News & Views about Bihar

Patna Daily

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Mast Pics of flowers from our garden and around

Excerpts from books...

Animal Farm by Eric Arthur Blair (=George Orwell):

I thought this piece of work by Orwell was definitely much more gripping than 1984. However, the latter was also very thought provoking and definitely forbidding, and you are tempted to think whether current state of affairs are globally converting of the sort mentioned. The present book has much to reveal on the animal instincts in man-once he has tasted the flavor of power and to subdue others...

Wisdom by Khalil Gibran from 'the Prophet'

• ...And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and his understanding of the earth.
• ...for what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live. For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
• ...you talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.
• ...for what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
• ...But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.
• For reason ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
• ...consider your judgement and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and faith of both.
• Your heart knows in silence the secrets of the days and the nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of yours heart's knowledge...You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.
• ...For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
• ...the soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
• ...No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
• ...if he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
• ...For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?...And it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.
• ...Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being. Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?
• ...And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
• ...To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam...To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconsistency.
  

Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes

• Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.
• ...if I believe that the track is my destiny and that God is in charge of the machine, then the nightmare becomes something thrilling. It becomes exactly what it is, a roller coaster, a safe reliable toy, which will eventually stop, but while the journey lasts, I must look at the surrounding landscape and whoop with excitement.
• Love- is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
• Pain is a very powerful drug. Its in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices me make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams. Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but its seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial. Or cowardice. However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives...True, no one wants to suffer, and yet nearly everyone seeks out pain and sacrifice, and then they feel justified, pure, deserving of the respect of their children, husbands, neighbours, God.
• In all the languages in the world there is the same proverb- "What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over". Well,...there isn't an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we're in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we're far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.
  

Science tidbits

• Drosophila melanogaster gene mutation called Indy (I'm not dead yet) doubles the fruitfly life span from the usual 37 days to an average of 70 days. The Indy gene is 50% similar to a human gene called dicarboxylate cotransporter. In humans, dicarboxylate cotransporter proteins move preliminary products of food metabolism (dicarboxylic acids of the Krebs Cycle) across membranes to where the food's processing takes place. In mutant Indy flies, poor dicarboxylic acid pumping means that less metabolic energy can be gleaned from the fly's food. In essence, the Indy mutation is the genetic equivalent of caloric restriction, with the added advantage that Indy's caloric restriction does not involve the unpleasantness of starving. The Indy mutation in effect puts flies on a severe diet, while the flies eat as much as normal and lead a normal vigorous life-for far longer.

• The Drosophila transposon called Mariner intriguingly has got into the human genome and is responsible for a rare human neurological disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, in which the muscles and nerves of the legs and feet gradually wither away. The Mariner transposon is inserted into a key gene called CMT on chromosome 17, creating a weak site where the chromosome can break.

Human chromosomes contain many segmental duplications, where whole blocks of genes have been copied over from one chromosome to another. Chromosome 19 seems to have been the biggest borrower, with blocks of genes shared with 16 other chromosomes.



DNA sequencing

1995: Venter, Fraser and Smith publish first sequence of free-living organism, a bacterium - Haemophilus influenzae (genome size of 1.8 Mb)

A rough draft for the human genome was published in 2003. Later in May 2006, Human Genome Project (HGP) researchers announced the completion of the DNA sequence for the entire human chromosomes.

Short write-up on the theme "Genetics"

I joined the 'developmental genetics' lab here in India in Dec 2004. Within a couple of months into this new exciting area, my supervisor asked me to write briefly on the theme 'Genetics' for a class of summer students. This was in 2005, 27 May. At this stage I had only recently initiated in the field of genetics. So this was also a good opportunity for me to read, understand , assimilate and write about this topic in my own language, which is given below. Of course there is much to improve upon and add to what I had written then:

Inspiring moments