ULTRA  SCIENCE

Prof  B M  Hegde
Vice Chancellor
MAHE University
Manipal - 576119

Progress is looking at the same thing from different angles. If we keep looking at some thing with the same angle that our forefathers were looking at, without questioning them at all, we would never progress. Change is progress and science is change.

"Shake a tree full of theorists, and twenty ideas will fall out" says Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, USA. Albert Einstein's general and special relativity theories made the astonishing assertion that time, space and matter could be squeezed and stretched like India rubber. "But he might have been a bit too hasty." Some sort of antigravity force-the "dark energy" (Einstein's cosmological term) was needed to make his mathematical formulae work. He was greatly relieved in the 1920s when the theory of expanding Universe was formulated and it was thought that anti-gravity did not exist. The new discovery now has almost confirmed the presence of the "dark energy" as real.  Astronomers however would like to see a few more distant supernovas just to be sure, though.

"Last week scientists made a powerful case that Einstein's blunder may actually have been another Nobel-worthy prediction," wrote Michael Lemonick in the Times London on April 16^th this year. "Tens and billions of years from now, our Milky Way galaxy will find itself alone in empty space with its nearest neighbours too far away to see. In the end, the stars will simply wink out-and the Universe will end not with a bang but with the meekest of whimpers, he wrote."

Let us allow people to think freely and not restrict their thinking by our rigid narrow views of science. Condemning anything that does not fit in with our tunnel vision need not be always right.  Wisdom does not belong to scientists only! Some thinking would, per force, be wrong. That does not mean that we should not let people think at all. That would be throwing the bath water out of the window with the baby inside.

Some one wrote the correct history of medicine thus:( author not known)

More and more scientists are realizing the futility of reductionist science.  Dr. Mariette Gerber of the National Institute of Medical Research in France, believes that such research methods, which attempt to isolate and examine the effects of a specific nutrient, are too narrowly focussed. In particular, single-agent studies may miss synergistic effects whereby different nutrients interact to lend increased disease fighting benefits. "There is no guarantee that a nutrient like vitamin C exhibits the same behaviour when consumed alone as it may when consumed as a tomato." Wrote Mariette Gerber. The report from her institute issued in June 2001 states that "Wholistsic approach to research may provide new insights into science." I have been writing about this for decades but no one took note. Instead, they ridiculed me!  I am sure they would now sit up and take note that it has come out in the World Cancer Research Journal.

The core principle of Ayurveda is to have a wholistic look at the human body and mind to understand human diseases and to manage them. People trying to isolate alkaloids in Ayurvedic herbal medicines will have to be disappointed in the long run.

There is a lot more in this universe than what meets the reductionist scientists' eyes and tools. The following studies would throw a lot more light on what I have been writing and saying so far. I hope deeper thinking and holistic research would unravel many more mysteries of this universe.

Coronary heart disease, claimed to be the Ace killer in this century, was linked to life style risk factors as smoking, high-fat diet, sedentary habits and non-adherence to medical advice. These have had multi-billion dollar business built around them in the last five decades.  There have, however, been pointers even as far back as the 1950s that certain behaviour patterns might have a bearing on its incidence too. The latter was mostly swept under the carpet, as it did not generate business dollars! 

A wealth of well-designed animal and human studies now has shown the direct link between behaviour and coronary disease. The notable feature is that these behavioural factors predict future coronary heart disease events independently of the influence of life style risk factors that are made much of. They are:

Future interventions should concentrate on these factors more than all the life style risk factors being sold to the gullible public. Two new studies ENRICHD and SADHART are looking into this and their results could alter our management strategies in coronary heart disease.

Newer studies have shown that atherosclerotic blocks (blocks seen in the angiograms) get worse with job stress.¹ Psychosocial factors adversely affect the coronary arteries.² Episodes of acute anger could bring on a heart attack. ³ In patients with coronary disease and hostile personality, episodes of anger could bring on left ventricular dysfunction and heart failure.⁴ Similarly, in everyday life, intense anger and stressful mental activities could provoke anginal pain and even infarct.⁵  Hostility has been discovered to be the "toxic" factor in human behaviour; it has several components such as aggressive and irritable feelings about others, and hostile thoughts about others. A recent meta-analysis revealed that hostility potential was the best predictor of all cause mortality! ⁶ 

Coupled with this is the data emerging from many new studies to show how time- honoured interventions like prayer could be of use in sickness. I am sure our "scientists" would be terribly angry at these studies! But remember that anger is the worst risk factor for coronary heart disease, as shown above in many elegant scientific studies. William Harris and his colleagues at the Mid American Heart Institute and the University of California in San Diego have shown, in an elegant randomized, controlled, prospective study with impeccable study design, that "remote, intercessory (praying for others) prayer was associated with lower Coronary Care Unit scores. These results suggest that prayer might be employed as an adjunct with significant benefit in the management of heart attack patients in the acute stage. ⁷

Many of the newer technologies, much touted, have been shown to be ineffective, if not dangerous, on long-term audits. Many drugs have been either proved ineffective or dangerous and have been withdrawn in the last couple of decades. Most of the fault lies in the methods of reductionist science applied to a dynamic system like the human body. The same holds good for other sciences like physics and chemistry.

The earlier report about Vitamin C and tomato is a good example to show how the whole need not (usually is not) the sum total of the bits.   Nothing, in my opinion, that is complicated, becomes less complicated when looked at more carefully. On the contrary, new angle of research would bring out hidden facets of the mystery. Progress could, therefore, come from an open mind. Closed minds have no place in serious science. The new Indo-European etymological root of the word science is skei, which simply means to cut into. I feel that the only genuine scientist is an innocent child that explores anything given to it. Grown up scientists, who could keep a child's heart in their adulthood, would be wonderful scientists too!⁸ Otherwise science would go after money and prestige, although many claim that scientists do what they do for the passion. Passion makes some of the best observations, but might draw, at times, wretched conclusions.

Money was the driving force in the reductionist sciences even from the very beginning. A glance at the early history of chemistry would show how! Alchemy was the forerunner of the modern chemistry and the former was used to fool all people all the time or to make it big by turning base metals into gold! However, chemistry could go back to its origin in the Khimi region (the land of black earth) on the Nile Delta some 4000 years ago. The first discovery was the finding that minerals when heated could result in the isolation of metals and glasses with useful properties. Those could be sold for profit! This science of chemistry spread gradually from the Arab world to Asia-gaining en route the secrets of gunpowder manufacture from the Chinese. Gunpowder did make lots and lots of money. The foundation of the Nobel Prize owes its existence to gunpowder, right?

I strongly feel that more than the out-wordly, intellect-based, objective education, a good scientist needs inwardly, intuition-based, subjective education as well. The two together, in a balanced fashion, could bring forth real good scientists in the future, who have their own minds rather than the borrowed minds that can not look at the same object from different angles. Science, like any other human endeavour, should be for the good of humankind. It should make man love man.