19 till I die

I wrote this article to participate in the AWSAR 2019 competition. Turns out previous years' winners can't apply. So here it is for everyone. Consider the value your muscles bring to your life? Imagine for second, whatever you did since this morning. Now picture doing it without using any muscles. Unless you were sleeping and completely still, not a twitch or blink of the eye, you depended on your muscles. Arguably, working muscles are as important to quality of life as a working brain. Some people lack this luxury. Due to genetic mutations running in some families, members lose their muscles at different stages of life. This condition is called muscular dystrophy. A close friend of mine was training to be a fast bowler in the Ranji trophy, in his late teens. A decade since the onset of muscular dystrophy, picking a cup of tea, a laptop out of his bag or himself out a chair are formidable tasks. He would have made an excellent fast bowler. Maybe you know someone who has or ...

All over the world, many fresh PhD graduates face an existential crisis, deeply despairing at their prospects. A post-doctoral fellowship can be a voluntary exercise in sapping one’s soul. We’re bursting with research ideas and energy with few outlets and sometimes nothing to show for them. Meltdowns are imminent and many have precipitated. I want to share my experiences here at home, in India, that have been personally and intellectually rewarding while shining a light on the contributions I can make. I garnered these experiences by stepping away from the bench occasionally to teach and train students around me. Finding out new things about the world we live in, makes me tick. Conveying knowledge by sparking curiosity and thought, carries me between these often infrequent and tiny but glorious flashes of discovery. As a post-doc in a research institute, one has to seek out opportunities to teach. In the past four years, I have taught students from small towns in India onlin...

This article was selected for an AWSAR award in 2019. I still haven't seen it published anywhere. So, I'm putting this out here too. For about 60 years we have known about stem cells that repair muscles in mammals. We were sure insect muscles don’t use stem cells to repair themselves. But no one showed if and how insect muscles do repair themselves. This article discusses how the discovery of adult muscle stem cells in Fruit Flies was made. We all get hurt from time to time. You might bruise a knee, break a bone or burn a finger. Our bodies possess the marvelous ability to largely repair these injuries. The ability to repair body tissues is not limited just to humans.   In multicellular life-forms, like ants and elephants (and us too), there are mechanisms by which one cell senses injury in its vicinity ( Doğaner B et al, Trends in Cell Biology 2016) . Once this cell and other cells near the site of injury sense that there is a wound and it needs repair, they oft...

I had written this article to communicate the science behind this study a year ago. A friend was going to publish it, but it hasn't happened yet. So I figured I might as well put this out here. At a very basic level, our brains compute our reactions to sounds, smells, tastes and problems in communication/mathematics and decision making of all kinds at the very highest levels. What makes this computer work? What are the circuits in our brain that make any of this even possible? Some sensations make our bodies react immediately. Most of us cringe at the sound of nails on a chalkboard, pull away our fingers from hot pans and jump if we step on a sharp pin. Smoke makes us cough. We’ve all squinted, wrinkled our faces and puckered at the first taste of lemon juice as babies. We don’t think about our reactions. They just happen. But, if you do think about it, these reflexes aren’t that simple. Messages carrying information about a screeching sound, hot pan and sour juice need...