SERENDIPITY TO SURREAL
Posted by bmhegde on 1
Science and the scientists are the ones that are supposed to take this world and mankind forward according to the conventional thinking. This talk tried to take one through the whole gamut of this presumption from the time the scientists jump with joy and proclaim to the world-Eureka-“ I have discovered the new truth,” to the time that science and scientists have become a menace to mankind on this planet. If allowed to go on unaudited it might even make man follow on the path taken by the dinosaurs! Many among the lay people have a feeling that scientists are the ones that have invented all our comforts and are the ones that make life easy for us on this planet. This needs a serious re-look and the whole arena needs to be audited once in a way lest we should become complacent. The truth, however, seems to be different.
There are two concepts that one needs to clarify, Dr Hegde said, before going any further. There is nothing like the truth in science, it could, at best, be a truth for the time being and could always become false with the next discovery. Every scientific hypothesis is true only until it is disproved by the next hypothesis. No scientist ever invents anything new in this universe. He/she only discovers one more secret of Nature each time he/she is lucky. Gravity was not invented by Isaac Newton when an apple fell on his head from the tree. That day he understood one of the fundamental principles of Nature’s working that every object is attracted towards the earth and the speed of its fall depends on its mass. Of course, when Chance knocks at our door we should not be in the toilet and lose that opportunity. Only a sharp and alert brain could derive mileage from such serendipitous happenings.
The apple falling on Newton’s head is the chance that Newton got without any effort on his part. This is called serendipity. Again chance played a large part in this drama. Isaac Newton suffered from not so rare an abnormality which doctors label as obsessive compulsive neurosis. He used to go round every lamp post and/or tree on his way. This might have facilitated the apple to fall on his head to give him the chance to become famous thereby. Real serendipity indeed!
From then on other ramifications of any serendipitous discovery follow. The talk mainly concentrated on the course that a pharmaceutical molecule takes after its serendipitous discovery. He took penicillin as an example. Although Alexander Fleming noticed Penicillium Notatum fungus capable of destroying his staphylococcal culture in 1928, he almost forgot about it, until it was independently rediscovered by Howard Florey and Ernest Chain at the Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford in 1940. In fact, long before Alexander Fleming saw the fungus growing in his culture plate serendipitously; two other microbiologists had discovered the same species of fungus, Penicillium Glucon, capable of destroying bacteria. They also did not go any further. However, it was the flamboyant Alexander Fleming who, at the end of the day, cornered all the glory for the discovery of penicillin, the first anti-biotic. He was knighted by the King, appointed Vice Chancellor of the famous Edinburgh University and, eventually, he even managed to pocket the Nobel Prize in 1945!
Well meaning leaders in the microbiological field quickly announced to the world the menace from germs is almost but gone for ever. Soon after that they were shocked to see stronger staphylococcus acquiring special resistance power against the scientists’ potent penicillin. The germs soon acquired the capacity to eat penicillin and live by getting mutated to have the power to destroy penicillin using an enzyme, beta-lantamase. Scientists were too proud to let that happen and they went in for newer and newer molecules of antibiotics for the last half a century. They have now landed up with around five hundred antibiotic molecules. All of them are prohibitively expensive in addition to having serious side effects. The latest curse, though, is that no drug company is keen on another new molecule as the risk of not making huge profits with the existing stiff competition is not very bright.
Germs, on their part, have become resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics and some of them have become monsters in the hospital environment. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics for minor viral illnesses also added to the problem of drug resistance. Today many hospitals have these multi-drug resistant germs; leader of the group is pseudomonas, threatening to produce the epidemic of nosocomial infections resulting in many unnecessary deaths. After the advent of penicillin even a simple organism like the peumococcus today kills more patients with pneumonia acquired in the hospitals in the elderly patients. Less enthusiasm for developing a new anti-biotic molecule by the drug companies coupled with the rise of the “super-bugs”, the resistant germs, has been the biggest challenges of modern times. What started as a blessing has now become a curse. More and more hospitals are relying on biological competition between micro-organisms to kill germs these days. Maggots are used to kill germs as well as the dead tissue in wounds very effectively. What a pity that we did not think of it earlier.
Similar stories could be narrated about every single drug in the pharmacopoeia. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a well known writer and a physician, was dead right when he wrote: “if the whole Material Medica could be sunk to the bottom of the seas, it would be that much better for mankind and worse for the fishes.” How true? Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are the fourth important cause of death in the US today. On an average 1,80,000 people die annually in American hospitals due to ADRs only. In addition, the ADRs in out patients result in another seventy million drug prescriptions to correct the ADR. The net loss to the buyer and consequent profit to the drug industry, for these ADR related prescriptions amounts to $80 billion annually! Drug companies have slowly shifted to more profitable business of manufacturing vitamins and minerals in place of expensive antibiotics etcetera.
The recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) audit in the US showed that doctors and hospitals are the third important cause of death after heart attacks and cancer. Simple life style changes that really keep man going as long as one lives on this planet are given a go by because of the false promises of the modern medical world that they have life saving drugs and technology in their armamentarium even to pull a man out of the jaws of death. A very tall promise that is very wide off the mark in reality. Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, in one of his off the cuff remarks, recently came out with the reality in modern medicine. “Modern medicine, for all its breathtaking progress seems to be slightly off balance like the Tower of Pisa,” said he rightly.
Most of the other technologies and drugs have met with the same fate but the medical world does not admit this because of the large amount of money involved in this medi-business. Over diagnosis, not letting the well alone through screening the apparently healthy, and intervening even in healthy people have resulted in a total loss of 2,25,000 deaths in one year in the Us whose population is just over 290 million in all. Many other systems of medical care delivery like Ayurveda, homeopathy and many more could assist the medical care delivery much more effectively at a small fraction of the present fiscal burden. Modern medicine is a must for emergency care and surgery but that is just about ten percent of the sick population. The remaining vast majority of 90% could do well with the other complementary systems. A judicious mix of all the systems would be the future hope of mankind.
That said, he hastened to add that the present craze for selling redcutionist herbal drugs in the name of Ayurveda seems to be more dangerous. American market for herbal drugs was in the order of $70 billion last year. This again would take that science to the market place and result in misery for mankind. The lecture made a fervent plea to the scientific community of the University to see that newer research in herbal medicine follows the new science of holism and chaos and not the out dated fallacious reductionist science of the post-Descartes era. Surreal, a word derived from surrealism, also means dreamlike, distorted and bizarre in another sense. The present scenario in the scientific world of drugs and technology could be aptly described as surrealistic. The talk traced the history of all these from serendipity to surreal.
The following day Professor B. M. Hegde answered questions from the students and staff of the life sciences department for well over two hours on all kinds of subjects around science, spirituality and real life situations in the world today.