions is not going to make life easy for us at an experimental levels and it also will make it more difficult to explain evolution in the political arena. But what it is going to do is to force us to think that there is no animal model for man, at least in the case of taste studies; this could come as a comfort to people who want us to be at the top of the Great Chain of Being.

Nozze di Figaro in Arabic!

2006-04-19T22:15:00.000-04:00

I was listening to France Musique; the classical music station of Radio France on the internet and heard a very nice conversation about Mozart and his universality. Then the talk stopped and out came "Aprite un po' quegli'occhi" Figaro's fourth act aria where he tells the men of the audience how they should open their eyes to women's perfidy. But it sounded strange, not italian certainly, then suddenly I realized it was in arabic; I just could not believe this! I listened some more; it stopped and out came the great trio from Cosi Fan Tutte, again in Arabic; followed by La ci darem la mano, also in the Language of the DHAD; as we say. What was going on? The conversation began again and it appeared that one of the speakers was the director of the Opera House in Cairo (where Aida had its first performance) opining about how important it is for the opera to be understood by the audience especially when it is a comedy. All arguments well rehearesed in all operatic circles; so what next? Lakme in Hindi? Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail in Turkish (already done, I am told by the radio anouncer and in the courtyard of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul no less). Well OK, but what is critical here is whether the singers can make the words understandable; the diction of most international singers who sing in foreign languages is largely atrocious, and this has nothing to do with the quality of the voices; Joan Sutherland only sang vowels regardless of the language she sang in. The old argument "Prima La Parola e poi La musica" has never carried any weight with me; give me the original tongue always, that is what the composer intended. And now with super-titles or Met titles, you get the translation so if you dont know the language you know what is being said. As many of you know, opera in English is the stock in trade of the English National Opera which has been a great success, but I am told now that for opera in English you also get supertitles, because none of the English can understand their compatriots speaking the Queen's Tongue. Prima la Musica e poi la parola I say.

The Active and Contemplative Life

2006-04-15T12:13:00.000-04:00

My French teacher today used something called "The Proust Questionnaire" a list of questions found among Proust's effects after his death written, they say as an aid to conversation; one will have to check with a Proust scholar on its veracity since I find it difficult to think that Proust needed a written list of questions as an aid to conversation. Regardless, it is a popular teaching tool, I am told, useful to start conversations and includes questions such as what is your biggest defect? what makes you laugh? What is you largest ambition etc. So Michel was asking Selma Votre occupation preferée? and she kept going from one thing to another such as faire la cuisine, faire la this faire le that and finally he asked what about him? and she Toujours dormir! After she left to faire ses courses he said that her occupation is to faire l'activité. So what about you, he asked? Here I remembered reading somewhere (I think in Hannah Arendt's Thinking or was it Willing?) that medieval monks divided life into the Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa. Expanding on this, I was saying that each of us is born with both but in some one type is dominant over the other. Also, there is a tension between these two and that some of us with an excess of one always envy those with the other. Or do they? I bet those with the contemplative habit of mind always envy those who are active; they seem to be doing so much and enjoying life so much more than we do! All we can do is to read or muse or gaze into infinity. I remember one wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker many many years ago which showed two little girls talking about a young boy in the distance and one of them is saying "I stopped seeing him; his knowledge only comes from books". Well; Voilà.

Do Books read us or is it the other way around

2006-04-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

I woke up today thinking of something I read in some book by Edmund Wilson: the idea that it is actually books that read us not the other way round. I remembered the words though not verbatim "Proust read me when I was young and found me boring and long-winded and had no patience or sophistication, but now that I am more mature he read me again and found me more tolerant and full of insight" I wish I could find the original quotation but I tried Google with little luck. I was also reminded of my father who once told me that I should have a cache of ten books that I should re-read every ten years. The idea was that I would thereby gauge my progress in life.

12th Century Map of Iraq

2006-04-12T11:30:00.000-04:00

Here is a beautiful map of Iraq dated 589H/ 1193 AD. It is from a book by the medieval traveller Al-Isttakhri called Kitab Al-Masalik wal mamalik i.e The Book of Paths and Kingdoms. In easily readable (though not great calligraphy)arabic script are written variuous names of towns rivers etc. On top in Gold Letters is "Picture of Iraq". East and West written in gold letters at the top corners. The Persian Gulf, in blue at bottom called Persian Sea. The Tigris is the long blue line in the center. Baghdad is the large red circle near the top. A red circle ion bottom right on the Persian Gulf is Abadan and above it in blue circle is Basra. The thin red line surrounding it is supposed to be a boundary, to the right is Khorassan and on top right Azerbaijan

Junk Science that costs $420 million

2006-04-10T14:07:00.000-04:00

The results are out and everybody is angry, but as usual for different reasons. The effect of fat in the diet was studied in 48,000 women. The paper was published in the front page of the New York Times, also in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The cost to the taxpayer was a mere $420 million! The results, trumpeted in all venues,seems to say that there is no effect of reduction of fat in the diet on cancer or on heart attacks. So should everybody now rush to their refrigerators and started gobbling up Haagen Dasz buckets?
Reading the paper however will show the reader what a waste of money the whole thing was. They tried to reduce the fat content of the diet in half of their subject, they succeeded in reducing it by 8%. But this reduction had no influence to speak of on the cholesterol level; since this is the "toxic" material, the results of the study were not very informative. They managed to increase the vegetable and grain intake of their experimental subjects, they barely did by one serving of vegetable or fruit and by half a serving of grain. The only conclusion I draw from this study is that it is difficult to take a large number of people and convince them to reduce their fat intake significantly enough to affect the parameters of interest. But I think I (and you dear reader) knew this already and we did not need a massive study to tell us.
The problem with studies like this is not poor design or lack of resources (420 million of them) but rather it is lack of insight into human nature or into scientific principles. My anger is directed at the people who under-wrote this study or forced it to be done. These include many people; Congressmen who think that NIH does not study issues related to health in people or women often enough, NIH staff members who love to have their own "portfolios of grants under their direct control ; NIH leadership itself which allows such an exorbitant amount of money to be wasted. An average grant of $1 million supports an individual scientist for five years. We live in the golden age of biomedical research where there are still enormous amounts of important things to discover. This study took the money from 420 scientists who would have toiled in the rich fields of real science for five years. If even 1% of them produced important results in some field, even of women's health, the whole world of health related research would have been the benficiary. This amount of money is equivalent to the whole national science bidget of many smaller industrialized countries, would they have wasted their resources on something like this?
I don't know how many of you have heard of Junk Science and Sound Science, the new clasiification invented by Right wing politicans. The former includes environmental research on the effect of pollutants that seem to contradict the government's policies and the latter might include things that they woiuld agree with. I am becominga Republican and want to have this kind of Junk Science thrown out but more improtantly prevented.

The Needle in the Haystack

2006-04-07T16:38:00.000-04:00

I am wading through the results of the examination that we gave last Monday and I find that the statistics are unusually strange. Of course the multiple choice exam had an average correct answer rate of 90%. The conclusion is that it was not a discriminating examination. We select medical students for their ability to correctly answer multiple choice examinations without knowing the material, only relying on the internal logic of the question. In the essay examination, the results were depressing. On the one hand, doctors (even student ones) are likely to be genetically predisposed to have bad hand-writing skills, but it was awful to try ot read 150 examples of bad writing. Syntax and sentences that contain verbs have never been a pre-requisite for entrance into medical school and there was ample evidence of that here too. But in terms of the actual substance of the material, I was lucky; there were about 20% of the class who said the right things and said them correctly, one so well that it was as good or better than the answers that I prepared (modesty is irrelevant here, since I determine what is correct). So clearly the message had been communicated to the blessed few. But the response of some students was so verbose, that it took an act of faith to identify the proverbial needle of truth in the haystack of verbiage. Some adamantly refused to answer the question as if on principle; they seemed to be participating in an experiment of cognitive dissonance but have refused to resolve the conflict. Some answers made sense without being correct, others were correct without making sense a third were neither correct nor made sense. The first and third got no credit while the second got some. So diversity ruled! Yet another problem was the lack of perfect correlation between attendance in class, active participation in the discussions or appearance of caring about the answers, obviously that was my lack of insight as a teacher of who understood and who did not. So at the end, instead of having a smooth Gaussian curve, I got a family of curves (using different y-axis parameters) that overlapped and which could not be averaged using any of the normal proofs of probability theory.

Perfect Pitch

2006-04-02T16:35:00.000-04:00

Spring at last! Flowers are shooting out of the dry twigs on Broadway, the magnolias in the center aisles are budding and even if the trees are not M. grandiflora it is still a great sight to see. There was even a cherry tree out in obscene blossoms in Riverside Drive at about 110th St. Riverside Park was full of daffodils and the garden there around 88th had many gardeners busily cleaning and planting new things. The park itself was blooming with people in various degrees of undress. Near us many young musicians were out probably from Manhattan School of Music carrying their violin or flute cases; every single one of them looking Chinese or Korean. Is there some cabal here in music schools that is doing ethnic profiling in reverse preventing WASPs, Jews and other white people from entering to MSM and Julliard? There is a mechanism at work as sinister as a cabal; it is called Genes.
Absolute pitch is the ability of a person to sing or identify any note in isolation. The test is straightforward, you strike a C on the piano and the person will say C and often in which octave too. Ordinary people cannot do that, they have to hear other notes and then can identify it. With training all musicians learn how to do that but it is a struggle and if you stop playing like I did many years ago, I can recognize it but only when the musical phrase is sung and even then it is difficult. Of course, to be tested for this trait you must have first learned solfeggio that is to sing the musical scale calling certain notes by their (western) names before a cognitive psychologist can say you have perfect pitch.
Studies on Absolute Pitch have started to show that it is likely to be of genetic origin. Siblings of children with absolute pitch have a higher incidence of it and especially when they are identical twins. The most interesting new results are that absolute pitch is more frequent in Oriental people and the frequency is equally high among Koreans Japanese and Chinese even though these three groups have widely differing cutlural attitutudes to music and music education. Despite that, you cannot now go to an orchestral concert without seeing that a significant if not a majority of the players have oriental faces. Of course it could be that children from other backgrounds are allowed to listen to music at such high decibels that they have gone deaf . But that is another story.
How come it is genetic? Is it like color vision? with its own separate receptors (cones) in the retina. Or is it more like three dimensional vision which requires that the pathways develop after birth. If like the latter then it requires both an environmental input (musical education early in life) and the genetic predisposition to develop the pathway. A more rigorous test, such as a mutation that prevents somebody from recognizing a pitch has not been identified and the evidence is still somewhat correlative. At any rate people with absolute pitch likely live in a completely different world than the rest of us. Even ordinary sounds must have a different quality and I have attacks of envy of those that live a more charmed existence full of interesting musical tones. Is their life similar to that of those with color vision living a fully vivid life while the color blind are banished to a more washed up view of the world? The color blind of course do not know what they are missing. But if it turns out that absolute pitch is more similar to 3D vision, then they may not be living such exalted lives. I don't have 3D vision and as a child I never understood why my peers were screaming when we saw these movies using green and red glasses where the train coming at you, I always thought that they were pretending to see something that I didn't see; I saw the train coming at me but I never thought it was that frightening, now i know I only saw it in 2D. I only discovered that I had this defect late in life.

Eight Glasses of Water a Day?

2006-04-01T14:58:00.000-05:00

Yet another lady at dinner insisting that I don't know what I am talking about when I told her that there is no reason to drink 8 glasses of water a day. I get dehydrated she says; New York has dry air, I can feel my skin getting dry. Where does one start? We have the best protective mechanism for preventing dehydration; it is called Thirst! the most potent sensation we have. We drink coffee and tea, beer and wine and eat only cells which are three quarters water anyway. If we get thirsty we will drink. Skin getting dry has nothing to do with water or dehydration; if it did the Cosmetics Industry with its zillions of emollients, creams made of exotic ingredients like placenta (it is true), DNA etc will have collapsed a long time ago. What do you tell her, dry skin is probably genetic, you come from Northern European stock, you will get atrophic skin in a few years also cancer of the skin not to mention wrinkeles a plissée. She says maybe it is useful to wash away the bad toxins the the kidney accumulates every day; well it does not accumulate them and what is the need for washing them when we are laready "peeing" them out. She says the New York Times says so. So there! we brought in the names of the Gods. I have no idea where the NYT comes up with these insights.

The Affiliation of Art with the Facts of Power

2006-03-30T19:58:00.000-05:00

Today Frank Kermode gave the second Edward Said Lecture at Columbia. A small crowd, luckily, I think, no members of the David Project heckling, no hyper-guilty Germans asking about Wagner's anti-Semitic music, no Alan Dershowitz ready to come to the defense of the Israelis, but we awaittomorrow's New York Sun for its vitriol. Luckily, the President of the University was absent, so we were spared his mispronounciation of the name of the honored guest (last year he couldn't even pronounce Barenboim properly).
Kermode, one of the greatest living English literary critics was introduced by James Wood, another great critic. The title of his talk was The Anglo-Irish Yeats: Living on a Hyphen. He opened the Lecture quoting Edward on the necessity of discussing and studying the artist's political beliefs even if as always art must be dominant. Yeats wwas the ultimate hyphenated man; a Gael speaking English, a Protestant from a Catholic Country, Dublin was his home but his address was in London. Kermode discussed his politics, the "good" at the beginning of his career, a belief in the unity and freedom of Ireland and the one at the end where he sympathised with Fascism. In the early years during the Uprising at the Post Office on Easter 1916, he was typically, you might say, not in Dublin but in an English country house belonging to a friend. Yet the product of his feelings was one of the greatest poems of the 20th Century. Kermode went through the poem underlining its lullaby like beginning. He made the wonderful point that despite the role and fame of this poem as an incendiary tract, it actually was not a fanatical poem as you can hear in the following:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

But there was also a celebration of the Sixteen who were executed by the English

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

bringing a mythical edge to the event. Then comes the curious descent at the end of his life into a love of Eugenics, a dislike of the petty bourgeois and the lower classes (peasants excluded) and a love of the upper classes.
A wonderful tribute to the life of Edward Said, a man whose great intellectual contribution was in Literary Criticsm but whose political inclinations were worn on his sleeves. He thought it a duty to speak out against all outrages from whatever side. Attacked by the lovers of Israel on a continuous and shrill basis his books were banned by Yasir Arafat in Palestine for a period. He never lost his belief that justice will be done in the end, but only if everybody speaks Truth to Power.RIP; A terrible hole appeared in our life with his death.

Today! The Noise is the Signal

2006-03-29T22:10:00.000-05:00

To electrophysiologists of a certain age Noise Analysis was the hottest thing since the proverbial sliced bread. Using this method (and those of you un-intimidated by equations click above on noise analysis) it was possible to analyze the dynamics of ion channels. All this was wiped out by single channel recordings using the patch clamp. Noise is simply the fluctuation in the current in an electrical circuit but it can be generalized to any circuit including information flow circuits such as looking at blogs.
I started thinking about writing a blog when on the way to a restaurant a friend got a call from Jeremy Denk and he told me later, Joe that is, that Alex Ross, listed Denk's blog as one of the best in music. I immediately checked it out and checked Ross's as well and I was mesmerized by the intelligence, wit, sophistication and diverse interests but especially by the eloquence of their musicspeak. So I started my own blog with no idea that anyone would read it unlike the interest that either of them very likely generate, one being a rising pianist and the other the music critic of The New Yorker. Denk has a devoted coterie of groupies (myself included) who constantly comment on his blog. Ross, the ultimate professional, directs people towards the most interesting writings about music in the blogosphere (always spelt in Scandinavian script).
So I started writing not expecting anybody to notice. Then I came across a site which counts the number of times anybody opens your web page. I started seening with great surprise that there were actually a few hits every now and then and they slowly increased. Noise analysis is a way of quantitating these events; the fundamental premise of electric current analysis is that each electron is completely independent of other electrons (I think this is the Pauli exclusion principle, but I have to check this). But is each visitor really independent; how do people find out about these blogs; just like I did by a random encounter with another person? I suppose that this is the case but there is a word of mouth section which we need to introduce into the circuit here. Yet when I look at the description of servers that are being used, most are "columbia.edu"; most but certainly not all; many have just IP numbers but you can tell they are from as far away as New Mexico. Then suddenly this week something happened; instead of a few visits a day there were a hundred or more a day! Again mostly columbia.edu. So what happened? Are these the students hoping that I will reveal the exam questions? Look! I am not complaining here; I am grateful that tens of people want to spend on average 6.23 minutes of their time on each page some spending 26.53 minutes! I am terribly flattered; Believe me the exam will be easy! It takes true genius to flunk at Columbia University's College of Physicians & Surgeons. In addition, grading students is a negative feed-back system: If you flunk, I have to give you a tutorial of a few hours followed by another exam. Why aren't you preparing for the exam, I sayand why is it taking you 26 minutes to read this page?
I will be keeping score here to see if the blog hit rate is proportional to the inherent interest of the content, let alone the courses I teach; this would be a nice research project. I could finally be reduced to respecting Epidemiology by using it to try and analyze the hit rate as a function of various types of information; sub-group analysis as they say. In this way I would like to come to the conclusion mentioned in the title, that the Noise itself is the proper subject of study being itself The Signal.

Teaching is for the Teacher

2006-03-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

One more day of classes followed by a Monday exam and I will be free. This class is quiet, I dont detect any of the usual furrowed brows and worried looks. Look up Jeremy Denk's blog (see link) he makes the ingenious idea that the opposite of happiness is not sadness but worry! All medical students will vouch for that. I will miss this class, though. Nobody even once mentioned that they have to pay $40,000 a year in tuition, as if all that money comes to me. I ran into one of my students in the subway yesterday and she said that next year's class is even more serious and "nerdy" such that she is worried that the extracurricular activities like their theater and music are going to be in trouble. How could something like this happen? You take 150 students at random and you put them in the same environment and they suddenly develop a distinctive group personality. Perhaps a few of them have sufficiently dominant personalities that imprints itself on the rest. I bet though, that it is only those with negative personalities that have the greatest effect. My small group section has 25 earnest young men and women who look like they are listening; but who knows? One of them is a man after my own heart; alert, always thinking but often at a tangent to the real question which throws a new light on the problem. Somebody had asked "how come our blood has the high salt concentration it has" and I mentioned the standard answer that since animals evovled in the primeval waters they entrapped some of the ocean as their milieu interieure. But for the life of me I could not remember who came up with this idea, Homer W. Smith ( or Lee J. Henderson(? But since amphibia had a much lower salt content and fishes even lower, it was concluded that the oceans of the early Earth had a much lower salt concentration and that the rains over the eons leached the salt out of the earth's crust. It sounded (and still sounds) very cute as an idea. Anyway, I got an email from him (at 1 AM) in which he tells me that he found an article by L. Paul Knauth in Nature in which it is claimed that the original oceans were much saltier than today's. It was a written by a geologist whose papers seem to be all about Mars. A close reading though, shows that it was really a speculation, I could not tell, not being a geologist how good the argument was, but then the evolutionary idea of the salt concentration is itself a speculation. At any rate, the most enlightening phrase in the Knauf piece is that he mentions that evolution of metazoa could have started in the briny estuaries of rivers; so evolutionists could remain happy and only geologists will have to slug it out. But he does say that maybe early life was more tolerant of high salinity which I seriously doubt or that it arose in non-marine environments. But we have to start from the idea that it started in water. We are all water based.
This is what I will miss when the class ends next week. After all why should one teach if not to learn. It was best said (as usual) by the Bard of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman; "Teaching is for the Teacher". I guess now I have to find out where Whitman said this.

Faith-based Art appreciation in New York

2006-03-24T21:28:00.000-05:00

Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, the Musica Sacra choir and orchestra and St Matthew's Passion. The chorus sounded well and at times even wonderful, the conducting was slack and slow without being stately, the most important role that of the Evangelist was a disaster, Jesus had a stentorian voice and at first I thought that he looked the part; tall with flowing blondish hair, until one could focus well only to find that he certainly did not look ascetic. What happened to Jennifer Larmore she certainly did not project her usual glorious dark sound. By the time the end came, one forgot and forgave everything; when the great chorus Wir setzen uns began, the depth of feeling was unmistakable. Where have they been? It is probably 10 year since I heard them do this and I stopped going to their seasonal Messiahs.
But it was the audience that was really different; there were no slim young men in pairs or small groups wearing very short jackets, no super thin young women in black and very short hair; no super thin rich looking ladies d'une age certaine. Everybody looked; well american as oppose to New York. Young blonde women not thin; the average weight everywhere was closer to the american average. Nobody was in black, plenty of ladies in Red, dressed in, as Selma always says american women's favorite color. Then we started to notice that when the chorales were sung the whole second tier boxes stood up and sang them! Remarkably one could not hear their efforts, the sound from the stage was so beautifully focused. The singers, presumably amateurs looked like they were church going folk who had very placid sincere looks without wearing beatific smiles but there certainly was not a hint of smugness. It is what a community does (did in Bach's time) in church when it hears religious music. Presumably, it was pre-arranged since they were only in the second tier rather than sprinkled everywhere had they been spontaneous. I have noticed that when Bach passions are played the audience is always different but I have never noticed the communal singing and the obvious devotional attitude. Maybe it is this year, but the same thing happened during the Fra Angelico show at the Met. During one of the many times that I went to see that gorgeous show, I saw many women and men standing before one of the great Madonnas in focused contemplation and what even looked like prayer.