PEREGRINATIONS

Today, I got news that a close friend is in the early days of what might be a difficult pregnancy. Richard Dawkins’ opening remarks of his book “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” came to mind. He marvels at how statistic-numbingly lucky each one of us is to have survived the odds of a sperm and a ovum fusing and giving rise to a living cell. How we are a nanoscopically small number of the total combinations that are possible for the human genome. But as a developmental biologist, for me, this is just the starting point of the great obstacle course. The hurdles that the embryo will clear in the mother’s womb to make it to light and sunshine, warmth and fragrance, and the colours and music of this, our second home.  We see numerous reminders of each step that falters, in the birth defects that abound our world (according to statistics, 3-6% of infants born). A less than perfect infant brings anguish for the mother and potential disa...

On 25th November 2018, Jiankui He, a professor from the South University of Science and Technology of China released a video on YouTube© announcing the birth of twin girls he claimed to have performed ‘gene surgery’ on to prevent HIV infection. The news exploded on media with comments of disbelief, censure and some cautious appreciation from the scientific community as well as the public. So, what is ‘gene surgery’ and what is the controversy about? We carry, in each of our trillions of cells, a copy of the human genome. The genome is made of DNA, a very long polymer made of pairs of four chemical building blocks (denoted by the letters A, T, G and C). It is this very precise sequence of A, T, G and C, all 3 billion pairs of them that we call the human genome. Changes in this sequence lead to the interesting differences between each of us.   But, these changes also may result in mutations that cause diseases. These changes in the DNA sequence happen as DNA is ...

Science, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is, the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment . The ancient man who watched the flow of water, the growth of the barley seeds or the orbit of the sun did so for the wonder of it. It is the wonder, that has always driven science. The wonder that revealed the secret workings of nature, which we harness today to run our world of drugs and crops and computers. To equate science to technology or product development is short-sighted if not suicidal. In the scientific method, I would notice an interesting behaviour of nature, would create a hypothesis to explain the observations and then do experiments to test whether the hypothesis holds true or not. If not, I go back to the drawing board to start with a new hypothesis. So, science by definition is about mistakes made and mistakes corrected. I...

This September a new member was added to our family tree 1 . His name is Homo naledi . He was found, two years ago, buried in the damp dark depths of the Dinaledi chamber of the Rising Star cave system in the archaeological hotspot known as the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. Two cavers while exploring in the caves accidentally broke through a crevice and discovered buried fossils of a human-like creature 30 metres below ground level. They took their news to Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Lee Berger was intrigued, but his large frame could never get through the 20 cm wide opening into the chambers were the fossils lay buried. But he had a plan.   Paleoanthropologists are generally thought of as secretive scientists who shy away from limelight and conduct their research in dark obscure spaces, slowly and painstakingly brushing away the dust of millennia to uncover fragmen...