History of the World

Religion is like human language. The similarities are inevitable. Though we have plenty of languages, many similarities could be found among them. Otherwise, it would not have been humanly possible for one man to learn other man's language. Just like language, religion must have been the product of human brains. I am reading an interesting book, "History of the world in 100 objects" by the director of British Museum.
We have discovered the items used by Homo species (may not be humans) about two million years ago. These are stone chisels discovered at a place called Olduvai in East Africa. Advance stone tools such as hand-axe have been discovered and dated to a period between 300,000 and 1 million years ago. The stone tools older than 500,000 years have been discovered only in Africa. This is one of the key evidences supporting the human origin in Africa.

Some scientists gave a stone to a man and asked him to make a stone axe. They observed which parts of his brain were active while he was chiseling. Interestingly they found that the brain region which controls our speech was also active. This study suggests that the language speaking ability for humans has evolved as early as 500,000 years ago.

The Homo sapiens anatomically similar to modern humans have evolved 250,000 - 500,000 years ago and behaviourally similar to modern humans at least 50,000 years ago. The great human migration out of Africa is believed to have happened between 100,000 BC and 50,000 BC. The stone tools made by humans have been discovered at many parts of the world in this period (including Tamil Nadu).

Why am I writing all these in relation to religion? We have discovered many items used by humans mainly stone tools and some art works with stone or tusk, which are dated to be of the period which marked human origin and migration. However, the first human articles related to any religion or worship belong to the period close to 10,000 BC! Even though humans were living, hunting, migrating and speaking for several thousand years, god seemed to have been only a late entry! Higher brain evolution, civilization and bevioral developments have been the primary requirements for religion. Baby Krishna is baby Jesus is baby Homo sapiens.

CANCER - Part II

Let me share an example from Siddhartha Mukherjee's book with few modifications. Two guys, Mr. X and Mr. Y, develop a cancer at the same in 1991. Both don't have any symptoms as the disease slowly progresses. Always cautious about health, Mr. X goes for a regular cancer screening in 1995 and diagnosed with cancer. Surgery-radiation-chemotherapy combo is performed on Mr. X. Life of Mr. X is saved for another five years due to early diagnosis and treatment. In 2000, the cancer relapses with vengeance and he dies. On the other hand, Mr. Y never cares about health and did not go for any screening. In 1999, the cancer spreads all over his body and lethal symptoms force him to be hospitalised. Surgery-radiation-chemo cycle is performed on Mr. Y in 1999. However, due to late diagnosis his life could be saved only for an year. He dies after one year of therapy, in 2000. Well. Mr. X and Mr. Y die almost on same time. However, the early diagnosis gave Mr. X five years of life and late diagnosis gave Mr. Y only an year. 

Despite the crude reality, the above example does not demean the importance of early diagnosis. Cancers like breast cancer, uterine cancer or cervical cancer can be 'completely' cured by early diagnosis. We have successfully developed methods to diagnose these cancers at very early stage. The early diagnosis in case of breast cancer has gone to the extent that the women who are genetically prone to breast cancer remove their breasts proactively, even before any possible development of cancer! Vaccination helps to prevent some cancers of viral origin.

As far as preventive life style is concerned, we know that tobacco causes cancer. Apart from tobacco, we have a laundry list of carcinogenic chemicals, but the chances of encountering them in normal life is rare. Robin Cook's 'Fever' is based on cancer due to benzene. It was a common solvent used in chemistry labs until two decades ago. It is completely out of laboratory use nowadays. Radiation and asbestos may be encountered sometimes, but highly avoidable. Alcohol is not carcinogenic, but it can be a secondary agent to lead a damaged liver to cancerous. Other than these, we are in the primitive stage to define an ideal life which may be cancer free. We could not even definitely say whether the use of cell phones causes brain cancer or not. All studies conducted in this regard have holes at the bottom. 

The first reported case of cancer was as early as 2500 BC. The Egyptian hieroglyphs mention about it. However, if we look at the history of our battle against this disease, it is not certainly a battle that we have won; neither have we lost. I haved my beloved family members succumbed to this disease. I have also seen my family members who have survived this disease. My grandmother lived for many years without any relapse. She underwent radiation therapy for uterine cancer in late 1970s at Adyar Cancer Research Institute (Chennai) and she was not under any anti-cancer medication as far as I know. She would not have taken, even if prescribed - I guess. After reading the literature on cancer, I think any oncologist would conclude that her case was a miracle. Cancer is known for its violent return after the treatment. Once relapsed, it is mostly the end. The relapse can happen after days, months or years. 

When Siddhartha Mukherjee started writing his Pulitzer winning book on cancer in mid-2004, he had also started treating an young lady, Carla, diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Ninety five percent of her white blood cells were malignant, cancerous. The book naturally starts with the chapter about her arrival to hospital and the events followed by. Siddhartha had thought that the final chapter of the book would perhaps about the death of Carla. The book describes the merciless chemotherapy cycles performed on her. Siddhartha finished his book in June 2010. On the last days of completing the book, he carried out routine blood test on Carla. There was no trace of cancer, no relapse. The distinguished oncologist, Siddhartha, calls it a miracle at the last chapter of his book. However, we must not forget that there are many such miracles. 

My first - may be the last - practical acquaintance with cancer was during my post graduation when we tried to test a newly synthesised drug coupled with photo energy on cancer cell lines. The method is called photodynamic therapy whose origin may be traced back to Dracula! We all know that we need oxygen for life. How does oxygen get absorbed into our blood? You will wonder if I say it is through the rusting of our blood. The iron forms rust when it comes into contact with oxygen and water. Rust is nothing but the oxides of iron. In our blood, we have haemoglobin. At its centre, haemoglobin has a plate like molecule called porphyrin. At the centre of porphyrin, there sits an iron atom. When the blood is exposed to oxygen in our lungs, the iron atom 'rusts'. It forms an oxide like complex with oxygen. This oxygen is carried to our cells through blood. Due to some metabolic malfunction, the formation of porphyrin does not happen properly in some people. They will have defective porphyrins in their haemoglobin that cannot fit iron atom. These defective porphyrins, literally useless, are deposited by the body in the fast multiplying cells especially their skin cells. This disease is called 'porphyria'. 

Well. What is the link to Dracula and cancer?! When the skin of the porphyria affected people is exposed to sun light, the defected porphyrins deposited in the skin excite, corrode and kill the skin cells. Therefore, they cannot come our during day. They also get some tendency to drink blood which moderates the severity of the disease. Garlic increases the severity of the disease. You would have guessed it now. The scientists believe that the people with porphyria might have been called as vampires! However, this strange disease gave a clue for cancer therapy. The defective porphyrins are naturally deposited in fast multiplying cells. When exposed to light, the cells are corroded and destroyed. Since cancer has fast multiplying cells, the porphyrins can be used to kill the cancer cells. This paved way for photodynamic therapy. Porphyrin type compounds are injected to a cancer patients who have cancer in the visible areas such as skin or eye. Once the porphyrin compound is naturally deposited in the cancer cells, the cancer area is exposed to light rays. The cells get killed. This is what we tried with some porphyrin compounds synthesised at our lab. Since we cannot try on patients, we bought cancer cells and tried on them. The results were instantly perfect. However, there are several practical difficulties with this therapy which have made its application limited. A drug based on this therapy, verteporfin, is under trials for cancer treatment.

Cancer is a lucrative area for any pharmaceutical company. We have basketful of cancer drugs, but the treatment and cure are still elusive. Why? For this we need to understand the emperor of all maladies, cancer. I will write about it later.

CANCER - Part I

'The Emperor of All Maladies' written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an American physician of Indian origin, is an extraordinary book. It has won Pulitzer prize for best non-fiction.

The book claims to describe the history of cancer. However, the author takes us through the history of all major advancements in medical science. Though I have read in my text books about history of some pioneer drugs, there are plenty of interesting anecdotes in this book. Let me share one: Farber, a Bostonian doctor, is the one who pioneered chemotherapy in early 20th century. He used aminopterin to treat leukaemia in children - the first synthetic drug to treat cancer. How did he get this idea? Simple logic! Leukaemia - blood cancer, in general - is an abnormal multiplication of white blood cells. We all know about anaemia. Anaemia is due to the scarcity or insufficient growth of blood cells. 

In 1930s, many women in Bombay suffered due to anaemia because of various reasons including nutrition deficiency. A lady doctor from London conducted research on these women and found that folic acid helped in the growth of blood cells and thus treating anaemia. Farber got clue from this! If folic acid helps the blood cells grow, why can't we stop the growth of abnormal cells with some anti-folic acid (antifolate)? His friend in Boston, Subba Rao (!), who is a synthetic chemist and his roommate, supplied him an antifolate. And that was aminopterin!

Many such interesting matters are scattered throughout this book. However, it flows like a thriller about the treatment of cancer in one of his young patients. Though cancer is known several centuries before Jesus, we are still on crusade against this crab. Hippocrates said in 3rd century BC - "It is better to leave cancer patients untreated". It seems to be applicable till date when I look at recent cancer deaths in my family.

Surrealism

I used to enjoy some crazy paintings circulated in chain mails. I once read about Salvador Dali. He is one of the famous surrealists of 20th century. If we go deep into our thoughts, at one point we would find that dream and reality merge together. This is the point, which is captured in surrealistic painting, literature or music.That is my understanding, though.

Surrealist movements originated in Europe (France) after the end of first world war, in 1930s. The beginning of surrealism is interesting, because the era of psychoanalysis had come to a peak in that period (Sigmund Freud died in 1939, if I am right). Both surrealists and psychoanalysts observed the dreams, but from different angles. The interest of surrealists was in representing dreams with its whole mystery, while psychoanalysts considered that dreams-not-interpreted were just like unopened letters. The former was like religion and the latter was like science!

However, the surrealistic ideas raise one fundamental question: what is the guarantee that what we are living now is reality and not just a dream?! Until you wake up, you never know that you are dreaming. Even in Zen, we can find similar concepts like surrealism.

The surrealistic pictures reminded a beautiful poem written by Kavikko Abdul Rahman on a famous painting of Salvador Dali, "Persistence of memory". I read it in a Tamil magazine, Junior Vikatan (~1988). I will try to translate and post it in some other occasion. I have heard that Kalki used to sleep in Thanjavoor temple and he created several scenes in Ponniyin Selvan based on his dreams. Could it be surrealism?!

Secrets

I read in a newspaper Nobel laureate Venkataraman Ramakrishnan's interaction with students and scientists. He says that scientific problems are solved with the help of gossip and sip (coffee, of course). "If you don't gossip about the problem then you are not really interested in it. The problem has to be bugging you when you have a coffee."

Rajinikanth has revealed his secret of stress free life in his interview to Film Street Journal. He doesn't meet anyone after 9 PM. "I sit in front of mirror with candle light, music and whiskey."

Inception

Dream is a fascinating subject. We might have heard the idiom, "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly". Zhuangzi was a Chinese philosopher lived 400 years before our Thiruvalluvar. He dreamed once that he
was a butterfly. In dream he didn't know he was a butterfly. When he woke up he was Zhuangzi. But he was in terrible state of confusion. He didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he was Zhuangzi!

Is there anything that distinguishes Zhuangzi and the butterfly? It is an interesting question. Generally when we dream we do not realize that we are dreaming. Once we wake up, we realize it 'was' a dream. Is this 'waking up' the thing that distinguishes reality and the dream? Since we have woken up from some dream we believe that we are now in reality. What if we wake up from this reality too?! Buddha would say that you are now enlightened or 'awaken'. Jesus might say that you have entered into kingdom of heaven!

Have you ever experienced that you sleep in your dream and dream within that dream? When you wake up from that 'second stage dream' you are still in a dream. You have to wake up once again to come into reality or what you believe as reality.

There is one rare kind of dream. Many of us might have encountered once in a while such a dream - sometimes in early morning. It is called 'lucid dream'. It is a dream in which we are fully aware that we are dreaming. In lucid dream, we know that if we wake up from this we will go into reality and we continue into
the dream with this consciousness. Lucid dreams are scientifically proven. If one is skilled in creating lucid dreams he can consciously switch between dream and reality.

Have you ever noticed that the dream ends and we wake up when we die in our dreams? Our death in the dreams wakes us up. Even in dreams we do not know what happens after death! (if we die in reality will we wake up into some other advanced reality?!) Imagine a situation that some one is sedated with some
sleeping drug or goes into a deep sleep due to some physical disorder. He dreams a sequence in which he is killed. However his sleep is so deep or he sedated too much that he cannot physically wake up. Thus he is dead in his dream but cannot wake up from dream. Scientists would say that such a situation would lead him to a paranoid state that when he wakes up he would not be able to distinguish whether it is a reality or a dream. He may confuse reality as a dream and even try to kill himself to wake up from dream, which is of course reality.

One last thing that is not scientifically proved. It is 'dream sharing'. When two persons are dreaming both enter into another reality out of normal physical world. Some people believe that like the physical world the 'dream world' is also common for everyone. You can come across me in your dream, say at 'Madurai beach', and I can also come across you at the same place in my dream. People can actually share their dreams through practice and it is possible in lucid dreams. Trained 'thieves' can intrude into another's dream and steal the information hidden in his subconscious mind. More importantly these intruders can even seed a thought in our subconscious minds. One of my colleagues bets that it is practically possible and he is practicing it. The
moment he said this publically he lost all his girl friends.

Why am I talking all these things about dreams? I watched 'Inception'. I guess nothing more to say about the film. It will enlighten us.

Man and Clay

Sumerian mythology says that the mother goddess Nammu created man from clay. The Chinese books of songs dated around 400 BC say that goddess Nuwa created man from clay.

We must have seen a ram headed god picture in Mummy films and it is called Khnum. Egyptian mythology says that Khnum created man from clay in waters of Nile. Some African tribes believe that goddess Obatala created human bodies from clay and god breathed into them bringing life.

If we think that it was only Jewish/Christian god who created man from clay we are wrong. The only difference is that Christianity and Judaism try to depict the creator as a man while other religions say the creator was a goddess. Male chauvinism? Shouldn't the creator be a woman?

It is not so surprising why all the religions attribute clay to man's origin. Since the sculptors used clay for creating statues people could have imagined that god too created man in that way. Or, was man indeed created from clay? Except some trace quantity of silicon in human body there doesn't seem to be
much connection between both - scientifically. Even in case of silicon processors the days are numbered. Intel CEO Otellini is confident that first non-silicon processor would hit market in 2017.

Does it have at least any philosophical or spiritual meaning? I somehow like the biblical quote used on Ash Wednesdays:" You are dust and unto dust you shall return." Let us come to the first part of the sentence later, but the second part is true. Whether we are buried or cremated, we go to the dust/sand. Sand becomes clay when it is watered. The wet soil paves way for plants to grow and animals to eat them. Man grows and reproduces eating those plants and animals. Therefore, is it not correct to say that man is made of dust? We are born to our mothers. Thus the mother goddess created us from clay! It is a full circle now.