📰 Venkaiah sweeps V-P polls with 516 votes
17 to 20 MPs cross voted to ensure historic victory
•M. Venkaiah Naidu was elected the 13th Vice-President of India on Saturday. The polling was held earlier in the day, and results were declared in the evening.
•Mr. Naidu polled a massive 516 of the total 760 votes, aided by cross-voting by Opposition MPs in the 15th vice-presidential elections, NDA Ministers said. Opposition candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi polled 244 votes. The elections saw the highest polling percentage at 98.12%, with 14 MPs failing to turn up to vote.
Unprecedented
•While the result of the contest was a foregone conclusion, the margin of Mr. Naidu’s victory was the largest in recent elections.
•In 2002, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat (the last NDA nominee to win) polled 454 votes to Sushil Kumar Shinde’s 305 votes. Outgoing Vice-President Hamid Ansari polled 490 votes to 238 of the NDA’s Jaswant Singh. BJP leaders, who oversaw the election for the party, said that between 17 and 20 MPs cross-voted, but no details were available on the MPs.
📰 GST Council approves e-Way billing
•The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council on Saturday decided to implement the e-Way bill system for the transport of goods across the country, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said.
•The Council also decided to reduce the tax rate for job work for all forms of textile work to 5% from 18%. Apart from this, the Council reviewed the progress of the implementation of the new indirect tax regime since July 1, and approved the changes made by its implementation committee.
•“The GST Council has given its in-principle approval for the implementation of e-Way bills,” Mr. Jaitley told reporters, following the conclusion of the 20th meeting of the GST Council. “There will be no checkposts since we want a smooth transfer of goods across States.”
•Mr. Jaitley added that e-Way bills will be necessary for the transport of goods worth more than Rs. 50,000, and over a distance of more than 10 km. It will not apply for goods exempt from GST. “We prefer it if the process is technology-driven, with the human interface kept to a minimum,” Mr. Jaitley said.
📰 Skill-linked immigration Bill may favour Indian applicants
But influential Republicans are opposing the Trump-backed legislation
•President Donald Trump is championing a new piece of legislation that proposes to change America’s immigration system to give preference to skills than family links, but the fractious nature of the debate over the move suggests that it is far from becoming a law.
•Two Republican senators — Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson — and the Democrats have already declared their opposition to the proposed Bill.
•RAISE or Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act, sponsored by Republican Senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton, also proposes to cut immigration by 41% in the first year and by 50% by the 10th year. According to the Bill, people with English proficiency will be preferred, and the number of refugees admitted annually will be reduced by half to 50,000. The lottery system to promote diversity in America, which allows people from less represented countries such as Nepal and Ethiopia, will be ended.
•The Bill does not propose changes in temporary work visa programmes such as H-1B.
•The proposal for skill-based immigration per se could find larger support, including among many Democrats, but the host of allied issues entangled in the American immigration debate makes any forward movement on the issue difficult. “The bottom line is to cut immigration by half a million people, legal immigration, doesn’t make much sense,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
•Comprising a significant portion of new entrants into the U.S. in the last two decades, Indians have a huge stake in the debate. Also in question is whether the U.S. lawmakers will have the appetite to deal with a minor part of the immigration issue, keeping the controversial heart of the issue, which is the future of estimated 11 million undocumented residents.
Illegal immigrants
•There is no authentic numbers available, but community activists estimate that South Asians constitute a significant share in that. A Pew study estimated that in 2014, around 5,00,000 Indians are in American illegally.
•Of the one million permanent residency permits, or green cards, issued by the U.S. annually, two third goes for the category of family reunion. Green card allotment has a country-wise cap, which currently is disadvantageous to Indians. “More than 7,00,000 high-skilled immigrant workers from India are in the U.S. today on temporary work visas. These people are working hard every day helping grow our economy, raising their children as Americans right here in our communities,” Congressman Kevin Yoder from Kansas said on the House floor recently.
•Another Pew study released last month said the average waiting time for an Indian to obtain a green card in America under employment category is more than 12 years, the longest for any nationality. The reason is that there are several times more Indian applicants than there are green cards every year.
•According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that maintains country-wise list of H-1B visa applications, but not allotments, 21 lakh Indians applied under the programme in the last 11 years. The agency received 34 lakh applications for H-1B in the same period and the second largest cohort of applicants were from China, at 2.96 lakhs.
•Some Democratic Senators and rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) have said the proposed Bill has racists undertones. “Its provisions reflect the shameful agenda of nativists and white nationalists who fear the growing diversity of our country,” SPLC said in a statement. Lakshmi Sridaran, of SAALT, said: “The draconian use of legislation and executive orders to criminalise and marginalise immigrant communities reveals the inherent xenophobia of this administration.
📰 Constitutional or party-political secularism?
Instead of respecting the best in religious groups, political parties hobnob with those least deserving of respect
•Few countries in the world exist where secularism is more bitterly contested and perhaps even fewer countries than India where the term has been persistently misused and abused. No other term in India has been continuously battered and evacuated of meaning or significance. The cacophony that surrounds secularism may well be the price that secularism has to pay for becoming an integral part of our country’s public and political discourse.
•A couple of decades ago, Indian secularism was unfairly charged by its opponents for being anti-religious. It was subsequently labelled as a pro-minority doctrine. In recent times, we have been advised to choose between secularism and development, as if secularism was an anti-development ideology. And last month we saw the bizarre spectacle in Bihar where secularism and corruption were viewed as blood brothers; the champions of secularism, mired in corruption, are arresting the growth of an economy perched to take off and soar high, it was claimed.
•How has secularism come to such a pass? This is a complex story, which I cannot even begin to narrate here. But I speak of a small, but important, conceptual episode within this tale: the degeneration of constitutional political secularism to what, for want of a better term, I call party-political secularism.
European and Indian secularisms
•What are these two secularisms? To understand India’s constitutional secularism, it is best to contrast it with European conceptions. The break-up of Latin Christendom in Europe generated religious wars. Elimination and expulsion of religious dissenters produced predominantly single-religion societies. Each European state closely aligned itself with one or the other dominant church in society. Thus, England became Anglican, Scandinavia became Lutheran, Spain and Italy became Catholic, Denmark became Calvinist, and so on. Over time, however, the church was seen to become too politically meddlesome and socially oppressive. A movement for ‘un-churching’, or curtailing the power of the church, was set in motion. A battle ensued between the state and the church in which, by and large, European states prevailed. European states separated themselves from the dominant church. Thus, the separation of state and church became the defining feature of European and later American secularisms.
•In India, the situation till at least the 20th century was completely different because, here, there has been no attempt to liquidate religious diversity. The state has always found ways of dealing with all religious groups. Hardly any state existed that did not patronise all existing religions. Under modern conditions, this practice developed into a defence of religious pluralism. The state had to respect all religions, treat them non-preferentially. Respecting religions often entailed the necessity of the state to keep off all religions. On other occasions, it meant that the state positively contributed to enhancing the quality of religious life, for instance, by giving subsidies to schools run by religious communities. At the same time, quasi-religious institutions such as caste continue to be oppressive, particularly to Dalits and women. This demanded that the state intervene wherever religion was hierarchical and coercive. Hence the ban on untouchability and the reform of gender-discriminatory personal laws.
•India’s constitutional secularism requires that the Indian state be neither wholly respectful nor disrespectful to religions. Critical respect for all religions is the hallmark of Indian secularism.
•Furthermore, it enjoins the state to keep a value-based or principled distance from all religions: to interfere or refrain from interfering in religions depending entirely on which of these strategies best promotes freedom, equality and fraternity.
The growth of opportunism
•But in the last 40 years or so, we have developed another secularism, what I call ‘party-political secularism’, an odd, nefarious ‘doctrine’ practised by political parties, particularly the so-called “secular forces”. This secularism has dispelled principles from the core idea and replaced them with opportunism; opportunistic distance from all religious communities is its slogan. It has removed ‘critical’ from critical respect and reduced the idea of respect to making deals with the loudest, most fanatical, aggressive sections of every religious group. Thus political parties keep off religion or intervene as and when it best suits their party or electoral interests. This has led to the banning of The Satanic Verses , the unlocking of the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomitemple, the curtailing of women’s rights in the Shah Bano case, and to deals with the likes of Bukhari. Instead of respecting the best in religious groups, political parties hobnob with those least deserving of respect. Party-political secularism means that political institutions like the state and political party keep an opportunist distance from the notorious and highly politicised sections of all religious groups. This is also a fertile ground for majoritarian Hinduism whose spokespersons can question all the deal-making and opportunism of “secularists” without self-examining their own equally unethical practices.
•Alas, electoral politics has sidelined or corrupted our constitutional secularism. To be fair, electoral politics breeds opportunism. If one’s only aim is to win, to do so by any means is always tempting. But it is here that we need the courts, a free press, an alert citizenry, and civil society activists to move in, to show a mirror to these so-called ‘secular’ parties and tell them what they can and cannot do. I am not blaming political parties alone. This is a collective failure. It is on all of us to stop the proliferation of the misuse and abuse of a secularism that was fashioned collectively by Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.
📰 Where is the opposition in India?
The BJP’s ideology is reasonably clear, in both its extreme and moderate forms. But the opposition lacks a coherent and consistent platform
•My friends who are opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party — and I have friends who support it too — often despair at the politics of the party ruling at the Centre and in various States. But sometimes I feel that they should despair more at the national opposition — and the parties in opposition to the BJP in many States.
•Because the BJP, for better or for worse, is there. You can count its warts or confer a halo on it, but you cannot miss noticing it. But I wonder if we have any real opposition left in India — both at the national level and in many States.
•This came through most recently in my home State, Bihar, where Chief Minister Nitish Kumar easily switched from his ‘grand alliance’ with Lalu Prasad to staying the Chief Minister with the support of the party (BJP) that he had rebuffed just three years ago. Now, I am not convinced that Mr. Kumar’s move was necessarily opportunistic — though things like his inability to induct more than one woman in a cabinet of 27, given his loud commitment to women’s emancipation, were definitely disappointing. Still, he had to choose between a family increasingly seen as tainted with nepotism and a party sadly dominated by those whose vision of the future seems to be based on virulent hatreds inherited from the past.
The disappearing opposition
•So, that is not the main issue for me. It is this: that once Mr. Kumar made the switch, the opposition to the BJP was revealed as basically ineffective and non-existent. This seemed to follow the pattern at the Centre and in some other States. This is also far more worrying, because the BJP does exist as the ruling party today, but the opposition seems to exist less and less with each year.
•There are various reasons for it. These include the inability of the Congress to abandon its ruling family, compounded by the fact that Rahul Gandhi, as decent a person as any in politics, nevertheless lacks the type of political charisma that is required to lead a party to victory in India today. This is partly because the times have changed: the taluk classes call the political shots in India, and they cannot easily trust a very metropolitan person like Mr. Gandhi. I know; I come from those taluk classes, and I have difficulty trusting Mr. Gandhi’s equivalents in the literary world! But even without the times changing, compare the political acumen and sheer rhetorical presence of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi with Rahul Gandhi’s performance, and you will spot a difference.
•The communists have long been split between a highly intellectual urban circle, which can get across only to people with university degrees, and a very parochial rural movement, which addresses genuine problems (for instance, the exploitation of aborigines at the hands of all governments), but in the very process limits its appeal to small regions. Even if you are a communist, it is impossible to imagine the supposedly revolutionary activities of Maoist groups finding any purchase outside remote parts of the hinterland.
•As for the rest, well, they seem to comprise parties led by powerful regional leaders, and often run by specific families. Sometimes the words come up — secularism, democracy, human rights, etc. — but they seldom seem to be anything other than rhetoric used by a certain group to obtain fleeting electoral support. In short, it is worrying: there is no substantial and coherent opposition left in India right now. Some people might argue that it exists at the grassroots. This is a deceptive argument: first, because it cannot be documented with numbers; and second, because in a working democracy any grassroots opposition needs to wear the face of at least some political party.
The great Indian tragedy
•Some of my BJP friends — not in the lunatic fringe, thankfully, but belonging to the old ideological core — smirk at this. They exult in the fact that the Indian opposition is either in disarray or divided up by narrow domestic walls. This worries me (also because the lack of a real opposition seems to be a spreading global problem, undergirded by the corporate logic of neoliberal capitalism and its enmeshment with nationalism).
•Any democracy needs a thriving and coherent opposition. The great tragedy of India does not seem to be the BJP, with which one can agree or disagree; the great tragedy of India is the lack of a real and issue-based opposition. The BJP’s ideology is reasonably clear, in both its extreme and moderate forms. But the opposition seems to lack a coherent and consistent platform. It largely fails to provide alternative views of government and it seldom responds cohesively to the BJP’s moves, leaving it to afflicted politicians to react singly.
📰 When dry eyes need attention
The disease can be debilitating and diminish the quality of life
•Putting carboxymethylcellulose sodium in one’s eyes two, three or more times a day may not sound like a great experience. But I can assure you that it can be. Drops of this chemical, called a topical lubricant, help to keep my eyes from burning, avoiding bright lights, becoming red and itchy, and generally feeling miserable.
•Like tens of millions of Americans, especially women older than 50, I have dry eye disease, medically known as keratoconjunctivitis sicca.
•Dry eye is sometimes referred to as “a nuisance complaint — it’s not the sexiest of eye problems,” Dr. Rachel Bishop, chief consulting ophthalmologist at the National Eye Institute, U.S., told me. Nonetheless, she said, “Dry eye disease deserves serious professional — and personal — attention. It can be very debilitating and seriously diminish a person’s quality of life.”
Tear functions
•Tears serve a variety of functions, which accounts for the kinds of complications their deficiency can cause. They lubricate the eye, supply it with nutrients and oxygen, and help to focus images and clear the eye of debris.
•Untreated, severe dry eye disease can result in scarring, ulceration, infection and even perforation of the cornea, the clear outer layer of the eye that protects the iris, pupil and anterior chamber and accounts for much of the eye’s optical power.
•But the current and evolving knowledge of the nature of tears and their production has led to a better understanding of the various causes of dry eye disease and major improvements in treating this all-too-common condition.
•“We used to think that tears were like salty water — just add more liquid and you’ll be fine,” Dr. Bishop explained.
•“We now know that there are many hundreds of substances in tears, including 1,500 proteins, and three main components. We try to pinpoint why a particular person is experiencing dry eye and treat that person’s specific problem.”
•Tears are now known to have layers: an outer fatty layer produced by the meibomian, or tarsal, glands at the rim of the eyelids; a middle watery layer from the lacrimal gland in the upper outer corner of each eye; and an inner protein-rich lubricating layer of mucin from the goblet cells of the conjunctiva that covers the whites of the eyes and lines the eyelids. A disruption of any one of these systems can result in dry eye.
Causes of the disease
•Dry eye disease also turns out to have far more possible causes — and, as a result, various specific treatments — than was once thought. As the above description suggests, it is not just a matter of insufficient tears from the lacrimal glands.
•Possible causes include defects in the parts of the eye that produce each of the layers in tears; an inflammatory disease like allergy or chronic blepharitis (an inflammation of the eyelids); environmental conditions like tobacco smoke or a dry climate; a hormonal imbalance (as occurs, for example, at menopause); the use of contact lenses; a vitamin deficiency; an underlying systemic disease like diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis; prolonged use of certain medications (diuretics, antihistamines, antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering drugs, among others); and damage to nerves in the eye, as can happen in LASIK eye surgery.
•One of the more common chronic causes in older adults is Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune condition that affects moisture-producing tissues throughout the body, including the lacrimal glands, Dr. Bishop said.
Possible treatments
•Among current possible treatments described by researchers at the Schepens Eye Research Institute and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, U.S., are topical applications of the immunosuppressant cyclosporin A; antibacterial and anti-inflammatory derivatives of the antibiotic tetracycline (like doxycycline); and high doses of essential fatty acids (the omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA in fish oil and flaxseed oil, used topically and orally) that inhibit inflammation and are now being tested in a major study funded by the National Eye Institute.
•When conventional remedies fail, speciality eye drops can be made using the patient’s own blood serum diluted with saline.
•Additional therapies are being tested. Results of an industry-sponsored study of a synthetic form of lacritin, a protein that stimulates tear production, are expected next year.NYT
📰 The news and the noise about gene editing
•CRISPR, the gene-editing technology and acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, and CRISPR-associated protein9 (Cas9) have created much enthusiasm among the scientific community lately. Although not the first tool in the field of gene editing, higher specificity, ease of use and the requirement of inexpensive reagents to selectively modify gene(s) of interest have made the system a potential game changer for research in genome engineering. Despite several applications, from microbial engineering to agriculture, its potential to correct genetic defects in human embryos and implanting healthy embryos in the wombs is why it’s drawing wide interest.
In a nutshell
•The latest trigger is a report in the science journal Nature . In the study, researchers claim to have used CRISPR-Cas9 to correct a heterozygous mutation (a type of genetic change where only one copy of the gene is defective) in the MYBPC3 gene for a patient with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a type of heart condition in which the muscle wall of the heart thickens abnormally.
•Gene editing with CRISPR-Cas9 starts with the introduction of circular DNA plasmids encoding components of the editing machinery into the recipient cells. The editing machinery consists of two parts, the DNA that codes for the Cas9 protein and another one for a specific RNA, called guide RNA or gRNA. In the recipient cell, the gRNA guides the machinery to the site of the genome where the Cas9 protein makes a double-stranded break next to the site of editing, which is subsequently repaired using the recipient cell’s endogenous DNA repair mechanisms. As Cas9 protein is produced from the introduced plasmid DNA, it stays in the recipient cell for a long time, resulting in the protein making cuts at additional unintended sites of the genome, causing ‘off-target’ effects or sometimes undesirable mutations.
•In the current study, the researchers’ key innovation involved using ways to obviate such mutations by using a pre-assembled system and ensuring that the Cas9 didn’t stay too long in the cell to stoke damage.
The future
•As news on the study’s therapeutic potential spreads, it is important to curtail the noise. Safety, efficacy along with the complex legal, societal and ethical issues need to get sorted before gene editing involving germ cells goes mainstream. India — like the rest of the world — has to pay special attention as both biological and surrogate women can be used to produce healthier babies.
•Patients with common genetic disorders in India, like, cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anaemia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and with rare genetic diseases like Hirschsprung’s disease and Gaucher’s disease will potentially benefit from the gene editing technology. However, proper policy framework and guidelines need to be in place involving research on genetic modifications in germ cells. We need to make sure that gene-editing in the human embryo does not culminate in live pregnancies but on the other hand encouraging ethical research involving unviable human embryos.
•In a country with mushrooming unregulated clinics practising in vitro fertilization (IVF) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) that often engage in unethical practices and commercial exploitation of potential parents, we need to be vigilant. In this direction, the introduction of The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 in Parliament is timely. It will be prudent to include stringent guidelines to eliminate germ line gene editing for human use altogether by the IVF and PGD clinics, at least for the time being.
•Although research related to germ line genetic engineering or reproductive cloning is prohibited in India, putting specifics on gene editing in the proposed National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research involving Human Participants, 2016 — prepared by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — and in the Biomedical and Health Research Regulation Bill, 2015 will help strengthen safety measures in research involving human germ cells.
📰 India team helps IBM create technology to battle hackers
‘The system makes it possible to encrypt every level of a network’
•IBM, one of the world’s largest technology companies said that it had achieved a breakthrough in security technology that would allow enterprises from banks to health care companies to retailers to encrypt their customer data at a large scale.
•The New York-based technology major said its system makes it possible for the first time to ‘pervasively encrypt’ every level of a network, from applications to cloud services and databases and prevent theft of information.
•This has been made possible by IBM Z (z14), a next-generation mainframe unveiled by the company in July. It is capable of running more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day.
•“Data is the currency. It is equivalent to the future energy,” said Gururaj S. Rao, IBM Fellow and vice president, Systems Integrators, IBM z Systems, in an interview. He said that digitisation was providing value, but was coming with the challenge of information security as “data theft is on the increase.”
Indian team
•IBM, which reported a revenue of $79.9 billion in 2016, said that its India hardware and firmware team had made significant contributions to the z14 system and microprocessor development. It said that more than 100 engineers from its India labs worked on key components of both the core and the processor in the areas of logic design, verification, custom circuit design and tool development. The team has also contributed to the base firmware development, next-generation input/output enablement and in building newer virtualisation management capabilities.
•One of the key units designed by the India team is the encryption unit, that gives an unparalleled security feature to the z14 mainframe, said Mr. Rao.
•Known as ‘big iron’, a mainframe is a high-performance computer used primarily by large organisations for applications such as credit card payments, flight bookings and ATM transactions.
Pervasive encryption
•Of the more than nine billion data records lost or stolen since 2013, only 4% were encrypted, according to IBM. This makes the vast majority of such data vulnerable to organised cyber crime rings, state actors and employees misusing access to sensitive information. The company said IBM Z’s new data encryption capabilities are designed to address the global epidemic of data breaches, a major factor in the $8 trillion cybercrime impact on the global economy by 2022.
•Mr. Raosaid that data could be travelling, sitting on a cloud device or on the application. He said the new system could encrypt everything without requiring application level changes. “Regardless of where the data is, we will protect it. Other than IBM, no other vendor has been able to do it,” said Mr. Rao, a PhD from Stanford University.
•Another concern for users is the protection of encryption keys. In large firms, hackers often target encryption keys, which are routinely exposed in memory as they are used, the company said.
•It said IBM Z can protect millions of keys, as well as the process of accessing, generating and recycling them. It does this in ‘tamper responding’ hardware that causes keys to self-destruct at any sign of intrusion and they can then be reconstituted in safety.
•The Big Blue said it was now betting big on India to sell its new system to customers such as the government, large banks and healthcare companies. Viswanath Ramaswamy, director, Systems, IBM India and South Asia, said that with the growth in digital transactions in India across banking, finance and government, “our focus is to work with our ecosystem of partners and developers to deliver these new capabilities of IBM z14.”.
📰 IIT Delhi team develops a new antibacterial drug-delivery system
The nanoconjugates will be useful for cancer patients suffering from bacterial infections
•A new antibiotic drug-delivery system that improves the efficacy of drugs thereby reducing the dosage used for treating bacterial infections has been tested in a lab by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. A peptide, which has not been approved for clinical use, bound to gold nanoparticles was able to kill E. coli and Salmonella typhi more efficiently at lower dosages.
•“Drug delivery becomes better and the bioavailability improves when the drug is conjugated [bound] to gold nanoparticles. So reduced dosage is sufficient to kill the bacteria. Reducing the dosage of antibiotics used is one of the strategies to reduce the possibility of drug resistance setting in,” says Dr. Neetu Singh from the Centre for Biomedical Engineering, IIT Delhi, and one of the corresponding authors of the paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Bioavailability
•The peptide in a free form may not be bioavailable as it gets degraded relatively fast. In a free form, the peptide is also not able to effectively kill the bacteria by engaging with the bacterial membrane and disrupting it, while the nanoconjugate fares better on these counts.
•The challenge was to arrive at an optimum number of peptides that are bound to nanoparticles to get the best results. When there are too few or too many peptides bound to the nanoparticles the antibacterial activity gets compromised. “There is significant antibacterial activity when about 1000 peptides are bound to a nanoparticle,” says Dr. Singh.
•The peptide called sushi-peptide bound to nanoparticles was able to kill 50% of bacteria at much lower concentration (400 nM) while the free peptide’s antibacterial activity was not significant at the same concentration, says Smita Patil from the Centre for Biomedical Engineering, IIT Delhi and one of the first authors of the paper.
•Besides normal cells infected with bacteria, the peptide bound to nanoparticles will be particularly useful in the case of cancer patients suffering from bacterial infections. “Rapid metabolism at the cancer site sucks al nutrients and leads to nutritional deficit in the body. When chemotherapy is given even the bacteria already present in the body but kept under check become disease-causing,” says Dr. Pankaj Chaturvedi, cancer specialist at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai.
•After chemotherapy the immunological response gets damaged as cells responsible for protecting against bacteria are reduced in number. So the person becomes vulnerable to infection. “Antibiotics by itself cannot kill all the bacteria. The inherent immunological response should be able to challenge the bacteria once antibiotic treatment is completed. Since this does not happen, the bacteria develop drug resistance,” says Dr. Chaturvedi.
Folate receptors
•Specific receptors called folate receptors are present in large numbers on the surface of cancer cells. Folic acid added to the nanoconjugates is recognised by these receptors and help in the binding process. “Once the nanoconjugates enter the cancer cells they interact with the bacteria and kill them by disrupting the cell membrane. The nanoconjugates have 40% better antibacterial activity compared with free peptides,” says Rohini Singh from the Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Delhi, and one of the first authors of the paper.
•The nanoconjugate is not toxic to cancer cells and targets only the bacteria.
•“We would next like to study if our nanoconjugates can be used on antibiotic-resistant strains and also understand the fate of gold nanoparticles used for making the nanoconjugates,” says Dr. Neetu Singh. Instead of gold nanoparticle, biodegradable polymers can be used. The only condition is that the peptide should be able to interact with the bacterial membrane. A few more studies have to be carried out before the nanoconjugate can be tested on animals.
📰 Learning from space and teaching from space
Though we have lost two great leaders of science, their “can do” and “never say impossible” spirit lives on.
•July 24 has turned out to a Monday of sorrow, since it was on that day that India lost two of its sons — two outstanding men of science, namely, the space scientist Dr. Udupi Ramachandra Rao (U.R. Rao for short), who made India a space-faring nation, and the scientist educator Dr. Yash Pal, who brought science to the homes of many across India.
•The fortnightly science journal, Current Science, published from Bengaluru, carries a series of articles termed ‘Living Legends in Indian Science’. Drs U.R. Rao and Yash Pal were two such legends who improved India through their scientific contributions. Dr. V. Jayaraman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has written a detailed life history of Dr. Rao and his contributions to India’s space efforts in the 10 June 2014 issue of Current Science(which is available free on the web). Some sentences from this article are worth repeating here. Dr. Rao, born in 1932, wrote several scientific articles in 1963 when he was 31 years of age. When he published another paper in 2011 (when he was 79), a fellow scientist, Dr. Ron Cram, apparently remarked: “Is this same U.R. Rao who was publishing science papers back in 1963? Or is it his grandson?” Such was Dr Rao who, until almost the last day of his life went to work daily at the ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru.
Aryabhata to Mangalyaan
•Dr. Rao’s entry into space science began with his Ph.D. degree under the mentorship of Dr Vikram Sarabhai, who persuaded India to enter the space age and use satellite technology. After spending a few years in the US, working in areas of astrophysics and satellite studies, Rao returned to India in 1966, but right after that, he was asked by Sarabhai to prepare a blueprint for developing satellite technology in India. This he did with enthusiasm and built the first Indian satellite, called Aryabhata (named after the 5th century Indian mathematician), along with its smaller size models, within 36 months and within the stipulated budget. To quote Jayaraman again: “Rao says -Yes, I had a young team, though inexperienced, was very committed. Their unmatched enthusiasm, dedication, hard work, and the tremendous confidence, and their ‘never say impossible’ altitude were contagious, and became part of ISRO culture later”.
•With Rao at the helm, several satellites were made — Bhaskara 1, 2, Rohini and the communication satellite called Ariane Passenger Payload Experiment or APPLE. Carrying the satellite APPLE on a bullock cart (in order to check for electromagnetic compatibility) captured the continuity between Old and New India! It is this combination of mastering high end technology with an eye for economy and efficiency that has catapulted Indian space efforts to stellar heights. Name another nation that has successfully sent a spacecraft to Mars at a cost of Rs 450 crores!
Propagating Science
•While Dr. U.R. Rao, of Karnataka, typified calm and composure, his friend and comrade in arms, Dr. Yash Pal typified Punjabi exuberance. Prof. Ramanath Cowsik has written a beautiful article on this legend, in the 10 July 2015 issue of Current Science. Yash Pal, too, trained as a physicist and worked on cosmic rays at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, from where he was called by Dr. Satish Dhavan (who succeeded Dr. U.R. Rao at ISRO) to head the Space Application Centre (SAC) at Ahmedabad, and to launch the ambitious educational programme called Satellite Instructional Television Experiment or SITE. He collected a group of eager youngsters, devised programmes on education, agriculture, health and hygiene and related topics. These were uploaded on the satellite ATS-6 and broadcast across over 2400 TV sets across urban and rural India. These were received enthusiastically by the viewers.
•The SITE experiment was novel, first of its kind anywhere, and successful. How did the Yash Pal team manage to do it? Cowsik quotes Yash Pal thus: “A civilization that protects its young from the hassles of doing things themselves deprives them of great joy, and ultimately leads its society into a state of permanent dependence… Let us just do it ourselves”. Recall that Dr. U.R. Rao said the same thing in different words.
•Yash Pal moved on to take on further assignments and tasks for the government, including the chairmanship of the University Grants Commission (UGC), Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and others. Among the many initiatives and innovations he launched, public understanding of science became an important one. As the Chairman of UGC, he gave fillip to the recently established Educational Media Research Centres (EMRC), and using Doordarshan to broadcast regular programmes from them, called “Countrywide Classrooms,” an initiative that continues to this day.
•Quite apart from these, Yash Pal captured the hearts of millions of Indians through the TV series “Turning Point”, where he would frequently come and answer questions from schoolchildren and explain science in the simplest of terms, remarkably successfully. For many children, he became known as Yash Pal Uncle (just as his hero Jawaharlal Nehru was called Chacha Nehru).
•On a personal note, my wife Shakti and I have lost a caring and encouraging friend. She produced hundreds of programmes in science and arts for “Countrywide Classrooms,” from the EMRC at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad (now called the English and Foreign Languages University), and I used to appear often in “Turning Point,” along with him. And Shakti’s sister’s husband, the late Dr. M.M. Chaudhri, produced “Turning Point” for quite a while.
•In Dr. U.R. Rao and Prof. Yash Pal, we have lost two great leaders of science. One helped us go into space in order to learn about the universe, while the other used space to teach us. Though they are gone, their “can do” and “never say impossible” spirit lives on.
📰 Elephant dung shows stress levels
Traces of hormones come through in the dung and indicate this
•Asian elephant stress levels peak during dry seasons, when resources are low. This is what studying leftover hormones in elephant poop unravels. The method could be an important non-invasive tool to study the health of wild pachyderm populations in India, finds a new study. In the future, it could also help test the efficacy of management interventions introduced to conserve the endangered species.
•With shrinking habitats, India's endangered elephants face food shortages and increased disturbances in their environments. The resulting physiological stress (a result of secretion of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids) can be beneficial for elephants, helping them escape from threats. However, if prolonged, the stress can affect their health, reproduction and even survival. Stress levels are often high in emaciated pachyderms: so can hormones – traces of which come through in elephant dung – be an indicator of elephant health?
•Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, examined changes in visual body condition scores of 261 elephants in the Mysuru and Nilgiri elephant reserves in south India during wet and dry seasons, scoring their ‘body condition’ on a scale of one (for very thin pachyderms) to five based on the visibility of bones. They also analysed faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGCM) levels in the fresh dung of the elephants they observed, to see if stress hormones were a good indicator of body condition across seasons. To study annual patterns, they repeated this for nine female elephants across seven years.
•The findings, published in Conservation Physiology, show that the body condition of elephants deteriorated during dry seasons, and has a strong relationship with fGCM levels (especially in females). As body condition deteriorated, stress hormone levels spiked.
•“Many conservation studies focuses on how animals behave when they are disturbed, how their population declines or changes. But they forget to address how such changes affect the internal health of an animal. Measuring fGCM will tell us how elephants are affected by either intrinsic or extrinsic factors. Our study is the first to examine this in free-ranging Asian elephants,” says doctoral researcher Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel, lead author of the study.
•“The sudden change in the profile of fGCM after any management intervention would definitely indicate the strong association between stress response and management practices,” she says.
📰 New tool to detect cervical cancer
The menstrual pad test can become a stress-free screening method
•Testing menstrual blood present on menstrual cloth can help detect human papilloma virus (HPV), which is one of the main causes of cervical cancer, researchers from Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Centre and National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health (NIRRH) have found. The study was carried out on over 550 women aged 30 to 50 years at two rural populations in Maharashtra. The results were published in the journal European Journal of Cancer Prevention.
•Cervical cancer is a major public health problem in India, and although there are cervical cancer screening tests, most rural Indian women fear the test and see it as an unpleasant experience.
Samples testing
•Over 190 eligible women were recruited for the study from two villages close to Jamkhed Tahsil of Maharashtra. The women who consented underwent HC2 testing to detect HPV. All the women, whether positive or negative for HPV, were asked to store their cloth pad used on the first day of period and immediately hand it over to the health worker. The collected menstrual cloth samples were sent to NIRRH for testing.
•The DNA extracted from the dried menstrual blood was amplified and tested for HPV. Over 3% positive HPV cases were detected from this area (both HC2 and DNA study showed positive). They underwent further vaginal examination and treatment. Two cases of cervical lesions were also diagnosed.
Additional study
•After satisfactory results from first area, another rural population with significantly better social indicators was studied. Over 360 women from 16 villages from Mulshi area of Pune district were selected for the study. However, the women were not tested for HPV but their menstrual blood was tested.
•From this population, 4.9% cases were diagnosed as HPV positive using DNA tests. The HPV positive women and a few HPV negative women underwent vaginal examination, HC2 test and PAP smear test (another cervical cancer test).
•The sensitivity of the menstrual pad HPV testing in the first and second area was 83% and 67%, respectively, and the specificity was 99% and 88% in the two areas. The reduced sensitivity at second area could be due to electricity failure in the health centre as the samples need to be continuously stored at -20⁰C.
•According to the researchers, the menstrual pad DNA testing could be used instead of PAP smear test as PAP test has several limitations such as very low sensitivity of around 50% and the method of sample collection is both painful and invasive.
•“Most of the women in these villages are daily wagers and do not want to waste a day for clinical screening. There is low participation in community screenings as they are shy and also fear the test. By using menstrual pad/cloth as a screening tool we can provide comfort and convenience to the participants,” says Dr. Atul Budukh, Assistant Professor at Tata Memorial Centre and the first author of the paper.
•By developing a simple method to mail the pads to the lab by participants itself, menstrual pad test can become a stress-free cervical cancer screening method, the authors write.
