Fat

.. is how I feel.

I can't get into the clothes that fit me barely 4 weeks ago.... waaaahhhh

And today I couldn't do any work, because every time I got up to do so, I thought I needed to eat first. And so I did.

And now I'm wondering if I can blame all this on the wiggly fetus (WF, for short) or if I have turned into one of those gluttons who are always craving food just because they are used to eating all the time.

Speaking of WF, Monday will be the day I'll get to check him/her out again- the first time since that day in September when I was expecting to see a ruptured, hemorrhaged, and emptied womb and instead caught sight of my little, dancing WF. That sight was what brought me some degree of feeling, towards WF, warmer than that of imminent doom. You've got to hand it to the kid, surviving a godawful hemorrage and dancing in the aftermath. Of course, WF didn't really look like a kid at the time, more like a baby lizard, but still.

Will I ever be able to fit into my old clothes five months from now? I'll probably have to go on some marathon exercise/crash diet routine to do so. In the meantime, thank God for drawstring pants.

Come to think of it, Monday may be the day I find out if WF is a boy or a girl. From my vast (not) epidemiological studies, I have concluded that people whose origins are from countries where sex testing of fetuses is banned (India, China) or where sex testing is expensive (most of the world) are the ones most likely to instantly agree to find out (once they get pregnant in America, I mean) the sex of their unborn child. Caucasians are the ones who blithely say, 'Oh, we want a surprise'. The rest of the world is in a frenzy to know, to plan and to reorder their thoughts, if necessary.

My gut feeling is that WF is a boy... only because of the rather painful kicks that WF has been administering to me. Surely I was never that active as a child? Oh, let's not forget the amount of food I've been consuming for the past few months now. Surely, I never needed that amount of feeding as a baby?

Digression: My mom says I was a pretty quiet baby, who peed a lot, earning me the nickname of "Boiler"- in those days before Racold Instant Heaters, water would be poured into a big brass vessel known as a boiler, which had a heating coil in it and a few minutes later, hot water would come out through an opening. My uncle apparently thought it was vastly amusing that I did the same.

The sooner I find out what WF is, the better. What if WF is actually a girl? Then all this unconcious thought (not so unconcious now, I guess) about WF being a boy will totally have me unprepared for that.

Not that RK and I are particularly prepared for anything. We don't have a clue about what to do with a baby. RK has plans of speaking only in Sanskrit and of great people who achieved success in the medical and public health fields so that the baby will be motivated to be the same. "Fine, as long as you also change the diapers while doing all this. I've read that baby poop is disgusting and smelly", I tell him. Upon which, he pauses and changes the subject. That is the sum extent of our planning.

In addition to drawstring pants, I also thank God for mothers. Mine and RK's will be there for a few months to help out after the delivery, so I presume they will know what to do.

Fate and the Collider

In the science section of today's online issue of the New York Times, there is an essay by Dennis Overbye called "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate".

Here, he explains a hypothesis put forth by two physicists, a hypothesis, in my opinion, which is outrageous, ridiculous, elegant and beautiful at the same time.
Let me try to put it back here on paper, without seeming like I'm regurgitating Overbye.

The Large Hadron Collider was completed on 10th October 2008. 9 days later, it sputtered to a stop because of a malfunction in its superconductors. Apparently, there was a soldering error.
The error was big enough that it has taken more than a year to repair. The Collider is expected to be back in business in December of this year.

One of the main purposes of the Collider was to isolate something called a Higg's boson. I don't know what that is, and Wikipedia does not explain things in an easy enough manner. What I do know is that a boson is named after Bose- our own, Bangla, Satyendranath Bose (A story for another time: the overt racism of the Nobel committee in not awarding him a prize). There are many types of bosons (whatever they are) and one such boson is called a Higg's boson. It is, of course, only theoretically postulated to exist. Higg's boson is the particle that is expected to give all elements their mass. Without a boson, protons and neutrons won't have mass, which means nothing else in the universe will. Strange, no?

Now for the crazy and wonderful theory: two physicists, Holger Nielson and Masao Ninomiya, have put forth the idea that to make a Higg's boson might be so against the very nature of errr... Nature, that its creation might trigger a backward wave of events that prevent its creation. Huh?

They postulate that it may just be so unnatural for a Higg's boson to be isolated that events will arrange themselves so that it may not be isolated.

Case in point: the October 19th Collider malfunction.
Another case in point: the dismantling of the US Superconducting Supercollider (also designed to find the Higg's boson), despite the fact that billions of dollars had already poured into that project.

See what I mean by ridiculous, yet beautiful hypothesis?

The thing is, there's no way you can prove it for the satisfaction of all. You can only disprove it.... or perhaps you cannot.

A reference to the original essay that prompted this entry: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?ref=science

Diwali!

This year is the first since I moved out of my parents' house in Bangalore that I actually did something to celebrate Diwali.

Ever since leaving India and coming to the US, my perception of Diwali has undergone many changes. During my first year here, there was still the excitement, a desire to celebrate as a way of capturing memories associated with Diwali in India, a way to shrug off the homesickness. Also, not to forget, the hope that finally I could get something good to eat without having to pay too much for it, or without having to work at it- the Indian temple at Pittsburgh traditionally has a Diwali 'feast' and the universities nearby arrange for transportation of their poor, car-lacking graduate students.

After that first year though, Diwali became something of a non-issue. Going to Diwali festivals organized by any body- the Temple, or the Graduate Student Associations- became a drag. The time wasted in waiting in long lines for bad food would be much better spent staying at home and watching TV. I would listen to my mom's description of all the fire crackers, clothes and food that they had bought for Diwali. The sheer distance - geographical and emotional- won against any envy I might have felt, and soon I was listening to all these descriptions with mere indulgence.
Marriage made no difference. Last year's Diwali was the first one after my marriage and Ram was in Honduras on a Global Health fellowship. So of course, when I received excited emails and calls from India wishing us a very happy first Diwali, I shrugged and was convinced that the magic of Diwali had completely disappeared.

This year is different, though. Our baby seems strong and reasonably healthy inside me. Both Ram and I are suddenly desperate to embrace everything Indian and everything that we used to love as children. We both want our child to know and love our culture and to know how much festivals like Diwali mean to us, average Indians. And if this means taking a day off from work to plan and prepare for a menu, or waking up early to be able to do the millions of things that are to be done on Diwali day before sun rise, then so be it.

So today, I woke up at 5:30am, cleaned the kitchen counters, the floors and washed the utensils, all the while thinking, if I had been more like mom, I would have done this last night. Then took an oil bath, lit the lamps, drew a rangoli (or what was supposed to be rangoli) outside the house, prayed, kept new clothes for Ram and me to be blessed by God, and cooked. I didn't have to think too much about what to cook- there's a standard formula that my mom has for breakfast on festivals- paruppu sadam, 2 pachadis, one or two veggie karumidus, vadais, rasam, thair sadam and payasam. I felt I could easily manage a shorter version. So I made the paruppu, mango pachadi, kosambri, applams, thair sadam and payasam- all by 8:45am!!

Then, feeling like an accomplished Tamizh maami, I sat, like my Perima would, at the window of the house, looking out at the world, waiting for the man to return from his overnight call at the hospital.

After he bathes and eats, we will go to the temple, just like we used to in India (but no need to dodge the fire crackers on the road) and we will come back and take a long, long nap.

What else is Diwali but the chance to eat well and dress well and sleep well?

Training a husband

One year since my marriage, I know what to expect and what not to expect from the man. I can expect discussions lasting for hours about everything under the sun, great insights into science, medicine, cricket and Indian politics. I can expect bickering, laughter, melodrama, teasing and unconditional support for whatever I like to do.

What I definitely cannot expect is help with household chores: I do the laundry and the dishes and the cooking and the cleaning and the groceries and the taxes. If I ask him for help, the man always find a book that he simply cannot keep down, or an article that is of crucial importance, or, if all else fails, an urgent call of nature that lasts for a couple of hours. I groan and whine and eventually do whatever needs to be done.

My parents were here for 3 months, during which I realized I was pregnant. After getting used to an endless stream of hot food kept in front of me, of a well organized kitchen, of clean clothes ironed and folded neatly, of trash boxes never getting overloaded to such an extent that the whole house smelled of trash, I was left adrift, bereft, once my parents left.

It took me three weeks to recover from this. I found that I didn't want to cook, or clean or eat anything that I had to cook. Nor did I want to eat out. I just wanted things to be the way they had been for the past three months. The man was blissfully unaware of my growing desperation. He was on an inpatient rotation at the hospital and he had his hands full. Even if he had been aware of what was going on with me, there wasn't much he could have done about it, since he had to leave by 6am and would return after 10pm.
I cried a lot, wrote long and whiny emails to anybody that I could think of, ate a lot of junk food and did no work in the lab. I had no energy.

Then the man, bless him, took 4 days off and took me to the Bahamas for a vacation. No beds to make, no guilt trips about unclean houses or not wanting to cook. There, under that warm sun, by the beach, I made a resolution: we would cook at home and eat healthy, we would have that laundry done and we would not keep any dirty dishes stacked up for too long. I mentioned to this to the man, who was enthusiastic about it. But I did not mention the plan I was forming in my head, but instead pondered about it until I was ready to give it a try.

The reason the man doesn't do household chores is because he thinks they are dreary, mundane, not worth the time that could be spent thinking of magnificent, inspiring thoughts. "I have to sell it to him right", I thought, and hence devised this plan:

For cooking: I would cut all the veggies and keep all the ingredients ready and then make it into a game. He would have to pretend to be a surgeon performing an operation and I would be the nurse handing him all the ingredients. In the end, he would cook, I would watch and surreptitiously supervise, and I wouldn't feel like I was doing all the work.
For laundry: we would take all the clothes to a laundromat, dump them there, and then go out for coffee and discussions about the world. That way, we would both get what we wanted.
For trash: emotionally blackmail him into doing so, by reminding him of pregnant state.
House cleaning: would just have to wait until everything else worked out.

Well. One week after we have returned from the BA, I can report results:
Trash: plan works wonderfully. Will have to change tactics somewhat to continue with success, because man realized instantly what game was up.
Laundry: also has worked surprisingly well. No change of tactics necessary, as man has bought into the idea quite well.
Cooking: Hmm... this plan would have worked better if I had had more self control. I cut the veggies and kept all the ingredients ready. I cooed to the man in the nicest way and said, "Won't you help me with this, baby? It always works so much better when you do it. Let's pretend that you're a surgeon and I'm a nurse and I'll watch you cook". It worked well for the first few minutes. Then man started showing off a bit too much. He said, "See, when you cook, you don't do it scientifically. There's a reason we add this bit first and that bit afterwards. And you hurry up too much. You have to let it blend in, absorb, synthesize", and so on. So much that, halfway through the cooking, I lost my temper, whacked him on the bum and told him I could manage very well by myself, thank you.


And that was the end of that.
Now the kitchen is my domain once more and I need to figure out how to get that man back in again.

* to be continued*

Language

For some reason, I seem to be coming across a lot of stuff about language these days. From Lewis Thomas' "The Youngest Science" (my gift to RK as a reward for doing the dishes and the laundry), I found out that the word 'leech' meaning both doctor and worm (and worm used by doctor) has two entirely different roots. Leech the doctor came before leech the worm, most surprisingly.

Also from one of Thomas' other books is the idea that language is the social network that binds humans, and humanizes us. We would not be what we are, if not for language and our incessant need to communicate.

Magee Women's Hospital has a course on "How to Talk to Your Baby before Your Baby Learns to Talk" where baby sign language is taught to parents. Who knew there was something called baby sign language?

Anyway, the latest in all this:
Olivia Judson (she of the 'Dr.Tatiana' fame) has written on alarm calls in animals:
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/leopard-behind-you/

Training to be a scientist

It confuses me when people ask me what I am. I'm a PhD student in Microbiology. What I assumed, when I first started out, is that I would be a scientist. Except that, five years down the line, I don't feel like one.

The vision of a scientist I have in mind is someone who has a broad knowledge of a lot of aspects of science- not merely factual information. It has to be someone who understands the history and philosophy of science, not someone who merely keeps abreast of the latest news, but who can put it in broad perspective and a historical context. It has to be someone who looks at scientific success not just as a list of publications. My ideal scientist has to think- and disseminate these thoughts extensively and accessibly- about scientific education, about ways to inspire younger people to seek answers for themselves.

When you search for articles on biomedical graduate education either on Google or Pubmed, the articles that come up are very rarely relevant. After sifting through dozens of results on graduate programs, you may stumble across a decade-old article that may be slightly useful. Invariably, even these articles are found, not in reputed scientific journals, but in medical journals. Medicine, unlike science, has a long history of people constantly thinking about undergraduate and graduate medical education, redefining core competencies in each field, addressing problems that may affect this education and so on.

Perhaps one reason for this is the rather mistaken assumption that science is an individual endeavor- one struggles and struggles and suddenly finds the light. While this is certainly a prevalent notion in the minds of PhD students about their doctoral work, surely this cannot be sufficient for producing scientists of any calibre? Seeking answers to important questions is surely something that cannot be done in a trice, but there needs to be some better ways of training people to do so. Putting them in a laboratory, generating a set of experiments to be done by some deadline and churning out papers is the wrong way of doing it. This method may work in the long run: the young graduate follows this same path through post doc and early independent work, and suddenly after decades of this, is in a position to clearly see how it all fits in it. But most likely, it will deaden the enthusiasm of young people entering the field (the Council for Graduate Education in the US estimates that 24% of the candidates entering a doctoral program in life sciences will end up leaving the program without getting their degrees)

My idea of a successful training program would be to ensure that all students understand the path of science. We didn't get to the point that we are in miraculously and instantly. What we know now has taken decades, if not centuries, of questioning, observation, hypothesizing and thought. Unless graduate students know of and understand the historical thought processes that have ultimately led to a particular question, there can be no appreciation for the magnitude or the scale of the scientific question that they are now posing. Instead their vision can only be limited- limited by the minor sub questions that they must break down the larger question into, and by the mundane practicalities of day to day laboratory work.

This, if it doesn't kill any love for science, will only produce mediocre researchers or lab workers who, biased by their own view of science, can only pose variations on the questions that have already been asked before.