Ooff!! The arrogance...

I absolutely detest arrogant people. We're going to come across arrogance everyday; out in the streets, in the workplace, in the home, at school...I hate it.

In academia I feel that I've come across two types of it. The first kind, "I know this is true, been proved many times and what you're saying is utter nonsense." is tolerable. This I've seen from professors who have maybe 40 odd years of experience and accumulated knowledge and are willing to listen to arguments. In the end they may be wrong, but these types of people are willing to change their minds. I can accept this...the brief flare up of anger inside me can be just that, brief.

The second kind, "I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. I've personally never seen this and I don't think that it can be true" type of arrogance just gives me a peptic ulcer. I've noticed this sort of thing come up in post-docs and other PhD students most often. What nerve !!! In your academic learning life of maybe 6-8 years, you're trying to tell me you've never seen this?? Absolute rot. I've experienced this first hand. It normally starts of with little disagreements, then finger pointing at how inept you are and then finally to open disdain. Well...screw you.

Another form of arrogance, and this may pass of as unnoticed, comes from success. You're successful (in this I mean by how much you earn..nothing to do with whether you're doing a good job or not) and I've heard many times - "Hah ! How can you not get such and such?! Please stop complaining about money. Let's go on a vacation. Come on...are you serious? Surely you can do this..." I've been the giver and receiver of such arrogance before - I hope I've improved in the giving department.

I cannot stand arrogant people and I am more than willing to tell someone to take their stupidity and immaturity somewhere else. No one deserves to be arrogant.

A minute of silent distraction...

A minute's silence, a moment of contemplation, respect for the departed...we've gone through this. Almost all of us. Maybe it was a national hero or leader's passing away, maybe it was a celebrity or someone.... I'm sure we're all been asked to bow our heads down and take a minute or so to think about...what exactly?

At the last international orientation volunteers' meeting we were asked to have a moment of silence for the departed. What is this moment of silence for? The first thought I had was of course of how they passed away. It was a tragedy that they did, but if it was to be a moment of silent respect..then I didn't have any. The driver was drunk and he got two of his friends killed. No...no respect there. But I didn't know any of them and it may be a little harsh on my part. Whatever...after this extremely brief period, I started thinking if I'd ever done anything stupid like that. I didn't. If I feel like I've had half a drink too many, no driving. I guess the correct and right thing to do is not have a single drink when you're going to drive. After spending three seconds on that, I moved on to other distractions. Looking sneakily around, wondering what other folk are thinking, thinking about what exactly you ought to think about? Is there a point to this?

Moments of silent respect - I had these when my grandfather passed away. I think I respected him more than any one I've ever known. But losing someone very close to you don't end with a moment of contemplation; they're normally long periods of mourning and remembrance.

Thinking back to all the times where I've been asked to silently contemplate....I cannot remember even a single time where I wasn't distracted in about two seconds. Its awkward; most of the time you didn't know the person well enough to think about them. The moments after are even more awkward I think - people looking around each other wondering if someone caught them staring at their bellies or looking around wondering which one wasn't paying their due "respects".

I don't know....what do you think when you're contemplating such things?

You work with what ?!

A lot of people who I meet will ask me what it is I do. I will normally start with I'm doing my Ph.D and then they'll be in what - and I'll say molecular biology or cell biology. Then they'll be "WOW ! That sounds tough" or "That's great !" or " My god ! I don't have the patience for that ! You must have a special kind of calm." :)

After that the conversation is normally done (80% of the time..), but a few times I'll be asked "Oh. What exactly do you study?" and I'll be "Aging and I have particular interest in muscle aging." That 99% of the time is the end of that discussion. Very rarely I'll be asked "So how do you particularly study this...?" and then I'll start a whole series of "Ewwwwwww" or "Yuck..." or "REALLY?!" by saying that I work with worms.

My work revolves around determining what, if any, is the role of small RNA molecules called microRNAs in aging, especially muscle aging (Not going to talk about microRNAs!!). Since these are molecules, I should say at the outset that I am in general a molecular biologist and more specifically a molecular geneticist - since these tiny RNAs have their own genes.

So coming back to worms….Now please don't confuse what worm I'm talking about.

These are NOT the worms I work with - but this is the sort of image that most people hold in their minds. And earthworms are very useful as everyone knows and are actually studied. But they are not model organisms - they are not used to generalize a phenomenon or extrapolate a phenomenon studied in their species to our species, at least, not that I know of.

A model organism is one in which a basic or specific biological phenomenon can be studied in detail and extrapolated to having the overall same mechanism in rats, monkeys, dogs, horses, armadillos, and of course the only real organism we care about, humans. A model organism is usually a simple, well-defined system of whose basic biology is easy to understand and shares (we hope) at least some conserved features across different species of animals (and plants and microbes). They should be easy to maintain and rear, they should not have very long generation times (ideally) and finally if possible, their genetics should be well understood (for my field).

The model organism that I study, the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, is almost microscopic (the adults are normally 1mm and even the mutant long worms are no larger than 2mm). It is completely transparent and is composed of exactly 959 cells (yes! Someone did actually sit and count every single cell and every single descendent of every single cell from the one celled stage). It lives for ~3 weeks in the lab (and it is my duty to make them, and by extension us, live longer and happier) and is super cool J

Here is a video of it moving around on the plate-

C. elegans has been used to figure out the details of several very important biological phenomena including apoptosis (how some of our cells are programmed / induced to die in response to starvation, damage, infection or just while they are forming the organism e.g. our fingers are webbed while we grow - cells in between are programmed to die so we have separate distinct fingers), RNA interference and microRNAs (this is what I study and received last years Nobel Prize in medicine), the signaling that goes on between cells when we’re embryos and a whole lot of other stuff. It’s also been a model for muscle aging since the muscles it uses for movement age and deteriorate almost identically to our own.

In any case - I’m writing this so people have an idea about what model organisms are and why worms and the other model organisms shown below are useful - after all it would be slightly problematic to create mutants of humans by forcefeeding DNA damaging chemicals and exposing your “privates” to radiation to better science and understanding !

Model organisms:

1. Escherichia coli - bacteria, most commonly found in our feces :)

2. Saccharomyces cerevisiae - Bakers yeast found in your nearest bakery - used to study cellular replication

3. Drosophila melanogaster - fruit fly found in rotting fruits, garbage, etc and used as a model to study development of the embryo, Neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, heart development, as well as behavioural defects.

4. Mouse - found in the streets of Bombay and formerly in my EX-apartment , used as a model for studying many many many human genetic diseases, obesity, alcoholism, development, etc etc.

Out to sea..

(It shows up as low quality. Click on it to see a better version)