Despite an internationally felt need for the availability of more organs for medical transplantation, the sale of human organs and tissues is outlawed in most countries. Expectedly, this has encouraged the growth of an illegal, exploitative market for organ trade, hidden well under the carpet. Governments, then, feign blindness to the existence of such trade, incapacitating themselves from regulating it. Consequently, the market thus created is unfair and exploitative. “In general, the flow of organs, tissues, and body parts follows the modern routes of capital… from female to male bodies.”[1] Empirical studies in India highlight that the number of women who donate their organs is exponentially higher than their male counterparts.[2] At the same time, there remains established scientific consensus that there are no relative advantages of donations of organs from female bodies over those from male ones, renders this trend a cause for concern.[3] This essay examines how the very language and structure of the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 (hereinafter the “THO”) allows for its objectives to be circumnavigated to allow the existence of a gendered market for organ transplantation. It then comments on how such body politics have given rise to a Culture of Alienability of female body parts, thereby eroding the idea of equal citizenship.

One of the two ways in which the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 (permits living organ donation is by allowing for it to take place between ‘near-relatives’. The THO defines the ‘near-relatives’ of a person restrictively to include only his/her “spouse, son, daughter, father, mother, brother or sister”;[4] a list which was recently expanded to include grandparents and grandchildren as well.[5] Authorities who sanction Donation naturally presume that a wife, irrespective of how suspicious the conditions of her marriage may be, is willing to grant her body parts to her husband, solely out of love and affection.[6] While the Authorities are entrusted with the task of ascertaining the consent of donors, this consent remains vitiated due to internalised sociological and psychological factors.[7] Interviews conducted by the researcher indicate that in almost all cases of near-relative transplants, consent is vitiated through (i) economic or other kinds of influence, or (ii) it being originated in conceived notions of the role of the woman and diminished value of her body within the family, or (iii) relative absence of consenting male donors.[8]

The other kind of living organ donation permitted under the THO is of the kind prompted by considerations of “affection and altruism”. Designed as a safeguard against the commercial sale of organs while allowing for their availability to those who need it, this provision requires the Authorization Committee to scrutinise all such cases in order to verify whether the said donation was prompted my genuine considerations of ‘affection and altruism’.[9] Regrettably, studies show that most donations prompted by “affection and altruism”, are made by women.[10] M.K. Mani, argues that “they ­(exploitative middle-men) do them (kidney sales) with the seal of approval from the Authorisation Committee, and are therefore a very satisfied lot. The law, which was meant to prohibit commercial dealings in human organs, now provides protection for those very commercial dealings”, indicating the THO, by necessary implication, is blind to these sales.[11] Cultural studies in Kidneyvakkam and Ayanavaram ascribe this to the perceived role of the female in society and economics, both limiting her ability to choose her profession as well as making her more vulnerable to invasive processes in order to be more economically valuable than men.[12] While a woman is not free to work in more rewarding professions due to constraints of societal conditioning and opinion, she is expected to sell her organs as an apologetic compensation for her perceived inability to the economically useful; subjecting her to an exploitative market and the mercy of untruthful middle-men and false promises.[13]

Sociological conceptions relating to the roles of women within families, the kind of occupations they may engage in, the economic value of their bodies and the tacit reluctance of men donating their organs has led to the creation of this Culture, according to which the body parts of a woman are mobile and can compensate for the relatively diminished economic role.  A Culture of Alienability of Human Organs necessarily rests upon the premise of their commodification.[14] When organs are traded in order to supplement the income of a family, it leads to the ‘collateralisation’ of the human body.[15] On the other hand, the prevention of commodification lies at the heart of the reason for the criminalisation of commercial dealings in Human Organs.[16] Commodification of human organs is said to deny the subjectivity of human beings, leading to their being treated as fungible instruments.[17] The commodification and collateralisation of human organs, then, takes away from the very purpose of the criminalisation of commercial trade in organs, both in India and internationally.

A Culture of Alienability of female organs, even when prompted solely by filial affection or altruism, then, strikes at the very objective of the THO. It has been argued out that the existence of such a parallel dialogue between the State and females denigrate them to the status of second-grade citizens. Cecelia Van Hollen argues that the gendered treatment of the human body in all spheres of public health creates different classes of citizens, with women occupying a significantly inferior position.[18] Consequently, the Culture of Alienability of Female Organs and their Commodification has clearly rendered female bodies as belonging to second-grade citizens to whom the logic and purpose of the THO does not apply, even as its framework continues to do so.

[1] S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009).

[2] Id, also see L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

[3] F. Ge, T, Huang, S. Yuang, Y. Zhou, W. Gong, Gender Issues in Solid Organ Transplantation and Donation,Vol. 18, Ann Transplant, 508, (2003).

[4] S. 2(9), The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

[5] S. (1), The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

[6] S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009).

[7] S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[8] Interviews with Interview with Mrs. A, aged 60 years, Kolkata, on 29^th January, 2015 and Mrs. Y, aged 35 years, Kolkata January, 2015 (Names of the interviewees changed. On record with the author) . Further, Interviews with the Hospital Authorisation Committee and Competent Authorities, BGS Global Hospital, 25^th April, 2015.

[9] See S. Shroff, Legal and Ethical Aspects of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Vol. 25(3), Indian Journal of Urology, (July-Sept., 2009), and S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[10] Id.

[11] M.K. Mani, The Nephrotoxicity of the Tsunami, Letter No. 154, Vol. 20(3), National Medical Journal of India, (May/June, 2007), available at http://www.nmji.in/archives/Volume_20_3_May_June/Letters/Letter_from_Chennai.htm, (last visited on January 15^th, 2015).

[12] L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

[13] S. Carney, The Red Market, (Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2011).

[14] K. M. Bridges, On the Commodification of the Black Female Body: The Critical Implications of the Alienability of Fetal Tissue, 123, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 102, No. 1 (Jan., 2002).

[15] Supra note 7 at 141.

[16] See B. N. Colabawala, Issues in Organ Transplant, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, (2002) and S. Wilkinson, Commodification Arguments for the Legal Prohibition of  Organ Sale, Vol. 8(2), Health Care Analysis, 189, (June, 2000).

[17] S. Wilkinson, Commodification Arguments for the Legal Prohibition of Organ Sale, Vol. 8(2), Health Care Analysis, 189, (June, 2000).  

[18] C. C. V. Hollen, Moving Targets: Routine IUD Insertion in Maternity Wards in Tamil Nadu, India, Vol. 6(11), Reproductive Health Matters, 98, (1998) as cited in L. Cohen, Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation, Vol. 128(4), Bioethics and Beyond , 147, (Fall, 1999).

India’s response to the ill-effects of a toxic pesticide has been slow and inadequate

Endosulfan, a pesticide, has been poisoning villagers in India over the past two decades. Its use has caused physical and mental ailments among thousands of children and adults and deaths of many hundreds. In 2011 India agreed to ban endosulfan, and, more recently, it offered compensation to its victims. But now it is falling short to keep both those promises.

The pesticide, once commonly used, damages the central nervous system and causes hormonal changes in mothers and babies. It leads to many birth defects including cerebral palsy, a condition that causes physical disability. Worse still, it lingers in the environment without degradation, leading to its accumulation in the food chain and causing lasting ill-effects.

Commitment to ban?

In 2011 at the Stockholm Convention 128 countries, including India, added endosulfan to the list of pollutants that they agree to phase out of use. Following India’s commitment at Stockholm and after years of effort by the Democratic Youth Federation of India, a non-governmental organization, in May 2011 the Supreme Court banned the use of endosulfan in the country but allowed its exports to exhaust remaining stocks. At present India has 2000 tonnes of the pesticide and raw materials enough to make a further 4000 tonnes of it. As international demand for the pesticide has plummeted, the government has been forced to dispose this stash.

In July, because the Indian government was not ready to foot a $40 million bill for the disposal of endosulfan’s raw materials, it asked the Supreme Court to lift the ban on making the pesticide. In November the Supreme Court’s expert committee requested giving in to this demand. Citing that the treaty that Indian signed allows it up to six years to phase out endosulfan, so it could allow endosulfan’s manufacture and use without breaking its commitment. This recommendation was made even though the committee accepts that endosulfan is harmful to human health.

Sadly, endosulfan remains popular among farmers too. Manufacturing of the pesticide, if allowed, will be greeted with strong demand. Before the ban, India was the largest producer and consumer of endosulfan. It is cheap, easily available and curtails a variety of pests. For those unaware of its environmental consequences, there is little reason to not use it.

Studies show ill-effects of endosulfan use across the country. Kerala is the worst affected state. A 2012 state report linked the pesticide to 4000 afflicted and 700 deaths, many of whom suffered the fate because of aerial spraying over nearby cashew plantations. In some villages 50% homes have a child or an adult with severe disabilities.

In May the Kerela government, based on the recommendations of the National Human Rights Commission, agreed to pay compensation to the victims of endosulfan in Kerela. The amount varied from Rupees 300,000 ($5,500) to 500,000 ($9,500) depending on the victim’s suffering. But despite protests in September and December, the government has only paid 101 out of the 2453 victim families.

The request to allow manufacturing of endosulfan exposes the government’s inability to dispose the raw materials. If undisposed, the chemicals lie in poorly maintained warehouses. A task force setup to inspect one such warehouse in Periya, Kerala, after locals complained of foul smell, found endosulfan leaking from rusted steel drums. The warehouse also lacked storekeepers, fire safety equipment and first-aid kits, posing a serious threat to nearby villages and water bodies.

Endosulfan rehabilitation project, setup by Kerala last year to help the afflicted, started an operation to deal with such cases. Their first task was to contain the leaking drums. They are now hoping to get help from the government for disposal and detoxification, said Mohammed Asheel, the project officer.

Far too little, far too late

Pratibha Patil, former President of India, promised to double public spending on health care to 2.5% of the GDP by 2017. Among its first steps is a $5 billion free drugs plan, the implementation of which began in October. Surely then the Indian government can, apart from preserving the ban, also afford to stop poisoning its own people for a mere $40 million and also compensate those already poisoned.

First posted on The Allotrope. Image from here.

The good news

First, the good news. The funding scenario for science in India is better than ever, with lots of infrastructure, startup funds and facilities provided to young aspiring professors. A major recent initiative has been the creation of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) whose primary goal has been to meld undergraduate education with research, something that’s traditionally been almost completely missing in India. Expensive new centers including a neutrino observatory, a clean nanotechnology lab and most impressively, an open-source tuberculosis drug discovery project are highlighting India’s ambition and capabilities to focus on relevant and cutting edge fields.

In addition there’s a surplus of faculty positions at some top institutes that will make faculty candidates in Western countries feel jealous. A great example is the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore which provides a premier research environment. Many of these institutes have year-round hiring. There are also a few lucrative fellowships designed to attract expatriate Indians back to their country to set up their labs. Some of them allow you to start a lab anywhere that you want in the country. Purely in terms of facilities and funding, this is a good time to do academic science in India. And after a long, fallow period of scientific entrepreneurship, there are finally opportunities for Indian scientists to turn their discoveries into profits, although time would tell how efficient the system is in reality.

In addition, being an assistant professor (or any higher middle-class working professional for that matter) in India has its perks; one gets cheap access to maids who will cook and clean for your family and a driver who will drive you around. The maids will also double as baby-sitters and will occasionally shop for your groceries. Science institutes in India often offer highly subsidized housing and meals. Adjusting for these perks and for purchasing power parity, it’s not a big exaggeration to say that being an assistant professor in a top Indian research university is a comfortable prospect.

The bad news

Now the bad news, which unfortunately points to some rather deep structural problems which have beset Indian science education and research since its post-independence conception. To gain some insight into these it’s worth looking at some history.

For a developing country India has always been pretty big on science. Nobel Prize winners like H. G. Khorana (who died a few months back) and C. V. Raman emerged from the old education system which was modeled after the British system. In some fields like statistics India has consistently produced world-class researchers. After India became independent in 1947, science was one of the top priorities for the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer. Even today Nehru remains India’s most scientifically literate leader and he was instrumental in establishing both the well-known Indian Institutes of Technology and several leading federal research laboratories.

Unfortunately, Nehru’s undoubtedly visionary outlook on science was severely crippled by his equally fervent belief in Soviet-style socialism. While this did not lead to the genocidal horrors seen in the Soviet Union and China, it did lead to forty years or so of socialist “reforms” and “five-year plans” modeled on the Soviet system of education under which science and especially basic science floundered. Constraints were tightly imposed both on funding and on financial incentives for Indian scientists. Scientific entrepreneurship leading to intellectual property was virtually non-existent. Keeping in line with the Soviet system however, there was heavy investment in both atomic energy and the space program and India emerged as a leading power in these sectors. Today there is a nuclear weapons complex, but more promisingly there is advanced nuclear reactor research trying to produce electricity from thorium. And as the article notes, the advanced status of the space program has led India to make ambitious plans for a manned moon landing.

But basic science has been neglected, and even after the opening up of Indian markets in the early 90s, the old system remains deeply ingrained in Indian science primarily in two debilitating ways.

Indian education: A riddle wrapped in a straitjacket

One huge hurdle is in the form of extremely limited undergraduate science education that still heavily relies on rote memorization without true understanding, discourages teamwork and most importantly, is almost completely uncoupled from research. As the articles note, this is most obvious in the large number of state-run universities in India that provide the bulk of the science education in the country. Almost no Indian state-run university offers decent research opportunities for undergraduates, a pronounced oversight that is starting to be remedied by institutes like the IISERs but still on a very small scale. An interesting contrast is that compared to top science institutes which can be awash in funds and facilities, state-run schools remain not just woefully under-equipped but blatantly ignorant of safety regulations. It is not uncommon to find chemistry labs even at respectable colleges without a single fume hood inside them.

In addition, the curriculum in most of these places is outdated. For instance, much of the biology curriculum still asks students to memorize intricate details of invertebrate anatomy and physiology. Physical chemistry courses include outdated textbooks from the 1950s by Samuel Glasstone and Bruce Mahan (these are classics and were excellent textbooks for their time, but they cannot be part of a modern chemical education that is supposed to prepare students for a research career). Physics is full of tuning forks, inclined plains and Wheatstone bridges. The notebooks of organic chemistry students still devote reams of paper to structure determination by chemical degradation of the kind that was done before spectroscopic techniques became available. A similar situation exists in the laboratory, with many experiments and apparatus looking quaint and outdated. To be sure there are chapters on molecular biology, protein chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, quantum chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and other modern topics, but they are mostly reserved for graduate level courses, and one wonders why undergraduates are expected to be steeped in all that outdated material.

However, the bigger problem in the Indian education system may not even be this lack of research opportunities for science undergraduates but the more general blinkered education that Indian college students are forced to endure. To begin with, the system has defined an extremely strange and regressive compartmentalization of education that seems to dissuade any kind of flexibility in learning, let alone in interdisciplinary study. It is no secret that ever since India opened up its markets and globalization brought West and East under the same economic umbrella, there has been a steady demand for Indian engineers and technical professionals in the West. But this has also led to a highly skewed bias toward engineering, medical and business education in the country. Importantly, it has manifested itself in the proliferation and segregation of professional universities from those offering science and humanities courses. This means that an engineering schools teaches only engineering, and a medical school teaches only medicine. So once you are out of high school you are forced to pick your major and your career. Get into an engineering school and you are pretty much shut out from being able to study psychology or chemistry or economics. For that you need to get into a school more akin to liberal arts colleges in the US. But even there you have to pick your major right in your freshman year; you can’t study both the sciences and the humanities. If you want to take chemistry you won’t be able to take philosophy. In fact the situation is so bad that in most places students cannot study even biology and mathematics together!

Needless to say, this system places a newly-minted high-school student into a draconian straitjacket where he or she has to pick a career and then stick with it for the next four years with absolutely no flexibility in changing a major or adapting one’s talents to one’s profession. It should also be obvious that this strict compartmentalization affords almost no opportunities for developing interdisciplinary research skills, a staple of today’s complex research problems. The result is predictable; an alarmingly large number of students who when they graduate from college are either unhappy with their major or incompetent at it or both.

Compounding these problems is perhaps an even bigger one; the social perception of professional education at the expense of relegating the sciences and humanities to the dustbin of mediocrity. The great demand for engineers, doctors and businessmen has placed these disciplines on a pedestal. As a result, the standards for admissions to these professional courses are much higher than those for the sciences or humanities. This typically means that spots in these professional courses are reserved for students who graduate from high school with the highest grades. Conversely, left to study the sciences and humanities are the scum of the earth, high-school graduates who are usually at the bottom of the pile. Since almost nobody from the top is going to fill out the science or humanities application, the liberal arts colleges relax their admission criteria to accommodate the most mediocre of the lot. The bottom line: engineering colleges tend to be populated with smart, articulate, ambitious students while the liberal arts colleges fill up with students who are studying sciences or the humanities pretty much because they aren’t good enough to get into any other place. No wonder that many of these state-run colleges are filled with mediocre and unhappy students who would rather be doing something else. This is unfair both to the students but more fatally to the disciplines themselves which suffer from active neglect at best and a constant assault of mediocre minds at worst.

It needs no imagination to perceive the effect of this segregation on the occasional outlier who, in spite of getting top grades in high school, consciously stays away from engineering or medicine because he actually wants to study chemistry or physics. For one thing he will have a very hard time finding intelligent, like-minded peers who can provide intellectual companionship, and we all know how influential the peer environment in college can be. In addition, the segregated system will virtually ensure that most of his peers outside his college will look down upon him; they will think that the reason he is not studying engineering is because he wasn’t good enough and more generally, the fact that he is not studying engineering means that he isn’t really worth paying attention to. In addition to the lack of research opportunities cited above and the mediocre faculty at state-run colleges combined with the poor employment outlook for scientists compared to other professionals, it is hardly surprising that many bright science students quickly leave science and get into better-paying professional fields. Now there’s a reason for the common complaint cited in the article, that Indian students are not studying the sciences anymore.

There is also a related social reason not discussed in the article which I just alluded to; the lack of societal respect for science and the humanities. Partly because of the educational segregation outlined above and partly because of a curious mentality that equates monetary success with intelligence and capability, Indian parents are loathe to encourage their kids to study anything other than professional disciplines. One theory I have about this has to do with the environment that many of these parents grew up in, that of socialist India. If you were an Indian parent who could not make money because of government constraints and if your son or daughter were growing up in a new, more market-friendly India, you certainly wouldn’t want your children to forgo the opportunities that you didn’t have. In this sense, many Indian parents who want their kids to become affluent are living the dream that they themselves couldn’t live. This is reasonable within limits, but it’s also creating a significant social bias towards all kinds of other professions including the sciences, humanities and the arts. In turn, the kids are judging other kids by the same standards that their parents have applied to them. In their worldview, any other kid who is not doing the same thing that they are doing must be unintelligent, misguided in his ambitions or both. This attitude feeds upon itself and perpetuates and has created a manifestly unhealthy peer environment. If India is to attract its best minds to science, it must create a society where science is respected for its intrinsic value at all levels, from parents to kids to teachers.

In India, B doesn’t stand for ball

One of the distinguishing features of all socialist countries and especially the old Soviet Union was the ubiquitous bureaucracy that pervaded every aspect of life. Indian bureaucracy and red tape are famous and recalcitrant, so recalcitrant that it seems that even twenty odd years of free-market reforms have been ineffective in undoing them. There has undoubtedly been much progress; for instance, getting a simple telephone line installed in your office in the 1980s could take up to a year. Other simple services could results in unacceptable delays and a trail of paperwork that would put a rainforest conservationist to shame. Setting up a small business in India was a nightmare and to some extent it still is; by one account you need 165 licenses to open a hotel in the country. But things have changed. Wireless companies have flooded the market and ensured that the Indian telephone experience is no different from anywhere else in the world, and Mumbai today probably sports a more diverse collection of cell-phone models than Los Angeles. Setting up a business is still not easy, but you don’t have to spend your entire life waiting for it.

Yet science seems to be straggled by unacceptable bureaucracy. But before we move on to its more predictable effects, we should first note its most startling aspect: the lack of a tenure system in Indian academia. For the longest time, even in top Indian institutions, there was no tenure review process and mediocre performers essentially hung around for life. Sometime in their 40s or 50s they would be bumped up from “assistant” to “associate” position by virtue of “seniority” alone. But institutions would naturally be obliged to pay their salaries and benefits even as they were producing little noteworthy research and blocking positions for younger scientists. A mandatory retirement somewhat compensated for the problem, but the effect of this accumulation of deadwood cannot be underestimated. The renewal of scientific blood and constant assessment of existing personnel is an essential condition for scientific productivity. Without tenure, not only was there no replenishment of the stock but there was a constant, general sense of malaise that spread to other faculty members and students. This factor is so obviously important that it’s not even worth elaborating on it too much. Whatever the merits and drawbacks of existing tenure systems in the West, it goes without saying that there should be some system of periodic evaluation and tenure. Thankfully some institutes like the NCBS have now instituted tenure reviews, but this is still a drop in the ocean compared to the vast majority of Indian science institutions.

Then there are the more prosaic but undoubtedly debilitating effects of bureaucracy. Senior Indian scientists cited in the Science articles remember the 60s and 70s when they had to wait months for simple chemicals and equipment and were asked to justify the details of every single purchase. State-of-the art equipment is now found at many top Indian institutions, but the justification part has largely stayed the same. Funding for Indian science may have grown, but every rupee is watched with a fervor that would evoke Big Brother. The article quotes an Indian scientist lamenting this situation and saying that he feels stifled by a system that asks him to submit a detailed report on his work every 3 months. It’s one thing to ask for detailed progress reports, it’s another to almost dictate the direction of someone’s research by scrutinizing every detail. Bureaucracy also engenders a lack of transparency, with officials conveniently hiding their responsibilities and mistakes under layers of obfuscatory paperwork. It’s pretty obvious that open science and freedom of inquiry can never thrive under such constraints.

The red tape also dissuades existing scientists from striking out in new directions; as the Indian Institute of Science’s director Prof. P. Balaram puts it in one of the Science articles, “Even the best of intentions can disappear without a trace in the quicksands of officialdom”. This is especially stifling for expatriate Indian scientists who have been exposed to a different kind of research environment for many years and are now seeking to starts their own labs back in India. Unfortunately the experiences of scientists coming back to India after a long time seem all too alike; almost any effort by these scientists to institute progressive practices and cultures ingrained during their experience abroad can be construed as elitism and an insolent effort to rock the boat. It’s pretty clear that unless bureaucracy is seen as a culture-independent, fundamental barrier to scientific progress, research aspirations will continue to disappear into the “quicksands of officialdom”.

The battle hymn of the old guard

Many of the problems riddling Indian science could be distilled down to one factor; what’s been called the Indian “scientocracy”. This may well be the hardest hurdle to surmount since it really reflects a problem endemic in Indian society as a whole. Although it has been rapidly changing in the past few years, Indian society remains hierarchical at all levels, from the family to private organizations. Traditionally society has been organized, at least implicitly, by class, caste and official titles. The caste system may have been largely shaken off, but other layers remain.

India has a very strong paternalistic streak in its many organizations and scientific organizations are no exception. Hero-worship is a rather deeply ingrained part of Indian culture, although the young generation seems to be showing some promising signs of shaking it off. Age usually commands great respect and obedience. “Senior” scientists who have done especially noteworthy work can be virtually worshipped. Some are treated akin to Gods. Students are explicitly or implicitly encouraged not to talk back to professors or ask them probing questions. I have heard too many cases of students being “shown their place” when they tried to be too inquisitive in class. In most cases even younger scientists are not addressed on a first-name basis. In the lab the PI reigns supreme and most labs are run as minor fiefdoms. Even minor decisions and ideas may have to be approved by the PI. Irreverent inquiry is almost always squished, even if it may lead to productive science. This is the case even in private companies.

All this has led to a rather conspicuous lack of open inquiry of the kind that fosters efficient scientific communication and the dispersal of ideas. Science especially is the quintessentially egalitarian system, where the only thing that should matter is how good someone’s ideas are and not how old or distinguished they are. Last year in an Op-Ed in Science, a previous director of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (the Indian counterpart to the NSF and the NIH) bemoaned the lack of irreverence in Indian scientific culture, although he must have been aware that his generation has played an active role in perpetuating it. He gave examples of famous scientists – Feynman, Watson, Crick, Feigenbaum, Venter – whose playful irreverence and lack of automatic respect for the “elders” in their field has led to both revolutionary ideas and a strong culture of innovation. The implications are clear; an Indian Feynman would probably be silenced and perhaps even cast out of the scientific establishment for daring to question his superiors. The Indian scientocracy dissuades bold, probing questioning.

The articles in Science don’t address this aspect of Indian science which I believe is of paramount importance. One does not create a scientifically fertile environment by surrounding himself with yes-men. There are countless cases to prove the contrary; the Manhattan Project and Bell Labs being only two examples of organizations where thinking outside the box led to great advances. True breakthroughs can only arise from individuals, and especially young individuals, questioning the status quo and boldly treading the boundaries of knowledge. Indian science clearly has to catch up.

The future?

The articles in science seem to strike a note of cautious optimism. India is certainly paying much more attention to its scientific landscape than it ever did and it is clearly eager to leave its mark. Whether symbolic or real, its aspirations for a moon shot signify its ambitions. The hurdle as I see it is that the problems outlined above run very deep and their roots extend through many generations. They are not problems which can be resolved in one year or even in ten. Plus, as some scientists in the article say, the sheer magnitude of the issues is such that even with all these efforts Indian science has not reached a critical mass; a startling statistic says that the total number of biologists in India is less than the number in Boston alone. So what can be done?

It is clear that the solution will have to come from multiple fronts. Some problems are easier to address than others. The syllabus will have to be overhauled and this can be accomplished at least locally at some places by convincing the administration of the value of including modern topics. The compartmentalization problem is more entrenched since it depends on demand for professional versus scientific jobs, a situation that’s unlikely to change in the near future. But at least in some cases it could be accomplished by driving home the conceptual and commercial value of cross-dsciplinary topics like neuroscience, biophysics and biostatistics.

The centrality of science in human progress and thinking must be driven home by the media, by educated intellectuals and most importantly by the senior scientists who seem to command public attention; perhaps some of them can put the hero-worship to good use. As upholders of the scientific status quo and guardians of the purse-strings, they can do a lot. This might generally improve the standing of science in the public consciousness. It might lead more top students to study science and it may lead their parents to support their ambitions. A lot of Indian scientists have blamed lucrative IT jobs for presumably drawing away scientific talent. It is clear that a nation full of IT professionals cannot fulfill its scientific destiny and demonstrate real progress, but this situation is unlikely to change any time soon, and as they say, it’s much better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The new scientific initiatives melding undergraduate education and research and offering thousands of scholarships to bright high-school students are certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact that these initiatives have not yet touched the preponderant state-run universities leaves much to be desired.

Ultimately the transformation will take time, probably a long time. Young Indian scientists including homegrown researchers and expatriates have to work together and implement positive changes in scientific culture, lab safety and communication. They will start anew and there is no doubt that we will have to wait perhaps twenty or fifty years to see truly significant changes. They will nonetheless face resistance from some of the old guard , but one can always remember Max Planck’s statement: “A new scientific theory does not prevail because it convinces its detractors of its validity, but rather because its detractors die and a new generation grows up on it and recognizes its value”.

Renewal can be the only true catalyst for fundamental change.

[Image Credit: By Pérot [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

But what really catapulted the story to public attention was the finding that resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine, might do this. The presence of a (relatively) cheap, edible substance universally consumed, savored and culturally revered that might slow down aging naturally led to unprecedented public attention. The French and Italians might say “I told you so”, but suddenly the holy grail of medical science seemed to be within reach. As usual though, the initial euphoria gradually gave way to a more cautious and tempered belief in the benefits of red wine in mitigating the ill effects of age, and indeed in the whole field of caloric restriction itself. The complete story is fascinating and too convoluted to recount here, but the simple fact of the matter is that the biology of aging is much more complex than we imagined and the initial breakthroughs have not been as unambiguous as they seemed. Not surprisingly, ascribing something as complex as aging and its attendant physiological changes to the action of a single family of genes and proteins has turned out to be simplistic at best (as a comparison, even obesity is thought to be caused by dozens of genes with overlapping effects). In addition, anti-aging effects that got the attention of the New York Times turned out to be significant only in “lower” animals and not in mammals. As it stands today, while research on caloric restriction undoubtedly has great potential, many complications need to be ironed out before the initial optimism can be justified. Curiously, much of the high-profile work in the area can be traced in various forms to a single laboratory at MIT. A recent article in Science does a great job detailing the personalities, the findings and the controversies that sprang from this and other laboratories’ work; the entire saga seems fit for a Sinclair Lewis novel.

But whatever the scientific status of the field, its high-profile nature and its potentially revolutionary implications promised ample funding for interested researchers, and over the years it has attracted both highly visible as well as lesser known scientists. One of the individuals who waded into resveratrol territory was Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut Medical School. Over the last few years Das  published several papers detailing the beneficial effects of resveratrol in possibly preventing or mitigating oxidative damage caused in cardiovascular and neurological diseases. While most of his research has been published in low-impact journals, it seems that Das was on his way to a lucrative research career involving resveratrol and its role in health and disease.

Until now. It seems that somewhere along the road, he started committing fraud on a massive scale, the likes of which haven’t been seen in some time in biomedical research. It started when an anonymous tipster tipped off the university about fabrication in some of Das’s papers. The university then launched its own probe and formed a review committee. For the past two years the committee has been working in the shadows with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) and last week they released their findings in a 50-page document. The findings indicate wholesale fraud, manipulation of results and deliberate doctoring of critical data on a shockingly regular basis between 2002 to 2009.

Much of the fabrication centers around Western blots, a research tool that’s universally used in all aspects of biological research. The Western blot is to biology what spectroscopy is to chemistry and physics. It essentially detects the presence and identity of specific biomolecules, especially proteins. The proteins appear as dark bands on a white background with different lanes representing different proteins. Western blots are absolutely indispensable in confirming the identity of a novel or unknown protein, and I think it’s safe to say that most biomedical researchers who have won Nobel Prizes have used these tools in their research. In case of Das, the report has found dozens of Western blots to be grossly manipulated using image manipulation software.

There are two aspects of the report that bear closer scrutiny. One is the sheer number of Western blots found to have been doctored. The committee examined 26 papers and cited no less than 88 figures which appear to be manipulated (there were also several that appeared normal). This is a staggering amount of manipulation and rules out accidental oversight. Das would have to be involved in a concerted, conscious and deliberate effort to tamper with so much data. It’s quite clear that the magnitude of the manipulation alone points strongly to purposeful fraud.

The second aspect of the report concerns the great difficulty of detecting the fraud. Western blots seem to notoriously amenable to manipulation; they prominently featured in another recent high-profile case of fraud in India involving Gopal Kundu of the National Center for Cell Science (NCCS). In the report on Das’s work, single bands of proteins in Western blots have been enlarged and their borders further magnified to show the contrast between the background for that particular band and for others, indicating that the band in question was copied and pasted. Image manipulation software can sometimes produce such artifacts and some of the data appears like it could also have been the result of negligence or sloppy editing, but the number of such instances again rules out merely these possibilities. But the difficulty of discerning the doctored data also indicates more generally how difficult it can be to detect fraud in science. Even experienced specialists, let alone laymen or researchers from other fields, wouldn’t have thought to look for these minute differences which are evident only in retrospect. To demonstrate the process, at one point in the report the committee actually depicts a mock manipulation protocol where bands are edited or appended to other bands from totally different experiments. The subtleties in the data make it clear that even in the future it would be relatively easy for researchers to get away with this kind of manipulation. What these cases point to is the need for automated systems (“counter-software”, if you will) that could detect such fine anomalies in submitted Western blots or other presentations and try to separate artifacts from real red flags. In this case of course, the verdict is unanimous. At the end of the report, the committee finds unambiguous evidence of “unequivocal image manipulation, splicing, background erase and duplication” in a vast number of cases resulting in both data fabrication and falsification.

The debacle is ending in ways that such unfortunate scenarios usually end. The university has already begun proceedings to fire Das from his position. It is very likely that he will never be able to do research again, and that’s probably the way it should be given the extent of his fraud. Sadly, Das has not made things any easier by accusing university and department officials of racist prejudice. When you have to resort to such allegations in the face of massive evidence detailing your dishonesty, you only make your guilt seem more likely.

Ultimately this episode speaks as much about the culture of scientific research as it does about the transgressions of a particular researcher. We may not know for some time why Das felt like committing fraud on such a massive scale, but I suspect that the high-profile nature of anti-aging research and the funding that such research commands may have had at least something to do with it. In the last few years, resveratrol, caloric restriction and sirtuins have made it into the public discourse about science like few other topics. The possibility of harnessing all this data to solve the ultimate mystery of aging has ensured both sensationalist news items and eager funding agencies wanting to enable the next breakthrough. When you work in such high-profile fields, it is more tempting to fabricate your results to snare more funding. In this particular case, Das’s work was deemed to be low-impact and peripheral to the field and so the damage might be negligible, but in someone else’s hands it could well be extensive. The case of Jan Schon immediately comes to mind.

The other reason underlying Das’s behavior might simply have been the complexities of biology. Das has been at the university since 1984 and got tenure in 1993, so it’s curious why he decided to fabricate results in the last decade or so. I am quite ready to believe that his work on the complex effects of resveratrol on disease may have run into roadblocks, prompting him to start making up results that he wanted to see but which he didn’t. Most research these days and especially biomedical research is a complex game. In some ways we are trying to bite off more than we can chew. In such cases wishful thinking can dominate, and when expected results don’t pan out because of the complexity of the system under consideration, it becomes easier to succumb to desperation and temptation. The resveratrol story may fit into this paradigm, with initial reports suggesting a tantalizingly simple connection between the drugs and aging and more recent reports questioning this connection. Yet again, nature is not just more complex than we imagine, but it is more complex than we can imagine.

The only remedy for avoiding such debacles may be more acute vigilance, self-policing and an honest willingness to accept failures. And some modesty before nature may be in order here.

***

2. Earlier this month, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler 22-b, a planet outside our solar system that orbits its star within the habitable zone. This zone, also known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’, is a region around a star where planets are neither too close nor too far from their sun, such that liquid water could be present on their surface. This makes Kepler 22-b and its moons excellent candidates for the search of extraterretrial life, or as extrasolar earth-like planets we could flee to if we really lose the plot back home. However, Kepler 22-b is 2.4 times the size of the earth (leading to a much stronger graviational pull), and scientists do not yet know whether it has a predominantly rocky or gaseous surface. However, this is a significant landmark in the search for earth-like planets. Read up on Nasa’s announcement here: http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=165

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3. The team at CERN has announced that it is closing in on the Higgs Boson, the particle predicted to exist by the standard model of particle physics.  However, John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at King’s College, London, argues that whether or not the Higgs Boson is found, scientists must formulate new frameworks of particle physics. I won’t reveal the reason why he says this, but urge you to read his article in Nature here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/481024a.html

The paragraph with the subheading ‘averting collapse’ is quite chilling.

***

4. Rounding off this week’s Critical Digest are a few links on Bad Science. I want to highlight practices that the scientific community has debunked and recognised as pseudoscience, yet are still prevalent in many countries, especially India.

• Reiki: Uses ‘spiritual energy’ for healing. Has been shown to be ineffective as a treatment for any condition, alone or in conjunction with other therapies in randomised clinical trials. Tell your parents!! Read the studies here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1742-1241.2008.01729.x/abstract;jsessionid=D1A896D44FC2280792CEE880654EC5FA.d02t03 and here http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2009.0036

• Astrology: Debunked decades ago, yet is still offered as a taught degree in Indian universities. I’m not even kidding. Read this rather unfortunate article here: http://www.hindu.com/2004/05/06/stories/2004050602931400.htm as well as a takedown of this pseudoscientific discipline here: http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/skepticism/blfaq_astro_sci_pseudo.htm

• Homeopathy: As widespread as this practice is in India, it would chill your blood if you read the kind of utter quackery that it is based upon. A read of the following Wikipedia articles is highly recommended: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy#Evidence as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_dilutions I highly recommend the second article, as one single thorough read will change your mind if you believe in this practice. Darryl Cunningham has also done a spectacular takedown here: http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/2010/06/homeopathy.html

I’ll leave you now with a little something from the great Tim Minchin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U

Whew, that was long. Until next time!

]]> http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sciencetechnology/science-critical-digest-6-12-11/feed 0 http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sciencetechnology/einstein-and-god-lets-put-this-behind-us-shall-we http://www.criticaltwenties.in/sciencetechnology/einstein-and-god-lets-put-this-behind-us-shall-we#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 20:36:55 +0000 Akshat http://www.criticaltwenties.in/?p=3487 I write this in response to all those who quote Einstein when they are faced with a science v/s religion dilemma. Misquoting Einstein or quoting him out of context (which most people do, albeit inadvertently) gives them a good excuse to go on living as they have. It allows them to escape from the tribulation that comes along with facing the prospect of changing one’s religious views. I know because I have been in those shoes before. Einstein’s views of God and religion are very clear but easy to distort.

Most of those, whom I know, who make the mistake of quoting Einstein at this juncture to appease themselves, are those who after a certain time of practising science have come to the point where they need to face the reality. The reality that fate is in the hands of us human beings and that we have a huge responsibility for all our actions. That the world is based on causality and is not some puppet show. Or it is those who have always believed in God but in a lab their belief system is contradicting their science. Or those, like me, who have always been agnostic but gone along with the flow of religious rituals because they never needed to question their religious views. (It is not uncommon to not have to face your own religious views when you are surrounded by people of very similar views, which happens a lot in urban India).

Before I state my case, I will make it clear that my main source of reference is Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Einstein’s essays on this topic. And I am aware that this may put off many of those who consider Dawkins to be wrong. I certainly don’t think Dawkins is wrong but I also am not an in-your-face-atheist (or a ‘new atheist’ as people call it these days). I say this because, irrespective of your views of Dawkins, his account of Einsteinian religion is an objective account of Einstein’s beliefs and as such can be considered independent of his views on God. So read the following without prejudices please:

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion (a supernatural creator that is appropriate to worship). Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God, inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.

One of Einstein’s most eagerly quoted remark is ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ But Einstein also said, “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious conviction, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Here are more quotations from Einstein to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion:

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

Einstein was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was a theist. He admired Spinoza’s philosophy. He said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings’?”

I’ll end this discussion with Dawkins’ explanation:

There is every reason to think famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but He is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe’ are certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in purely metaphorical, poetic sense.

One of Thiel’s controversial initiatives is his 20 under 20 program. The broad outline of the program is as follows: any person under the age of 20 can apply, and those who have great ideas in science, technology, or entrepreneurship are selected and are given $100,000 over two years as well as special mentoring and access to resources to pursue their ideas. These people are required to “stop” out of college for the duration of two years, though they can go back to college once the time period is over.

Thiel first announced this in a TechCrunch interview. Here’s what Thiel said at the end of the interview:

Well, we’ve been, you know we’ve been brainstorming a lot on, on what we’re gonna, you know, what we can do to try to break the sort of relative stasis we’ve been in as a society and you know as a BC Fund we’ve been investing in these breakthrough technology companies. One of the things that we think is very important is to encourage potentially young entrepreneurs to actually get involved in a science technology and in creating all this great value for the next generation. So one of the initiatives that we’re gonna be starting over the next few weeks is a program for offering grants of up to $100,000 to up to 20 people under age 20 for starting something new. [...] One of the big problems with the education system in both, it’s undergrad and grad school levels which a lot worse when I went to school 20 years ago is that it just cost so much more and so you end up with people burden with incredible amounts of debts and well, they maybe able to track towards certain safe jobs is actually a lot harder for people to take the risks you need and we think you’re gonna have to take a lot of risks to build the next generation of companies. So the, we’re basically are gonna be taking applications through the end of this year for 2011. The basic thing is you can apply individually or in a team of up to four people. It is a two year program up to $100,000 and we will, we will encourage people to do something from California to get involve in the, a breakthrough technology, anywhere in the world. [...] Twenty under 20.

This led to some negative responses, such as this one from Jacob Weisberg at Newsweek, which Bryan Caplan at EconLog described as “Accurate summary plus impotent fuming” aka “priceless publicity” for Thiel’s cause.

Recently, the Thiel Foundation announced that it had decided the list of Thiel Foundation fellows for 2011. 24 fellows have been selected, instead of the originally planned 20. It seems likely that this program will be continued for future years, with the next round of applications due at the end of this year, but there has been no official announcement of a next round so far.

The announcement received coverage in many media outlets, including the Chronicle of Higher Education. There was also some critical discussion in the Washington Post, Fortune, as well as on Bijan Sabet’s blog.

In a subsequent blog post some time from now, I’ll take a look at the 20 under 20 program, the current list of Thiel Fellows, and what I think of the promise of this program and what it reflects about the merits and demerits of staying in college versus “stopping” out if you want to pursue great ideas in science and technology.

When I came to America two things struck me. First, that science popularization enjoyed vigorous participation and appreciation from both scientists and non-scientists. And second, that some of the clearest writing about science came from people without formal scientific backgrounds. There are indeed many famous science writers like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E O Wilson and Steven Weinberg who have impeccable scientific credentials, but there’s an equal number of others like Carl Zimmer, Robert Crease, Richard Rhodes, James Gleick, Rebecca Skloot and George Johnson who have written first-rate books on science and its history and philosophy, and whose grasp of basic science rivals that of experts in the field. With the rise of blogs and online media, science popularization has enjoyed an even bigger audience and entire conferences like ScienceOnline are organized and attended by science writers and journalists who are fundamentally science popularizers. I attended ScienceOnline 2011 this year and was very impressed by the scientific passion and drive for science communication that I saw in all the non-scientists attending the conference. Most of the attendees had basic degrees in science but very few of them were professional scientists.

In this post I want to address the troubling attitude about science popularization that existed among my fellow students in college. I already consider my college years a thing of the past, so recent college graduates should definitely voice their observations and opinions in the comments section. Have things changed?

As I noted above, the real problem with the attitude toward science popularization is that it is endemic of a more troubling larger view of science as being equivalent to research and nothing else. But this view is just plain wrong. Even a cursory glance at the history of science reveals that while research has been the primary driving force within science, the teaching of science, scientific funding, scientific collaborations and even rivalries, the impact of social factors on the direction of research and yes…science popularization, have all played a key role in science’s transformation of the modern world. This history reveals a simple fact that is sometimes forgotten; science is very much a social activity. The image of the lone scientist toiling away in his lab and making a great discovery with immediate impact on society was never really true, and is not true at all in this era of expensive science, international collaborations and interdisciplinary research. These days it’s not enough to have a great idea; one needs to sell it to academic institutions, government agencies, private corporations and other funding bodies.

But most importantly, one needs to sell it to the public. And this is true even if the sale is not actually conducted from a park bench by every individual scientist. The sale is necessary because not only has the majority of scientific research in history been funded from the public coffer but because that funding will stop flowing if the public is not convinced of the value of research. We are already seeing this happening in the US. A country which has been the largest public supporter of science until now is struggling to hold on to the public purse strings through its government agencies, in part because of a fundamentally bad economy but also because public support for basic science has been increasingly tainted by multiple factors including the declining quality of education, fundamentalist religion and a growing inability to separate long-term prosperity from short-term benefits.

The only solution to this problem is better science communication. No number of brilliant scientific research ideas by themselves are ever going to reach the public and solve the problem if they are not presented in a digestible form. In that sense, science “popularization” is really nothing but science “communication”, although the former entails fancier pitches. Hopefully the latter word conveys a much bigger and obvious sense of urgency. Thus henceforth I will refer to science popularization as science communication.

Once the key dependence of scientific support on a public that mostly is not formally scientifically educated becomes clear, the important of science communication cannot be underestimated. Communicate science, otherwise doing science will slowly but surely become an uphill battle. My friends who were erstwhile scientists should have realized that their future as science doers depends in an important way on the science communicators that they disparaged. Perhaps that should have generated more respect for the communicators.

Indeed, even within science the importance of “explanation” has been widely recognized. Scientists who were masters of explanation may not always be as well-known as the movers and shakers of science but within the community their importance is unquestioned. Most people won’t recognize the name of Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman who contributed much more to science by way of teaching, critiquing and explaining than he did through original research. Robert Oppenheimer was similar. At the height of his powers, Oppenheimer once said that the business of theoretical physicists was to explain to each other what they could not understand. Niels Bohr, a scientist who had an almost maddening obsession to state scientific facts accurately, used to stress to his brilliant students and colleagues that they could not claim to have understood the thorny subtleties of quantum mechanics if they could not explain them to each other in “plain language”. Richard Feynman quipped that one could not really hope to have understood something if he or she were unable to explain it to the average layman on the street. It may not be obvious, but all these scientists were implicitly extolling the key value in science of what we are calling science “popularization”.

But assuming that my friends had understood the importance of communication, that may have still led them to their second misunderstanding; that only scientists who are accomplished in research are capable of the best scientific communication. As I have noted before, even a factual examination tells us otherwise; there are as many first-rate formally untrained science communicators as there are trained ones. This leads right away to the larger fallacy stated above; the assumption that knowing or doing science necessarily means spending all your time in actual scientific research.

It’s important to spend some time discussing this fallacy since it also implicitly assumes that being steeped in the fundamentals, getting trained at the best universities or under the best scientists or being the valedictorian of your class are all equivalent to great scientific creativity and necessarily imply an actual research career. This is not the case at all, not just among non-scientists but even among scientists. As the case of Coleman and Oppenheimer reveals, the history of science reveals a multitude of (largely unsung) first-rate scientific “critics”, those who had an excellent grasp of their field but who could not, for one reason or other, achieve creative genius commensurate with their intellect. But Coleman and Oppenheimer were still exceptional scientists. How about science journalists who graduated with degrees in history, english and philosophy and then penned top-notch scientific volumes? The bigger point really is that science, just like many other things, is basically a set of complex ideas that can be digested by virtually anyone if they really apply their mind to it. Those who can understand the tortuous meanderings of politics or the vagaries of sports statistics really shouldn’t have much problem understanding scientific basics, and this is proven for example by the “amateurs” who have edited excellent scientific entries on Wikipedia. Most of these people lack formal scientific training and yet have a knowledge of many scientific ideas that rivals that of the best scientists. And yet are we going to cast them aside because they are not professional scientists and will not win the Nobel Prize? There’s another key point; people may sometimes realize relatively late in their career that their real talents lie in other aspects of science like teaching and communication and not research. In fact this happens all the time (and we should be honest enough to own up to it) since many of us don’t really know what we are truly good at until late in our career. Should we then just give up these other scientific activities because we are supposed to fit within only one narrow box? Would we have dissuaded Isaac Asimov (“The Great Explainer”) from writing all those wonderful science books because he was not publishing top scientific papers? Such thinking reflects a very impoverished view of the institution of science and its role in society.

The real big truth is that not only can you understand science very well without being a great scientist but that there is nothing wrong with it. Every field needs its critics, explainers, teachers and creators. As described above, science has always been a multifaceted social activity, and it is unreasonable to assume that anyone who is competent to delve into one of its many corners should also be competent enough to delve into any other.

We live in an age where more people believe in astrology and ghosts than in evolution. In this age science communication is as or even more critical than scientific research, whether this communication is done by scientists or anyone else. When you are trying to discover antibiotics against rapidly evolving bacteria or viruses and when the public which ultimately funds your research is skeptical of this very evolution, it is imperative to have good communicators on your side. None of the great ideas that are created by “real” scientists are ever going to have an impact if they are going to reach ignorant and closed minds. Nor are most scientists involved in research going to have the time necessary to communicate science on a regular basis. On the other hand, most people can grasp and appreciate scientific facts when these facts are carefully and patiently communicated by dedicated professionals.

In such cases, it’s best to leave communication to those who do it best and nurture and encourage their potential. It does not matter whether they are actual scientists or writers or just scientifically minded members of the public. Science is inherently a social phenomenon accessible to anyone with an open mind; as Oppenheimer put it, what we don’t understand we need to explain to each other. We want to get the message across. The identity of the messenger should not matter.

The UK public values science and is interested in finding out about it, with two-thirds agreeing that knowing about science is important to them personally. The society is more at ease with science than a decade ago and sees science as leading to more benefits than harmful effects.

The UK government has recently released a study titled Public Attitudes to Science 2011. (See summary below). A foreword by the current Science Minister, David Willets, points to the fact this is the fourth in a series. The others were published in 2000, 2005 and 2008. I was glad to see that such initiatives have been taken at a governmental level. I’ll discuss some of the findings.

Many people feel their attitudes to science, both positive and negative, were formed at school.

Most also see careers in science as desirable, although there is less enthusiasm for working in science among 16- to 24-year olds.

The most interesting point in the UK report was the fact that. It makes me wonder how important it is to have a good science teacher given the impact he/she can have on a person’s life. It must make schools worry about how uninterested the youth seem to be about science.

The data suggest that recent media controversies such as “climategate” have had little impact on how much people feel they trust scientists, with a clear majority saying they trust scientists “about the same as they did five years ago”

Most support Government funding of science even for projects that bring no immediate benefits, even in the current context of reduced Government spending generally.

But it was pleasantly surprising to know that people still trust scientists especially after all the climate change skeptics have been rallying around the country to put to shame the scientists involved in the ‘climategate’. That trust is well demonstrated by the fact the public are ready to support blue skies research.

While searching for similar studies done in India, I found that the Indian National Science Academy had published a report back in 2005 which covers a wider a range of topics. The questions asked in both the two surveys have some common points but not many. I really like how well the executive summary of the UK report has been compiled compared to cluttered one in the Indian report.

The Indian Science Report looks at Science Education, Human Resources and Public Attitude towards Science and Technology. For this post I will focus on the findings related to the Public Attitude towards Science and Technology.

India’s attitude to science is hard to understand (probably because the surveyors did not ask the right questions?). I found the executive summary difficult to read. It was more facts thrown out at the reader where as it should have somewhat of a storyline.

Over three-fourths of the public feel S&T is are important for education. The perception is that the benefits of S&T are slightly higher (1.1 times) than its deleterious effects.

Less than 12% of the illiterates feel computers and factory automation create more jobs than they destroy while over half of the graduates and postgraduates feel this way. Just a fourth of all Indians are in favour of mechanisation.

Indians consider science to be an important part of our education but don’t think that it does much good. And, by the way, most Indians seem to be Luddites (!).

Television remains the primary source (57%) of information in the country, and is almost five times as popular as newspapers.
Weather news is the most popular S&T show watched on TV.

Most of the information Indians get about science is from watching TV and the weather report is the most popular science and technology show (!).

The most disappointing bit of the report for me was how little Indians read about science. Of course, it is not just the public to blame but the lack of science in the newspapers and the dearth of science magazines.

95% of graduates feel S&T makes life healthier, easier and more comfortable as compared to 56% of the illiterates. 80% of graduates think S&T will create better opportunities for the next generations as compared to 30% of illiterates.

The blame of the skewed results here also goes to show that the lack of education can make it very hard to understand and appreciate science. But the most annoying thing about the report was that comparisons mentioned were made between graduates and illiterates. What happened to those who are literates but not graduates?

A little over half of those in the lowest income quantile feel that new technology makes work more interesting way as compared to 80% in the top-most income quantile.

The difference in the few of the poor v/s the rich toward science is also expected. Do have a look at the full report for more ‘insights’.

Given that it is India’s first report, there is nothing to compare the current results with. Hopefully, there will be another report published in a few years that will give us more insights in to how the education policies affect India’s attitude to science.