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.

The Leaders

History books are the best management books and the lives of great kings and conquerors are the best leadership stories. Those personalities in the history may be bad guys in one perspective or the other, but the history books will have only empty pages if we go on removing their names based on our perception of good or bad.

Here is a man often referred by modern management gurus. He is Hernando Cortes, a Spanish conquistador of 16th century who brought Mexico under Spanish control and began the Spanish colonization in the Americas. When he reached the American shores, he had a limited number of soldiers with him and already rebelled his superiors who did not match his aggressiveness. He understood that it was going to be a uphill task as they had to fight not only the Aztec tribes but also the challenges posed by the dense forests. He also realized that the soldiers could lose confidence at any time and withdraw from the battle. And Hernando did not wish to compromise with anything other than victory. Guess what he did. Once all the soldiers alighted from the boats, he ordered immediately, "Burn the boats"!

No wonder that Sun Tsu's "Art of War" is the best management book ever written!

First of its Kind

I came across this piece of information through a strange path. I was reading Norman Lewis' 'Better English' in which he was trying to explain adjective with an example, 'obscene book'. He also gave an example for an obscene book and it was John Cleland's Fanny Hill (though 'Better English' mentions the name as Samuel Cleland by mistake).

There are many interesting things about this man, John Cleland. His novel, 'Fanny Hill' (or, 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure'), was actually the first of its kind, i.e., the first pornographic novel in English. It was published in two installments in 1748 and 1749. Not surprisingly the novel was banned immediately at that time. He then attempted to publish few more novels with less erotic content, but they were not up to the 'standard' of Fanny Hill. As the story goes, John Cleland was offered a life time pension by the British Empire on a condition that he should stop writing!

Interestingly John Cleland has served as a soldier in East India Company and lived in Mumbai for about twelve years. He has written the novel, Fanny Hill, during his stay in Mumbai. Another interesting fact was that he remained a bachelor till death.