Bhavya Chowdhury Number of words: 1,265 Asha (not her real name) is the youngest bahu in a large joint family that stays in West Delhi. She got married a few months before India went into lockdown. Her husband works with an IT company in Gurgaon and is now having to work from home. Asha teaches chemistry to … Read more
Number of words: 1,375 Even as data science becomes ubiquitous, we still have a shortage of people who truly understand data. Yaneer Bar-Yam is a Professor and President of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He graduated from MIT and is an expert in complex systems. Throughout this pandemic, he has been meticulously analyzing COVID-19 … Read more
Number of words: 311 A “drug,” in bare conceptual terms, is any substance that can produce an effect on the physiology of an animal. Drugs can be simple molecules; water and salt, under appropriate circumstances, can function as potent pharmacological agents. Or drugs can be complex, multifaceted chemicals— molecules derived from nature, such as penicillin, … Read more
Number of words: 548 Genes encode proteins, and proteins often work like minuscule molecular switches, activating yet other proteins and inactivating others, turning molecular switches “on” and “off” inside a cell. Thus, a conceptual diagram can be drawn for any such protein: protein A turns B on, which turns C on and D off, which … Read more
Number of words: 146 Of the twenty thousand genes in a cancer cell, Weinberg reasoned the vast majority were likely normal and only a small minority were mutated proto-oncogenes. Now imagine, for a moment, being able to take all twenty thousand genes in the cancer cell, the good, the bad, the ugly, and transferring them … Read more
Number of words: 605 Until the late fifties, Rous sarcoma virus had been shown to cause tumors only in live chickens. Temin, working closely with Harry Rubin, wanted to study how the virus converted normal cells into cancer cells. To do this, they needed a vastly simplified system—a system free of chickens and tumors, and … Read more
Number of words: 535 Papanicolaou secured a research position at Cornell that may have been just as surreal as carpet selling: he was assigned to study the menstrual cycle of guinea pigs, a species that neither bleeds visibly nor sheds tissue during menses. Using a nasal speculum and Q-tips, Papanicolaou had nonetheless learned to scrape … Read more
Number of words: 858 For centuries, gastritis had rather vaguely been attributed to stress and neuroses. (In popular use, the term dyspeptic still refers to an irritable and fragile psychological state.) By extension, then, cancer of the stomach was cancer unleashed by neurotic stress, in essence a modern variant of the theory of clogged melancholia … Read more
Number of words: 772 Edell’s case, filed in 1983, was ingeniously crafted. Previous cases against tobacco companies had followed a rather stereotypical pattern: plaintiffs had argued that they had personally been unaware of the risks of smoking. Cigarette makers had countered that the victims would have had to be “deaf, dumb and blind” not to … Read more
Number of words: 601 In the early summer of 1967, Banzhaf dashed off a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (the agency responsible for enforcing the fairness doctrine) complaining that a New York TV station was dedicating disproportional airtime to tobacco commercials with no opposing antitobacco commercials. The complaint was so unusual that Banzhaf, then … Read more
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