She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Title: She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity
Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Picador, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781509818549
Pages: 656

Heredity is a powerful tool with which life sustains and propagates itself on earth. Even though its effects were clear to every society, the methods by which it is transferred across generations came to light only in the twentieth century. With the discovery of genes and unwinding the mysteries of DNA, mankind basked in the tremendous potential the knowledge offered to enhance the wellbeing of people – and, by corollary, causing unforeseen consequences if the technology was not responsibly handled. Genes are the blessing and the curse that our ancestors bestowed on us. However, science identified many other factors that are equally crucial to the development of humans as genes. This book covers all these channels in excellent detail and provides a comprehensive view of genetic research. The single most important idea it gives off is that inheritance is a broad concept which propagates through DNA (what is usually called nature), environment (nurture), epigenetic (transfer of some acquired traits) and by teaching the young (culture). Even though these are quite diverse, a little consideration would show that the benefits it conveys to a living being are broadly of the same nature. Carl Zimmer is an American popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites and heredity. He has authored many books.

The book provides a good overview of the study of heredity beginning from Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, to plant and animal breeding in subsequent centuries. Generations of interbreeding in the royal line resulted in specific genetic features such as a deformed jaw (later called the Habsburg Jaw) among the princes. Their overall health was very fragile too. Things got moving when Darwin appeared on the scene. ‘Origin of Species’ was one of the most influential books ever written. Darwin could not explain the biology behind why individuals varied and how traits are copied to the next generation. He believed that a trait acquired in life could be passed down to future generations. We read about Gregor Mendel and the birth of the concept of genes. Hugo de Vries discovered in the year Darwin died that every cell contained invisible particles that are responsible for passing traits from one generation to the next. He called them pangenes which was later shortened to genes.

When it was established that traits could be transferred to another generation, racism suggested the possibility that the white race was at the pinnacle of human evolution. Even among the whites, the Nordic stock was deemed to be superior. Whites suffering from genetic diseases ranked further lower in the hierarchy with blacks and coloured people going down to the bottom rung. A new branch of study called eugenics thought of ways to cleanse and thereby better the human stock. By the dawn of the twentieth century in the US, eugenicists wanted to improve the human stock by selective breeding and preventing people with genetic disabilities from having children. Across the ocean in Germany, it was copied by Nazis into a devilish strategy. It first targeted people with disorders (usually poor intellectual capacity) to be sterilized. Hitler established a set of racial hygiene laws. In the first year after establishing hereditary health courts, Germany sterilized 64,000 people and by 1944, the tally went up to 400,000 including the mentally ill, the deaf, gypsies and Jews. In 1939, Nazis started killing off people with hereditary disabilities. It is estimated that they eliminated 200,000 lives. In the US, the craze for eugenics sailed in the inverse ratio as its progress in Germany. American objectors of eugenics repudiated it as bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939. Eugenics is down for the moment, but it may spring back to life if a powerful backer comes to its rescue. How many of you did think of Donald Trump while reading these lines?

Zimmer gets into the question of whether a characteristic is heritable in the true sense of the term, that is, whether an organism will definitely suffer the consequences if a specific gene is present or missing in its genome. The gist of the discussion is that the linkage is too complicated to decide beyond doubt. Colour of eyes is a heritable trait. Citing the example of a genetic disease called PKU, the author argues that it showed a way to attack the idea that our intelligence is fixed by the genes. This is an unfortunate example for the argument however. The brains of these people get stunted and they end up with very low intelligence like a toddler. This is because the gene prevents the dissociation of the amino acid phenylalanine obtained from food which eventually reaches the brain and damages the nerve cells. If no treatment is made, it will lead to devastating intellectual disability. But if the infant is given a diet low in that chemical, the symptoms disappear. What this example proves is that genes are extremely important but in some cases, some alleviating measures can be found. This does not support the author’s logic that genes are not that critical. Then he takes up the case of height as a heritable trait. Here, the dependence on genes is as high as 86 per cent, but it is strongly linked to nutrition also. After each generation, the world is getting taller, not just in the developed countries. South Korean women grew eight inches taller in average height in a century, while Iranian men got taller by six and a half inches. The book then concludes that intelligence depends on several physical factors and genes that no direct relationship can be drawn. Studies held in Scotland suggest that lower intelligence test scores raised people’s risk of death. It’s possible that people who score higher may be better able to understand information their doctors give them. Genes still account for only a small percentage of the variation in people’s test scores. As with height, it has not been able to definitely prove which genes cause the effect to occur.

Race or racial purity is a concept which is associated with the genome of people constituting a society. Zimmer makes an extraordinary effort to conclude that race is not supported by DNA. He observes that the concept of race is not a feature of the natural world beyond our social experience. But this looks uncannily similar to the wokeish canard that gender is a social construct rather than biological. Hence, take it with a pinch of salt! Up until the middle ages, writers never used the word in the present meaning. Racial laws were common in the US as recently as half a century ago. The Racial Integrity Act passed in 1924 barred interracial marriages. It defined the white people as those whose blood is entirely white (of course, not in colour) having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race. This law would stand till 1967 when a couple’s wedding was annulled on its basis. They appealed to the Supreme Court which struck down the law. The author argues that if races were biologically significant, most of the genetic diversity should exist between races rather than between individuals of the same race. In the 1950s, Richard Lewontin made a study of a wide range of human populations which found that genetic differences between races was only 6.3 per cent, whereas the diversity within populations was 85.4 per cent. Even with this data, it somehow feels that something important and which can tip the scales has not been told. Since the subject is contentious, it is understandable that authors would prefer to bet on the side of the politically correct option. There is a brief analysis on contagious cancer, which was a scientific secret hiding in plain sight for two centuries. Eight cases were identified so far and they would not be the last. In the case of humans, the documented cases show a single leap (from one person to another and not more). It may be that our immune systems are so strong that cancers never get the chance to evolve into parasites that can leap from host to host.

The birth of a living being is something which is looked at with awe and wonder even by committed rationalists. This book furnishes a good discussion on how cell division takes place when a foetus is developed, clearly articulating the intricacies of the process and the pure amazement at one cell replicating to hundreds of types of totally different cells in different parts of the body. There is a startling narrative on human chimeras where the genome and proteins contain traces of another person, usually a twin, whose genetic particles get mixed up in utero. If two embryos of the same sex are involved, it’s much easier for them to go unnoticed. In the other cases, the blood of the person may carry cells of a different blood type. A case is listed where a person possessed male and female sexual organs. In the case of animals, an example is described where it carried the genetic imprint of two fathers. Obviously, this possibility is not examined for human cases. We also read about unusual instances of a mother’s DNA not matching her children. This happens when the mother was a tetragametic chimera (where one embryo develops into a person combining that of a should-have-been-twin). It is now known that foetuses can pass cells to mothers and vice versa, whose effects can last for several years after birth. Women who had given birth to boys carried cells with Y chromosomes. This book pushes the envelope of genetic research to the end of the 2010s. It looks like a whiff of Lamarckism is returning to science under the lofty title of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’.

The author unveils a chapter in the life of the famous writer Pearl S. Buck who is the author of the masterpiece The Good Earth. It was one of the four books with which I started my reading career. In fact, I’m not sure how many times I have read this superb novel. It was news to me that Buck started writing fiction just to save enough money to settle her mentally stunted daughter in a good institution. The child was suffering from PKU. There is a good discussion on gene therapies on somatic and germ lines such as CRISPR and mitochondrial, fully exposing the ethical and scientific concerns associated with them. The apprehension that this may lead to a new kind of eugenics is also very strong. In vitro gametogenesis offers the dizzying possibility of transforming on ordinary skin cell into a sperm or egg from which a baby can take shape. The author displays an unnecessary wokeish bias in the last chapter in accusing the whites of inheriting wealth way more than the blacks and suggests that this may be legally stopped. In a second case, he suggests that instead of using for disease eradication, CRISPR should be employed for saving endangered species, but he does not consider who would fund such research. This is also a wrong appreciation of the priorities.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

On the Origin of Time

Title: On the Origin of Time – Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory
Author: Thomas Hertog
Publisher: Penguin 2024 (First published 2023)
ISBN: 9781804991121
Pages: 313

Stephen Hawking was the face of physics for nearly three decades. His achievements in theoretical physics, especially the finding that black holes do emit radiation contrary to popular belief, was a game-changer in astrophysics. All of these in the face of a severely debilitating physical illness helped Hawking reach the level of an icon of resilience and hope. His best seller ‘A Brief History of Time’ was as legendary a work on popular science as its author was among physicists. People thought he would rest on his laurels since there was so much of it, but Hawking had other ideas. This book contains his research on the cosmos towards the end of his life long after he lost the whatever little power of muscles for electronic communication. Twenty years of the author’s conversations with Hawking are faithfully and truly woven into this narrative. The thrust of the story is on his so called final theory of the universe’s origin. Thomas Hertog is an internationally renowned cosmologist who was for many years a close collaborator of Stephen Hawking. He is currently professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of the big bang. He lives in Belgium.

A problem with cosmology is its inability to handle and explain the moment of origin. In spite of many theories elaborating on how ‘something came out of nothing’, they are unable to fulfil the basic criteria of a scientific theory on testability and falsifiability. Esoteric terms like quantum fluctuations of the void are thrown hither and thither, but the sad fact is that this aspect of physics – the exact point of origin – is still shrouded in mystery and conjecture, just like a religious myth. To add to the confusion and stoke the arsenal of religionists, Hawking and other writers toy with the concept of the appearance of design in the origin of the cosmos because it turned out in the future to be an ideal place for life in general and human life in particular. The book begins with the recollection of a talk with Hawking in which he commented that the universe appears ‘designed’. Most physicists believe that the universe’s delicately crafted architecture follows from an elegant mathematical principle at the core of the theory of everything. Then the universe’s apparent design would seem like a lucky accident of objective and impersonal nature. The author then contrasts the appearance of design at the root of things in physics and biology. This unnecessary exercise only serves to lure the attention of creationists and nothing more. Darwinism offers a thoroughly evolutionary understanding of the appearance of design in the living world. Physics and cosmology, on the other hand, have looked to the nature of timeless mathematical laws. Not history or evolution but timeless mathematical beauty is thought to rule at the deep bottom level of physics.

Even though the creation myth was part and parcel of the cultural milieu of every human society, the concept of a definite origin for the cosmos did not enter scientific thought till the last century. It was only when the expansion of the universe was established that scientists extrapolated it backwards in time to reach the starting point. Georges Lemaitre proposed a primeval atom which expanded to become the universe. The seed of big bang was sown then and interestingly Lemaitre was also a priest. He maintained that science and religion do not overlap. What happened to the primeval atom later is the realm of science while questions such as who created it or what went before it, is the subject matter of metaphysics and religion. Half a century later, Pope John Paul II claimed that every scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world such as the primeval atom or the big bang leaves open the problem of the beginnings of the universe. Science itself cannot resolve such a question which requires ‘revelation from god’. This remark was made in connection with the 1981 conference held in Vatican organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences convened to enhance the mutual understanding between science and religion. At this meeting, Hawking declared that the universe had no boundary and no definite moment of creation. Some curious facts about the universe’s expansion are also mentioned in the book which emerged recently from observations. We live in a hesitating universe, meaning the expansion rate was slow at first, but its period of hesitation ended a few billion years ago and is now expanding more rapidly. This was predicted by Lemaitre but contested by Einstein. Recent researches has proved Lemaitre right. A lot more has to be learned about the universe as well. 70 per cent of the universe consists of dark energy and 25 per cent with dark matter which do not interact with ordinary matter, which we are familiar with. Even according to the little chunk we know, it is difficult to explain strangely coincidental occurrences without resorting to concepts in quantum theory. The hot and slightly colder spots in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is very essential for the formation of galaxies and life. Inflationary theory states that these spots are primeval quantum fuzz, magnified and writ large across the cosmic sky.

Hertog describes the development of many hypotheses in physics that deal with cosmological concepts and the role Stephen Hawking played in developing or modifying them. Hawking was bold, adventurous and ready to do a lot of intuition-driven practice of physics. This characterized much of Hawking’s later work, which is after the publication of Brief History. The paradoxes of the life cycle of black holes and with our place in the multiverse are the two vexing and hotly debated physics puzzles of the last decades. Hawking found that black holes emit some radiation and will eventually go into a void, destroying all information that had previously entered into it. But quantum theory states that this is impossible. Hawking’s clever attempts to rid the origin theories of a singularity at the very beginning are described in detail. The no-boundary hypothesis of Hartle and Hawking are illustrated, even though it is still very complicated to comprehend. The time dimension warps into one of space in the beginning of the cosmos. In this way, the singularity at big bang is conveniently taken out of the picture, but this looks more like a metaphysical somersault. This is also an approach towards developing a clear view of quantum gravity. In short, the theory holds that ‘once upon a time, there was no time’, because the time dimension is changed into one of space. The role of an observer in a quantum experiment is very critical as sometimes the effects fail to materialize in reality if there is nobody or nothing to observe it. In a quantum universe like ours, a tangible physical reality emerges from a whole horizon of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing. Now comes Hawking’s final theory. It offers a different explanation of the assertion that the universe originated in a big bang from nothingness. He held that nothingness at the beginning is nothing like the emptiness of a vacuum, but a much more profound epistemic horizon involving no space, no time and no physical laws. The origin of time is the limit of what can be said about our past, not just the beginning of all that is. This he calls the top-down approach (p.257).

The first decade of this century was a golden period for cosmology books in which quite a good number of titles abundantly ‘infotained’ the audience. Most of them talked about the quest for a grand general theory of physics that would unify the four fundamental forces of strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism. The general consensus was that string theory would one day become ripe enough to explain it all. The second decade was not so prolific after all with very few good books coming our way and this book steps into the role of updating people about the fortunes of the fabled string theory at present. It now seems that the theory has not been able to live up to the expectations. The fundamental structure of string theory remains somewhat elusive. If you were to ask a number of theorists, you are likely to get a range of different answers. String theorists have mostly had to supplant input from experiments with mathematical research. Over the years, the community has developed its own intricate checks and balances system to judge progress, baked mostly on criteria to do with mathematical consistency of the framework. Unlike the Einstein equations of general relativity or the Schrodinger or Dirac equations of quantum theory, a single agreed upon master equation that encapsulates the kernel of string theory has yet to be found. Many predictions offered by the theory are not testable in the short or medium term because of the very high energy levels required. This has put the research at a dead end. This is the impression readers get regarding the string theory.

The book is extremely unappealing to read for general and lay readers for whom completely reading this would be a test of endurance and steadfastness. I don’t use the word ‘boring’, only because I am being charitable. Several diagrams are included in the work, but they fail to enhance comprehensibility and the book lacks the ability to inform lay readers. Many chapters are highly abstract and not described with the general reader in mind. This tome is rather a tribute to Stephen Hawking who was the teacher, philosopher and mentor of the author for many years, rather than serving as a herald of new developments in the field. Even Hawking’s final theory is not very convincing and appear to be only a philosophical conjecture of possibilities rather than a snapshot of reality. It is felt that this idea many not go much further.

The book is not recommended for ordinary readers.

Rating: 2 Star

A Crack in Everything

Title: A Crack in Everything – How Black Holes Came in From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre-stage
Author: Marcus Chown
Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781804544327
Pages: 334

The strange thing about the concept of black holes is that even people with hardly any exposure to science writing are well aware of it and its propensity to gobble up anything that ventures near it. Black holes were predicted as a corollary to Einstein’s General Relativity, but they were physically traced only in the 1960s. Sophisticated instruments detected gravitational waves caused by merger of two black holes and new concepts have emerged in the last few decades that revise our understanding of these elusive celestial bodies. Latest research hints that black holes are not exactly ‘black’, but they are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in the universe. They are not only holes down which matter is sucked in, but sources of immense jets of matter spraying outwards and extending to millions of light years across space. This book envelops the journey of black holes from the periphery of imagination into the very heart of science. Marcus Chown is a science-writer and broadcaster who was a former radio astronomer at California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. He is the author of several books and also launched the Solar System for iPad app, which won ‘The Book Seller’ Digital Innovation of the Year.

The first two chapters make a solid foundation on the theoretical concepts of black holes without appearing too scientific. The first hint of the possibility for existence of this intriguing phenomenon was made by the mathematical solution of Einstein’s General Relativity carried out by Karl Schwarzchild while fighting on the Western front in World War I. He died just five months later but the spark he lit caught on in scientific circles. Beyond a specified size, matter behaved strangely. Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar developed the theory while on a voyage to Europe by sea. Stars up to 1.4 solar masses ended up as white dwarfs when their nuclear fuel was exhausted. If the mass is around 2 to 3 times that of the sun, it may explode as a supernova but the core will turn into a neutron star. Even bigger stars collapse down to a point of infinite gravity. Space will fold in on itself and the star will vanish from view, turning into a black hole. This was hard to grasp for the conservative establishment and the book records the intellectual rivalry between Chandrasekhar and his superior Arthur Eddington which was also tinged with dark shades of racism. However, the threshold size of the star which becomes a black hole is now called the ‘Chandrasekhar Limit’, vindicating the Indian. Chown narrates some amusing effects expected at the ‘event horizon’, the fictitious surface that masks the point of no-return for matter and light falling in. To a distant observer, time at this surface appears to run slower and slower because the space-time is highly distorted. When in fact the matter had gone inside, the observer still sees that the fallen object is hovering on the event horizon. Stephen Hawking once quipped: “In space, no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear”. If you accidentally fell into a black hole, you can be pretty sure that there will be no eye-witnesses.

Even though the discoveries of Schwarzchild and Chandrasekhar occurred much before World War II, the field lay barren and eventless till 1963. In that year, a New Zealand physicist Roy Kerr theoretically found the exact shape of the warped space-time around a spinning black hole by solving Einstein’s equations. The accepted opinion at that time was that when a crushing big star rotates, its centrifugal forces would balance at some point the push of gravity and prevent it from becoming a black hole. Kerr demonstrated that the centrifugal force of a rapidly spinning star could not prevent the formation of a black hole. He also proved that energy is also a form of gravity and the increased kinetic energy would add to gravity and enhance the formation of black hole instead of preventing it. The behaviour of mass and energy are weird when they are very large. The observational proof came just eight years later, in 1971. Paul Murdin and Louise Webster found a blue supergiant in Cygnus galaxy orbiting a black space every 5.6 days that was emitting X-rays. The first black hole was found – on circumstantial evidence. Many were found thereafter and astronomers estimate an astonishing 100 million to exist. Almost every galaxy has a black hole in its centre. Our own Milky Way certainly has a supermassive black hole at its centre. The few dozen black holes so far discovered are no more than the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Early theories of black holes posited them as truly black, set in a black universe and so impossible to identify. This was logical and shaped the minds of many enthusiasts. However, later investigations exposed the fallacy of this postulate. It failed to realise that black holes are likely to be embedded in an environment of interstellar gas and ripped-apart stars. In consuming the material, black holes would superheat it to such high levels as to emit even X-rays, apart from visible light. This idea suggested that, far from being black, black holes could be the most brilliant beacons in the universe. In 1963, quasars were discovered which emitted radiation hugely in excess of its size. These were found to be powered by spinning, supermassive black holes when matter swirls down into such a black hole like water going down a plug hole. This is also a source of energy in the universe. Nuclear fusion which powers the sun has a conversion rate of only one per cent whereas the new source provided up to 40 per cent. In the 1980s, better radio telescopes observed jets of matter stabbing out of the black hole core of galaxies into adjacent radio lobes. It definitively erased the idea that nothing comes out of a black hole. Another concept that changed along with the new influx of data was that supermassive black holes were a rarity that powered only one per cent of galaxies. Observational data from the Hubble Space Telescope proved the existence of many such entities. In fact, one is found to be present in virtually every galaxy, including our own.

Apart from the theoretical and observational aspects of black holes, the author investigates whether these have any significance for the human race. Supermassive black holes have an essential role in the birth and evolution of a galaxy. Through its huge outflow of energy, it transfers the energy into the surrounding galactic environment, gradually clearing the central regions of gas and throttling back star formation. If this did not happen, galaxies would have used up all their gaseous raw material soon after its birth. There would not have been time to produce higher elements which are very much required to sustain higher forms of life, like ours. In this sense, we owe our very existence to the black hole feedbacks that ensured that star formation continued at a sedate rate after the birth of our galaxy and that there was gas left over to give birth to the sun. Chown updates the readers of the recent revolutionary discoveries in relativistic physics such as the experimental detection of gravitational waves from merger of two black holes in 2015. In 2019, intense light was observed from the accretion disk of the merger of two supermassive black holes. Merger of such heavy-gravity stars churn up interesting material too. When two neutron stars merge, gold is generated in copious quantities. The book follows a diligent timeline of the major events related to black holes and the readers observe a conspicuous gap between 1963 and the launch of the Hubble telescope in the 1990s. The reason for this barren period – if it was not coincidental –is not elaborated. One is tempted to assign it to the manned lunar missions of NASA which riveted America’s attention and resources for the race they ran with the Soviets in a bid to reach the moon first. However, the Soviet Union did not make it to the moon.

The book is very agreeably written so as to be interesting to readers having no advanced training in science. Chown has taken care not to include any equations or unnecessary numbers. Hawking had one remarked that had he omitted the lone equation E = mc^2 in his epic book, ‘A Brief History of Time’, it would have doubled its sales. A lot of scientific facts are seamlessly interspersed with interesting biographical accounts of the inventers along with amusing asides. It appears that the nomenclature of ‘potential energy’ which we had studied in school has now changed to ‘gravitational energy’; just as kinetic energy is now referred to as ‘energy of motion’ in this book. A good popular book on physics was the need of the times as the old crop ended in the first decade of this century. This book neatly fits the bill. Latest findings and information till 2023 are updated in the book. However, the last third of the book seems to be full of somewhat uninteresting speculation and unnecessary elaboration of not very important ideas, some of which may never be discovered or disproved. They may remain just intelligent speculation for a long period to come. In spite of this minor hiccup, this book is a must-read for enthusiasts of physics, astronomy and cosmology.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Invisible History of the Human Race

Title: The Invisible History of the Human Race – How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Future
Author: Christine Kenneally
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2014)
ISBN: 9780143127925
Pages: 355

The first point of reference in the case of narrating the history of an object is the written record mentioning it. Royal proclamations, edicts on rocks and other non-perishable surfaces, literary sources and oral traditions certify to the existence or origin of a thing. If we go a little bit more into the past – before the beginning of language – other material objects substitute the place of written records, such as potsherds, tools, funerary paraphernalia and architecture. By evaluating these specimens, experts can recount many facts about the society who made it. Going further backward brings up fossils, pieces of bone and skull and footprints on a congealed lava flow that provide testimony to endless lifeforms which had once walked on the earth. When man examined all these ideas emanating from outside his body, he turned to the inside by intuition and saw that the book of life was written and lay unread inside each of his cells’ nuclei in the form of DNA. We know that DNA is the marker of heredity, but what is perhaps not widely appreciated is that the DNA carries the story of all ancestral lifeforms which had gone before us. True to the postulates of evolution, the human genome still carries the traces of not only our ancestor human beings but also the genes of other species from which we split and evolved in a different direction. This book provides an interesting overview of this extraordinary field of study which promises a great deal to shed light on our genetic past as well as to make our future life a bit more comfortable by addressing health issues specific to the genome. This book handles aspects of inheritance evaluated in studies from psychology, economics, history and genetics, anecdotes and data from business, science and the lives of many fascinating individuals. Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist who has written for many prominent newspapers and magazines. She is the author of two books and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The book opens with observations on the study of genealogy and the surprisingly stiff opposition to it from some quarters. Genealogy can be traced to the Bible. Romans painted portraits of their forebears on the walls of atriums. Modern western genealogy began with the rise of aristocracy. This may be the reason why socialists oppose any move by a commoner to know more about his ancestors. The author assuages these concerns with the observation that it is only an attempt to build one’s own identity and help others view them, may be in the hope that the person may be a long-lost distant relative. The criticism on this hinges on the premise that the more people turned to their genealogy especially to elevate their status, the more out of step they become with the spirit of an egalitarian republic (this was raised by scholars in the US). They asserted that this attempt to research one’s past was developed of snobbishness and vanity and hence unworthy of honourable attention. Birth and heredity are inevitably tied to racist undertones in a white, western country. The infamous ‘one-drop rule’ determined the race of mixed couples at least in the first hundred years of the American republic. It said: “the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (p.60). This racist concept has an exact reflection in India’s caste system where the offspring of two different castes belonged to the lower of the parents’ castes. The author has not observed this Indian connection. In fact, she has not effectively studied Indian society in any detail.

Kenneally examines the birth and development of the scientific basis of heredity in genes and DNA. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a revolutionary concept in 1859 when it was introduced but he did not know of genes. He postulated ‘gemmules’ that were passed from parent to offspring to stamp the hereditary traits on the latter. This was a flawed concept, but the idea of something resembling a gene was essential to explain how traits that were not apparent in parents might appear in a child. Even though the structure of DNA as a double helix was discovered in 1953, it was only in the late-1990s that a study of the genome could become meaningful. Computing power at the command of academia and pioneering industrialists exploded manifold in this period. The author observes that most of our genome is not coding DNA which expresses proteins that are vital for the wellbeing of that organism. Non-coding or junk DNA may influence our genes in significant ways. Even if they don’t, we may learn how to read the book of our history in it. Ancestry is marked by mutations in a being which is passed as such to its progeny. If the mutation is on a coding gene, it may adversely affect a vital protein and endangers its reproductive prospects. That’s why non-coding – sometimes remarked ‘junk’ – part of the DNA becomes crucial for studies about ancestry.

We are inured to accept Nazis catalogued as extreme racists who devised brutal pogroms to cleanse the society of people undesirable to them. This book provides several examples of these devious ways but what startles the readers is the information that the US also followed some of these projects with vigour though to a less sinister degree. Forced sterilizations were practised in the US as part of eugenics. The first man was sterilized in 1907 who was characterized as belonging to a group of ‘shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of antisocial whites’. Between 1907 and 1970, at least 60,000 were judged inadequate and forcibly sterilized by their state administrations to prevent those genes entering the next generation. Ideas about ‘racial hygiene’ were popular even before the Nazis came to power. The interest in genealogy culminated under the Nazi regime and the right to live became virtually dependent on one’s family charts. There were registers maintained by civil government noting down Jewish blood in the family. Hitler’s T4 program was merciless. Parents were encouraged to send their disabled children to special centres for treatment where they were killed by starving or lethal injection. 200,000 people died in these institutions and falsified death certificates were issued to their relatives.

Personal history related to ancestry is sometimes closely guarded by societies, most often to shield the present from unpalatable associations echoing from the past. These efforts make history invisible to some. The perpetrators of the Holocaust, the early descendants of the convicts who helped establish Australia and the victims of the Irish famine of mid-nineteenth century originally suppressed information passing down to their children. Several of the author’s ancestors were convicts, which were exposed only as the outcome of her own genealogical research and to which her parents were ignorant of. Kenneally points out that after the 1960s rights movement, more transparency arrived and people became more relaxed to accept that one or two of their great-great-great grandfathers were not as decent as to make a great-great-great grandchild proud. Kenneally also finds a link between genetics and anti-Semitism in Germany by observing that Jews were attacked and killed more in those towns which had a history of pogroms during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. She do not hint that the people living in those towns in the Nazi period were direct descendants of the medieval society, but this finding sticks out like a pseudo-scientific hypothesis. This book points out the long-term damage inflicted by slave trade on some African nations. The countries that lost more people to slavery were also the poorest countries today. They were, however, among the best developed economies and best-organized states during the slave trade with central governments, national currencies and established trade networks. Many slaves were betrayed by people to whom they were close. Some evidence is presented to conclude that this engendered distrust among people which persists even today. Without some form of general trust, economic activity cannot flourish. The idea that mistrust and silence on a shameful aspect could be passed down for centuries is profound and requires more corroborative evidence.

The book includes some passages which support a biological basis for human races. Since this topic is very controversial, the author wriggles out of an embarrassing position of openly admitting it. Eugenics extolled the racial differences and postulated the superiority of the white race. This was discredited after the Nazi regime’s collapse, but science then took a swing to the other extreme that there is no genetic basis for race. Studies by Lewontin in the 1970s concluded that genetic differences are between individuals only – they may be in a race or across races. This ruled out any genetic basis for race. The Human Genome Project reiterated this by declaring that two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world. This underwent a transformation in 2007 when the resolution of genetic analysis improved to evaluate thousands of nucleotide pairs than the earlier hundreds. It is now convincingly displayed that a person’s racial roots can be found by analysing his genome. The book includes a good coverage of DNA testing services now widely available and the uses they can provide to people susceptible to genetic diseases, some of which are capable of decimating a person’s quality of life. Huntington’s disease is a deadly malady, but can be easily predicted if you know where to look in the genome. Pre-natal tests can establish if the foetus carries the disease and can then be terminated. Some communities, such as the Ashkenazi Jews, are inherently endogamous which cause genetic diseases in offspring when the population size is small. In Israel, genetic screening and counselling in the pre-marital and pre-natal stages are a normal part of the culture.

The book can be comfortably read by any class of readers. It drifts slightly out of focus in the initial stages when readers get confused that the author is pointing solely to the ethical aspects of charting family genealogy. It makes precocious conclusions on cultural inheritance of psychology. The author argues that women were freer in plough-based societies (farming communities) than those employed shifting cultivation. This is a long shot with doubtful accuracy. Another assertion is that people tend to cooperate more and divorce rates are less in rice-growing societies. This is because rice is more demanding in the case of irrigation requirements which needs better coordination between people. Another claim is that distant historical events may influence the character of a modern family and the choices of families can illuminate history. In another section, she mentions that carbon dioxide levels dropped by 0.1 ppm because of economic stagnation in the wake of Mongols’ killing raids which exterminated 40 million people in the thirteenth century that caused reforestation on a large scale (p.180). No evidence for this bold assertion is cited. Genetic peculiarities thrown by DNA testing provides some amusing results such as Chengiz Khan’s DNA being found in living people. On the other hand, it is also disclosed that if you go eighty or hundred generations back, there would be very few DNA lines in common with our ancestors so that we can be termed biologically unrelated to many of our blood-relatives. The book strictly follows political correctness in its observations, conclusions and generalizations.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Upright Thinkers

Title: The Upright Thinkers – The human journey from living in trees to understanding the cosmos
Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Penguin, 2016 (First published 2015)
ISBN: 9780141981017
Pages: 340

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is so comprehensible”, said Stephen Hawking. There are two points here. One is that the profundity of the universe can be understood by the tiny electrical pathways in the brain of a developed ape species that is man. The second point is more inscrutable. Why, among the millions of living or dead species, Homo sapiens is the only genre which can think about its origins and its place in the world? This book is the story of the development of thought and how it went about redefining man’s position in the race for survival. The search for knowledge is the most human of all our desires. Man is a born thinker. The first two parts of the book summarizes the history of human intellect and the growth of science – with special reference to physics. It expounds how knowledge of the things which we can actually observe developed, following Newton’s methods. The final part deals with concepts that can’t be seen, felt or even where its reality is suspect – such as quantum objects. Leonard Mlodinow is an American theoretical physicist and mathematician, screen writer and author. In physics, he is known for his work on approximating the spectrum of atoms and the quantum theory of light.

The early part of the book explains the evolution of humans and what led to the growth of their thinking ability. Nature invested its resources in developing the human brain. Chimps and bonobos are very muscular and have the ability to pull with a force exceeding 550 kg. They also have sharp and rugged teeth to tear with ease through hard nutshells. Man is not endowed with any of these extraordinary facilities, but his brain is exceptionally gifted. The human brain, which accounts for only 2 per cent of the body weight, consumes nearly 20 per cent of the energy a body absorbs. This investment on brain helped us make thinkers who ask questions. Only humans exhibit the quest to understand its own existence. Late Paleolithic and early Neolithic people turned their focus away from mere survival and toward non-essential truths about themselves and their surroundings. This was one of the most meaningful steps in the history of human intellect. Instead of simply believing that somebody or something is at the root of happenings in this world, the early intellectuals stumbled upon the theory that natural forces are behind them. Understanding nature in terms of laws was a new mode of thinking that revolutionized the life of societies. To look at the workings of nature and infer the underlying abstract principle was an enormous advance in human development.

Mlodinow talks about the development of rational thinking in ancient Greece that was channeled to late-medieval Europe through translations made by Arabic scholars. In sixth century BCE, a group of Greek revolutionary thinkers came up with a rational approach to nature, which was claimed to be an ordered entity, and not at chaos. Knowledge was imparted from a master to his disciples directly. The term ‘academy’ owes its origin to the institution run by Plato. The middle ages saw the rise of religion and the eclipse of institutions of high learning. Europe started its dreary stroll through the dark ages. Learning was rekindled among the enfolding darkness by universities that sprang up here and there under the watch of a benign monarch. Scholars needed to be saved from the demands of daily toil to feed their families and to provide them with a pecuniary resource in return for the ‘thoughts’ they expended to push the envelope of useful knowledge at the societal level. Early universities were far different from what they are today. A statute in thirteenth century Germany forbade senior students from drenching freshmen with urine. Professors were paid directly by students, who could also hire and fire them. Students fined their professors for unexcused absence or tardiness, or for not answering difficult questions. If a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or quickly, they’d jeer and become rowdy. Leipzig town passed a rule against throwing stones at professors!

Human awareness reached its pinnacle in its quest for knowledge with the development of scientific thought after Renaissance. Falsifiability being one of the critical norms of scientific genuineness, many scientists’ work must inevitably end in failures or dead ends. Still, they are exhorted not to fear taking risks or to explore fields not frequented by others. The author advises the scientists to shed the anxiety of being wrong. Any innovator goes down more dead ends than glorious boulevards. To be afraid to take a wrong turn is to guarantee not going anywhere interesting. The book describes about the little known aspect of Newton’s experimentation with alchemy. Even though it ultimately ended in failure, the knowledge collected and documented by Newton helped to advance the experimental methods of various chemicals. There are many crazy schemes, even in modern science, that were proved wrong. The wrong ones are quickly forgotten and the time put into them having ultimately been wasted. Often we call the proponents of these schemes failures or crackpots. But heroism is about taking risks. Mlodinow highlights the factor that helped foster the scientific quest. Science had to overcome the natural human tendencies to feel that we are special and that deities or magic govern the world. That meant overcoming the God-centric doctrine of the church and the human-centric theories of Aristotle. The book illustrates several instances where the theories of Aristotle proved to be the bigger hurdles to innovation than religion. In the end, the author summarizes that it is a fine line that separates an outlandish, crackpot project and an innovative idea that changes everything.

The book then examines the development of the modern disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology based on the lives of the pioneering spirits of each stream. Galileo set the ball rolling in the sixteenth century, followed by glorious stars in the constellation such as Newton, Dalton, Mendeleev, Darwin and Einstein. The biographic sketches are refreshingly updated but the content is essentially the same as one could obtain from any book on popular science. What Mlodinow emphasizes is that these men were not superhuman, but possessed normal human fallibilities. Their life is portrayed as something that is fit for emulation rather than restricted to adoration or even worship in extreme cases.

This text nicely explains the limitations of Newton’s theory of classical mechanics and concludes that it is plain wrong when the domain is as small as the inside of an atom or as big as the gravitational neighbourhood of a star. In the first case, quantum theory has replaced Newtonian mechanics while in the latter, Einstein’s general relativity is the only theory to reach the truth. The inadequacy of Newton’s theory became apparent in failing to explain the phenomenon of black-body radiation which is narrated in detail. The book maintains a personal touch by elegantly roping in the comments made by the author’s late father whose remarks which appeared naïve at first sight exhibited a facet of truth and insight. The senior Mlodinow was tortured in the concentration camps on account of being Jewish and narrowly escaped death when his native country of Poland was run over by the Nazis. He didn't have much education, yet had the wisdom to accept facts foreign to him but process them in the right way. Even if you forgot all the arguments of the author on science, chances are that you are likely to remember some of the expressions or at least the attitude, of his father to science.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Beasts Before Us

Title: Beasts Before Us – The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution

Author: Elsa Panciroli

Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9781472983985

Pages: 320

 

We are really awed by our planet’s collision with an asteroid at the end of Cretaceous period 65 million years ago when dinosaurs became extinct. The demise of this predator group prepared the ground for mammals to explore and conquer all possible niches on earth. As a result, mammals grew in size, became more and more diurnal and won the competition for scarce resources. Eventually, a bipedal ape which developed a large brain size took over the world and assumed nature’s role in making several species go extinct. This has been the accepted lore regarding the development of mammals – and by corollary, of humans too. This book presents a different view, one in which it is conclusively shown that mammals existed and to a certain extent were spread over the face of the earth much earlier than thought. What it paints is the picture of a see-saw. Mammals proliferated in the Permian but were seriously put back by the mass extinction at the end of the era. Reptiles, which include dinosaurs, took prominence in the Triassic period which followed it. Then came the asteroid at the end of Cretaceous and mammals again held sway which still continues. This interesting story is told by Elsa Panciroli, who is a Scottish paleontologist who studies the evolution and ecology of extinct animals. She is an experienced science communicator and has written for mass-media houses.

 

The author discusses on the so called ‘success’ of a species in biological parlance. In fact, this is not to be confused with the dominance of a species on others. The term ‘success’ generally means only that it could propagate itself over time in an uninterrupted lineage. In that sense, all species living today are successful up to now. Moreover, while there are only 5,500 species of mammals, there are 18,000 species of bird and 35,000 of fish. That’s just vertebrates. There are over one and a half million species of beetles. So, who is the most successful? This should be kept in mind while making tall claims such as this was the ‘age of mammals’. The only thing is that mammals include the largest vertebrates and we are disproportionately focused on size. However, they originated much earlier than the current consensus. Paleontology suggests that they arose 350 million years ago in the supercontinent of Pangaea. Around 300 million years ago, mammals parted ways with reptiles. Mammals did not evolve from reptiles; they only shared a common ancestor. The belief that mammals followed reptiles in dominance of the world became prevalent as most of the early fossil evidence found in Europe came from secondary rocks and belonged to reptiles. After a catastrophe, they were wiped out and mammals appeared in the tertiary age. The first fossil of a mammal ever found was the jaw of an opossum-like animal discovered in 1820 in secondary rocks. With more evidence coming from all over the world, the scientific world has now conceded that mammals existed and flourished much earlier than the age of reptiles.

 

The author narrates personal experiences of prospecting for fossils in her native Scotland, Russia and South Africa. Mongolian expeditions of the pioneer paleontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska are given in some detail as she had obtained the largest collection of Cretaceous mammals. The fossils demonstrated that the age spanning 250 million years before the collapse of dinosaurs which was the first age of mammals was ignored by scholars for a long time. Early mammals like pelycosaurs looked like reptiles. We continue to see descriptions like mammal-like reptiles to describe them. From among the ranks of the pelycosaurs, a new group emerged which developed the key traits we associate with modern mammals including warmer blood and higher energy lifestyles. They also established – for the first time – an ecosystem which we still recognize today as based on large numbers of herbivores fed upon by a smaller cohort of carnivores. These cyanodonts are the ancestors of mammals which looked more like compact dogs with increasingly enlarged and complex jaw muscles. This change is linked to chewing with more complex teeth. At the same time in the Late Permian, 252 million years ago, reptiles and other tetrapods were also proliferating. Some of them had also evolved into giants. They would get their lebensraum when mammals were most hardly hit by the end-Permian extinction event.

 

The Permian extinction was a great cataclysm in the life of biota on our planet. Around 250 million years ago, volcanic activity peaked in the region which is now in Russia which threw up volcanic ash and greenhouse gases in huge quantities as to alter the global climate for millions of years. Three quarters of life were wiped out and the next age – the Triassic – began with a slate wiped clean. Reptiles and dinosaurs gained prominence and grew to large body sizes. But the mammals were not always at the receiving end however. We have found evidence of carnivorous mammals of this era that ate baby dinosaurs for food. In late-Triassic, little mammals the size of a mouse spread across the globe. These little creatures are thought to be the ancestors of us all. Warm-bloodedness helped early mammals to become nocturnal and escape the unwelcome attention of larger predators. The coldness of night is no barrier to an animal carrying its own heating system. Most of the mammals (except humans, of course) have only mediocre ability to distinguish vivid colours and their eyes are more attuned to see shapes in the dark. It is surmised that humans and primates re-acquired the ability to see colours through a mutation in the genes, but their ability is still a far cry from the glorious visual world of birds. Because they adapted as nocturnal animals, the sense of smell and sound greatly developed in mammals.

 

Whether intended or not, this book not only fails to discredit Lamarck’s use and disuse theory as the reason for causing genetic changes in organisms, but on at least two occasions, it lends a gentle support to it. In a footnote on page 31, the author claims that ‘the characteristics that were used would be passed on, and those that weren’t would atrophy which isn’t all that far off the mark’. This is indeed far off the mark. Lamarck’s theory stayed afloat in the pre-genetics era when the mechanism of inheriting a parent’s characteristic by the offspring was unknown. I’m sure the author is well aware of this and obliquely suggests natural selection as the mechanism that helped propagate features advantageous to survive in a particular habitat, but some readers may get confused here and think that Lamarck’s idea must have something in it. Another argument on the same line is the adaptation of herbivores to digest plant matter by incorporating helper bacteria colonies in their guts. Panciroli argues that microorganisms may have initially been ingested by early tetrapods when they ate some decomposing plant matter. Eventually, some of the plant-processing bacteria survived in the gut and a symbiotic relationship developed. This too is a broad statement enough to perplex a reader on how this new feature persisted in a new generation of the animal. This book introduces flowering of plants as a novel mechanism of species propagation developed around 120 million years ago that helped in mammal evolution. Earlier, pollination was limited through wind and water. Another interesting feature is the remark on ancient human bones. Analysis of the bones between the Neolithic and bronze ages (which is just yesterday by paleontological timescales covered elsewhere in the book) shows that the intense manual labour of early farming lifestyles made the average woman develop upper body strength comparable to a renowned modern athlete. Life was really hard back then..!

 

It is asserted that we are seeing a radical transformation in the study of paleontology and that is part of the reason for writing this book. Use of statistical methods to analyse big data and the routine CT scanning of fossils have opened up entirely new fields of research. In fact, Panciroli is very forceful – even to the brink of obsession – in boasting about the use of modern technology and mathematical tools used by her and her colleagues around the globe. This may be an attempt to enhance the stature of paleontology in the minds of young readers and to attract them to its study. It’d be a good exercise for the readers to look up the mentioned animals on Google as the included photographs and illustrations are totally unappealing. A real turnoff is the author’s punctilious political correctness that often leaps off the pages to sting you in the eye. She frequently flays white European bias towards discrimination of local knowledge regarding finding fossils. She credits nameless native inhabitants, than the person who described it to the world. This is mere showiness. She accuses the big names in her specialty of research of having harboured racist views on ethnicity and a misogynist perspective of history. As a successful woman typically considers herself a feminist by right, the author stresses on the contribution of earlier women in elevating paleontology to a widely respectable avenue of study. She accuses male bias in history and science and goes as far as claiming the same bias in museum specimens since we often see the peculiar features of the male displayed in such institutions! At the same time, she points out amusingly that the term ‘mammals’ applied to a wide group of animals, is not gender-neutral.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

The Song of the Cell

Title: The Song of the Cell – An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092727

Pages: 473

 

Efforts to understand the fundamental building blocks that make up the complex whole of living organisms was an exercise eagerly taken up by intellectuals in all civilizations of the world. Many intelligent guesses were put forward which could not be evaluated until the physical infrastructure for observing what is happening at the smallest levels could be developed. The invention of telescopes revolutionized astronomy and its counterpart – microscopes – opened up an unknown world before the incredulous researchers. For the first time, they began to discern an underlying uniformity in the composition of various organs within an organism and even across organisms. Following many leads found by experimenters, it was established that cells form the building blocks of life. This book is a chronicle of the discovery that all organisms, including humans, are composed of the basic units called cells and how these cooperative and organized accumulations enable aggregate traits like immunity, sentience, reproduction and cognition. It is also the story of what happens due to dysfunction leading to death and the transformative medicines that are being developed. Siddhartha Mukherjee's other books – the masterpiece ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ and ‘The Gene’ – were reviewed earlier here.

 

Mukherjee begins by a brief survey of the ancient theories that tried to explain how life functioned. One such was vitalism which postulated a vital force that was present in all living beings as essential for birth of life. Another related idea was preformation. This speculated that microscopic shapes of adult animals reside in sperms. After fertilization with an egg, this is then expanded in size like a balloon surface does. However, cell theory demolished both these by the 1850s. Mankind woke up to a new idea which proved that cells are the basic building blocks of life. All our organs are made of cells that share many similarities like a membrane wall, metabolism, waste processing, nucleus and portals for entry and exit of chemicals. The instructions for creating new cells and for synthesizing proteins are contained in the DNA stored inside the nucleus. Even though the same genome is encoded in each cell, only parts of it are enabled in each organ. The physiology of an organism is the result of chemical reactions happening inside the cells. Likewise, the pathology of an organism is the outcome of another set of reactions which do not contribute to the well-being of the cell and the organism. This cellular targeting is the cause of why medicines succeed in curing the individual. Every potent antibiotic recognizes some molecular component of human cells that is different from a bacterial cell. Penicillin killed the bacterial enzymes that synthesized its cell wall, resulting in bacteria with ‘bullet holes’ in their cell membranes. This helped only because the human cell wall was different from a bacteria’s. But cancer cells share most of the features of normal cells and that’s why destroying them is so difficult and normal tissue is also affected as collateral damage in chemotherapy.

 

Technology has been able to probe deep into outer space and watch the formation and death of star systems in distant galaxies where light itself takes several years to reach. Considering the depth of information – at least, many viable hypotheses – on astronomy, it is astonishing as well as slightly embarrassing that we know very little about cells, on which our body and very life is totally dependent. The author gives a summary of how they originated. The origin of eukaryotic cells – those with a nucleus, like all animal cells – took place around two billion years ago. This is said to be ‘a strange, inexplicable turn for evolution’ (p.71) and also ‘an evolutionary mystery’. It has left only the scarcest of fingerprints of its ancestry or lineage. This is thought to be a black hole at the heart of biology. The growth of cells, by a process called cell division, is also a complex and mysterious operation. It includes a least understood phase called G2, where the division temporarily halts and checks for major errors in DNA duplication that may lead to catastrophic mutations. In such a case, it aborts the process but allows small mutations; otherwise there won’t be any mechanism available for evolution to operate. ‘Black hole’, ‘mysterious’, ‘least understood’, ‘inexplicable’ are all terms that make the opponents of evolution exuberant with joy. But wait, the working of the cell is so complex that they are not even wrong! A serious and fruitful study on cells developed only by mid-twentieth century and the field is still open for revolutionary discoveries.

 

As we read more and more of this book’s contents, we get more and more astonished at the ingenious inner working of the cell. Such is the organization and direction going on at the microscopic level! Frankly speaking, if somebody is led to think that this entire set up must be the creation of a superior intelligence of creator, they can’t be blamed outright. But as you delve deeper, chinks begin to appear and what is most evident is behind the veil is imperfection at every stage of the cellular process. Otherwise, we won’t die, won’t age or even get sick. Perhaps, we may not even be born! The process of blood clotting after a wound illustrates this in detail. Clotting is orchestrated by a special protein called von Willebrand factor (vWf) which circulates in blood as well as located under the cells that line blood vessels. Injury to the vessel caused by the wound exposes the vWf protein. This prompts the other vWf to gather around the injury. A cascade of changes is then launched which leads to the synthesis of another protein called fibrin. This forms a mesh on which the platelets are trapped which forms the clot and stops blood flowing out. So much is perfect design, but the incompetence manifests itself later. As a person ages, cholesterol-rich plaques are formed inside the blood vessels which hang on to the walls of arteries and stick to heart’s valves. When such a plaque accidentally ruptures or breaks, it is unfortunately sensed as a wound. The cascade to heal wounds is then activated. Platelets rush to the site to heal the wound and results in blockade and heart attack. This leads to the conclusion that if life is thought to be the handiwork of a creator, he is certainly intelligent, but not perfect. And this violates the first principle of religion about omnipotence.

 

This book examines each functional subunit of the human body and explains how it functions at the cellular level. The heart, brain, kidney, liver, blood, spleen, pancreas and neurons are handled in sufficient detail. I’m afraid some of it may be a little too thick for readers uninitiated into serious biology like me. However, these chapters are treasure chests of a lot of information and learning. Most developments in cell biology are surprisingly modern. The physiology of T-cells, an essential part of immunity, was identified only half a century ago. The thymus gland which produced it was till then thought to be a vestigial detritus of evolution with no useful function. How the immune system distinguishes between the body’s own cells and foreign invaders is a miraculous process. Mukherjee emphasizes this as it is highly relevant in cancer treatment which is his specialization. The present state of cancer therapy is handicapped by the immune system’s inability to distinguish cancer cells as something hostile to the body’s well-being.

 

The subtitle of the book mentions ‘new human’ whose potentialities are at once exciting and a bit terrifying. This involves genetic manipulation to alter the destiny of humans before birth or when afflicted with disease. Early experiments are now on to search for specific disease-causing genes at the embryo stage and alter them to benign versions before implanting the embryo into the uterus. Needless to say, this is still in its infancy and there’s lot of scope for regulatory supervision. In some cases of cancer in grown up persons, modifying the genome of specific immune cells or therapeutic agents to zero in on the cancer cells and sparing healthy cells is technically feasible. Another aspect of the new-human paradigm is the full scale development of stem cells which is a special kind of cell which can be used to create any type of cell. Normally, a skin cell produces another skin cell and a muscle cell creates a muscle cell. However, a stem cell can be programmed to create any of these. The book records a recent experiment in which a normal cell could be converted to a stem cell. This will greatly assist in developing organs outside the body that can then be used to replace defective ones inside. Mukherjee also stresses on the dynamic equilibrium which pervades at the level of cells which is called homeostasis. Cells die continuously and new ones take their place. Death is a relative balance between forces of decay and rejuvenation. If you tip the balance in one direction, you fall off the edge. Or in other words, the moment you stop growing, you start dying.

 

The book is divided into many parts dealing with fundamental aspects of cells like origin, reproduction, anatomy and metabolism and then goes on to explain each in some detail. Lot of footnotes is included which the author urges us to read carefully. Mukherjee, himself of Indian ethnicity, freely uses Indian philosophical, metaphysical and even mythological symbols to illustrate abstract concepts happening at the level of cells. This is a welcome innovation in books of this genre. This book introduces many advanced ideas which must be well understood by the readers in order to follow the argument intelligently. It must be confessed that this is a bit tedious and there are some pages on which it feels like a text book than a volume of popular science. Still, it must not be missed in one’s reading career. It is also suffused throughout with sublime wonder at the intrinsic functioning of the cell which the readers readily share. However, the illustrations are not at all attractive as many of them are reproduced from the original papers which were intended for a scholarly audience. This should be simplified and made arresting with good graphics in future editions. The author and publisher must seriously consider this suggestion.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star