Stems cells turned into ova and sperm!

In the latest issue of the journal Nature a few Stanford University scientists claim to have devised a method of converting stem cells into ova and sperm and can therefore produce an individual by the combining of those two stem cell products! Ofcourse, it means that infertility is really a problem no more - it will be possible to produce stem cells from the skin of infertile individuals and then it is only a matter of making those stem cells into sperm and ova! But it also means that sex is now redundant and so are male and female couples! The mother (the person who gives birth to the baby) can actually be both mother and father! It also means that gay men can actually have children with their own genetic make up if they can find a surrogate mother to house their child in her womb until it is time to give birth!

Interesting possibilities are being thrown up by this development - I'm sure that to people in the legal profession it must appear like a problem wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a conundrum because this raises so many legal issues! Fancy a mother also being the father of a child, is that a legal quagmire or what?!!

But as a person of science I am a little perplexed by this development because ova and sperm are generally haploid, having only one set of chromosomes i.e 23 chromosomes and not 46 that normal human cells have. Now stem cells too are by and large diploid in nature so how do these scientists go about making ova and sperms out of diploid stem cells - the article doesn't dwell on this issue, wish they would have. Also there is the issue that if female skin cells are used to produce ova and sperm the sperm will always carry only the X chromosome because females do not have a Y chromosome, now this would mean that female skin cells can only beget female children! Is the male as a species doomed to be consigned to the dustbin of history? If only for the purpose of generating Y chromosomes the poor male may yet be needed! All this doesn't bode well for humankind it would seem!

Brussels, Belgium

This recent trip to Europe allowed me an opportunity to do a short side trip to Brussels to visit a nephew of mine who lives and works there. Off the net I chose an affordable place to stay near the Brussels Gare du Nord - my nephew checked the place (or shall we say the location) and said it was ok. I arrived in Brussels by an Intercity express from Frankfurt, on Nov 2nd evening and linked up with Timki who walked me to the hotel. I have to say it was a rather disappointing hotel and the room was a trifle worse! But guess what, the guy who managed the place was Nepali! I decided I would hang in there because I hoped to spend most of my time out of the hotel room and return only in the late evenings to sleep. Timki returned to his office (not far away) and I stepped out to check out the neighbourhood. I was a little surprised to see the trash on the roadsides and the general untidiness of the place - then it turns out that the area was home to the Turkish community and was full of these burqa clad women pushing prams around with atleast one or even two toddlers holding on to their burqas. Ofcourse, there were the Doner kebab joints all around and hundreds of small shops selling rather garish looking goods from back home in Turkey. Every one around spoke in Turkish and the youngsters wore T-shirts emblazoned with names such as Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe (Turkish football clubs). I was hungry so I stepped into one of those ubiquitous kebab joints and asked for a shawarma - was disappointed by the food but atleast I had got rid of the peckishness. I stepped into a Turkish grocery and saw some interesting looking candied Kiwi fruit - never seen those before so I bought myself some of that and quite enjoyed the preserved fruit. Soon I was beginning to itch on my face and neck and hives were developing on my face and neck - I knew what was coming my way - my dreaded allergy - dont know why it hits me when I travel but I do know that I don't look pretty when my face swells up and turns beet red. So I quickly hurried off to my room, called my nephew and requested him to get me some anti-histamine tablets and waited for him to arrive - mercifully he was there soon but by then my face was looking ghoulish, I popped a couple of those anti-histamines and told Timki I'm going to sleep. I woke up next morning with no sign of the allergy and was grateful it hadn't gotten too bad. Timki arrived and we headed off to catch a train to Heysel station to check out the Atomium - pretty much a landmark in Brussels. Its a 103 m tall steel model of a Ferric iron molecule made in 1958 for the World Expo - it was to have been taken down after the Expo but the public of Brussels would not hear of it so it stayed on to become one of Belgium's most visited locations. The view of Brussels from the top was awesome. The Exhibition centre in the area was having a Food Expo so Timki and I decided to check it out - it was well worth it. Some great stuff on display and we even got to sample some of Belgium's 2000 beers. One glass of Chamay Beer (made by monks from a monastery) was enough to make me woozy and unsteady on my feet - on checking the alcohol content I see it is a staggering 9% volume by volume!
The next day, Sunday 4th Nov, we checked out the Grand Place which was awesome - right in the heart of the Grand Place was a store named 'Gautam Diamonds' signifying how Indians have cornered the diamond trade which was once the preserve of the Belgians. Then we walked it to the Mannekin Pis - that famous Pissing boy monument, possibly the most photographed monument in the world - one expects to see a huge piece of bronze art but what one beholds is a 2 foot little structure tucked away in an obscure corner of the city - very disappointing to say the least. But next to the Pissing boy is the reclining statue of the saviour of Brussels, Everhard 't Serclaes who is supposed to have saved the city from the clutches of the Flemish back in the mid 14th century . Story has it that touching the statue brings you luck (and brings you back to Belgium!) so the statue actually shines while the rest of the art work around it is coated with the dust of centuries! We were awfully hungry by now so we stopped by the only place that was open at noon on a Sunday - a Pakistani Biriyani place! I have to say it was the best biriyani I have ever eaten - it was absolutely fantastic! By now it was getting to be time for me to take leave of this Brabantine city and make my way to Munich. Timki helped me lug my luggage to the train which showed up bang on time and before I knew it I was bye bye Brussels, hello Bavaria!!

Back home again!

One of the highlights of my recent trip to Switzerland was the visit to the Rigi Railway system in the mountains adjoining the Lake of Lucerne. This is the Railway system that was the basis for the building of the Nilgiri Mountain Railway (NMR) and it is the invention of the cog wheel system by the Swiss Engineer Niklaus Riggenbach that allowed railways to be built on the sloping terrain of mountain sides.

If you thought the NMR traverses a steep terrain you are mistaken - the little stretch of railway between the town of Vitznau on the banks of the Lake of Lucerne to the final stop on the line to the peak of Mount Rigi (Rigi-Kulm) at 1,752 m (5,748 ft) is only some 8 km but the gradient is an amazing 1 in 5!! That would mean that for every 5 feet you move forward you climb 1 foot! Whereas the gradient on the NMR at its steepest is not more than 1 in 12.5!! You have to see it to believe it because the Rigi train is almost at an angle of 35 degrees to the horizontal at some places - kind of makes you feel its going to roll back into Lake Lucerne!! And guess what, the line is even electrified, nowadays the old steam loco travels the track only on occassion while the electric locomotive is the one that plies on most days - so I had to be content with electric traction but I did get to see the old steam loco being exercised!

Its travel time again

Indeed, it is travel time again and I don't seem to fancy the idea of traveling like a blue-bottom fly any more. This time around its 10 days and seven cities! Doesn't sound very interesting, does it? Well, it really isn't interesting at all because its the same circuit every year. Hopefully, this year my Swiss clients will try and do something different by taking me up to Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps.

Its crazy but I have been traveling to Switzerland for 8 years now and have really not seen anything of this beautiful country other than a little of western Switzerland - the areas around Basel, Lausanne and Lake Neuchatel. Beautiful though the area is I feel I need to see the Alps in order to say I've been around Switzerland!

I'm pleasantly surprised by the fares available to Europe on Sri Lankan - its almost 40% cheaper than those of the other carriers such as Lufthansa and Emirates - I hope the experience will also turn out to be unbeatable in a positive sense!

The Schengen visa too turned out nicely for me in that I got a two year multiple entry visa without any fuss! That means I save on precious pages of my passport by not having to devote more of the pages for visas! And this time around it will be the first time I enter Switzerland on a Schengen visa - earlier I had to apply separately for one of those difficult Swiss visas which took ever so long to get and would be for 8 days, yes, 8 days!! Which again meant my old passport had a Swiss visa on almost every alternate page!!! Thankfully those hassles are over and done with given the new visa regime. Now lets just hope the trip is nice and easy and some work gets done!!

Unconditional love

Every morning for the last 7 years this friend of mine and I head off to the beach near our homes for our hour-long morning constitutional. Its been fun doing this almost without fail every day of the week except on Sundays. One of the first things that we encounter on our walk are a few stray dogs who look so happy to see us early morning when they are just about stretching their limbs and muscles to begin their day. One of them, a scrawny, small white bitch is so happy to see my friend that she goes into a barking spree that wakes up the neighbourhood people and dogs! All she wants is a simple petting and maybe a scratch under her belly and she is so happy that she's bouncing up and down and prancing about barking in that happy way.

Then there's another mongrel that actually breast fed her daughter's pups when they were little ones'! She too seems to just need a little petting and off she goes to start her hunt for food to keep her going for the day. As we get closer to the beach we encounter yet another white dog but this time its a male who seems to love to jump and rest his front paws on my belly, as he does so he makes this strange growling sound that almost makes it seem like he's angry with us! Being male he needs a little more than petting - he actually expects you to play around with a piece of rag or an old shoe that he expects you to tug at while he pulls in the opposite direction!

On our return leg of the walk we take a slightly different route from what we traversed on the forward trip - this is to meet with a beautiful specimen of the Dalmatian breed - he's huge and so full of life. He usually looks out for two people walking towards him and bounds towards the twosome but every once in while he bounds towards the wrong folks and the poor guys dont know whether to turn and run or stay their ground! The dog answers to the name 'Samsung' - I'm sure the owners meant it to be Samson!

These dogs dont get anything other than a few strokes of affection from the two of us yet they yearn for our company and affection and look forward to our presence every morning! It is indeed so heart-warming to feel the unfailing, unconditional love of these dogs - it almost makes me want to ask 'why cant people be more like these dogs'?

Back again

Its been a few days since I blogged and the hiatus was caused by a trip out of town and into the hills of north Kerala with some Swiss and German business associates. These folks are here in India to expose my team to a new technology they have put in place to manage thousands of square meters of building space over the internet. We have been in this domain of computer aided facilities management for some years now and little had changed in the technologies deployed in this domain but now we have some serious new stuff to handle and it was a pleasure to be working with these Europeans on the new systems they had developed.

The training done it was time to give the Europeans a taste of Kerala which incidentally they had read up about and were aware that it was one of 50 destinations that National Geographic recommends as a 'must see'in a typical lifetime. So off we went to Calicut from Chennai and checked in to the Kadavu resort on the banks of the Chaliyar river. I love this river for its pristine beauty and because I know that not so long ago it was a 'dead river' because of industrial pollution from a rayon factory that was built on its banks in the 60s. The local people protested and with a concerted effort they were able to close down the offending unit and within a few years the river healed itself and looks oh so beautiful today.

The European visitors feasted on the beauty of this part of Kerala and watched in awe as sand divers went down to the bottom of the river to bring up baskets of river sand to dump into their boats moored mid-stream. To fill up a typical sand barge a diver needs to go down atleast 200 times - this is hard and demanding labour that really could be done by a machine but local laws prohibit that lest people over-dredge the river and mess up the riverine ecosystem. Once bitten twice shy, I guess!

From Calicut we went up into the high ranges of Kerala to the Vythiri Resort - this is dense tropical rainforest area and is quite remote. There is nothing else around and the only sounds are those of a gushing stream, crickets, birds and the swishing of leaves as monkeys swing from tree to tree! The resort was full and it wasn't foreigners that filled the place it was people from all over India! It was a working day and the place was full - I'm wondering how these folks at this remote resort manage to get this kind of traffic even on working days. It perhaps has to do with word of mouth promotion. Whatever it is, I highly recommend a night or maybe two in this resort - take plenty to read because there really isnt much you can do in the place and guess what, no cell phone coverage!

The tree houses here are awesome - one is 60 feet up in the canopy of a massive silk cotton tree and the only way up and down from there is by a cage lift operated with a water assisted winch! And the food is to die for - guess they have to have it that way or else the guests who have no where else to go for food, would be a bitter lot!

Dis-respect for due process and systems

Not long ago I was charged with leading a search for the company's new International Data Centre (IDC) - this was necessitated by the fact that a US company that our company had taken over was to be wound up and its physical operations moved out to Singapore while the data centre would be re-located to India. We called in a bunch of known companies to bid for co-locating our servers in their data centres and I was expected to go out and inspect each of these facilities.

Data Centres these days go by Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 type - the higher the Tier number the more complex amd more reliable the DC is supposed to be. There are internationally acknowledged levels of compliance that these various Tiers entail. My job was to check if these facilities were indeed Tier 2 when they claimed it was Tier 2. One of the top companies in this space took a colleague and me on a tour of their spanking new DC where they had a huge amount of heavily air-conditioned space with raised floors to accommodate the cabling that goes with computers and the security was severe. They took away our camera phones, and they had us smile into a camera to generate a mug shot that would adorn our visitor's pass and once inside, CC camera's monitored our every movement. A hi-tech Siemens Building Management Systems (BMS) controlled the temperature, humidity, access and power and reports are constantly generated about the variance from set values in any of those parameters! CCTV camera images are channelled to screens every where and to a central security console!

It didnt take me long to discover that people working in the facility had camera phones a plenty! And the BMS that was the nerve centre of the whole facility was un-secured in that there was no password required to access the system! This makes a mockery of the crores of Rupees the company has spent in putting all this Tier 2 infrastructure together! This apathetic attitude towards systems and processes seems ingrained in us as a people. Little will change in the lives of people in this country if we cannot respect systems and processes. Even disasters like the helicopter crash that killed a Chief Minister are caused by due process (maintenance) not being followed - yet we don't seem to learn our lessons. Wonder how and where we start instilling these values into our people - would it be at home, or school or at work? I'm beginning to think that its a leadership issue - if the people at the top insisted I am sure people down the line would fall in line - isn't that how the armed forces maintain discipline and a respect for systems? Where have all the leaders of civil and corporate society gone?