CRISPR

As a voracious reader, I would check out a stack of books from the local library and finish them before renewal limits. Getting close to the end of the year, I get even more suggestion from the best books of the year. Not surprisingly, those selected books have an unparalled level of popularity. So much so that I won't be allowed to renew the books, which have already been reserved by dozens of readers.

That means I have to finish The Code Breaker within two weeks of borrowing this Walter Isaacson must-read. That is a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna discovered the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR. A tool even more thrilling than the Apple product of Steve Jobs.

When we open the box of an iPhone, we have the tactile experience to set the tone for how we perceive the product. When Doudna broke the code of CRISPR, she opened a Pandora's box. It's not just a matter of switching off the defective gene causing Huntington's disease. In addition to offer the prospect of curing an inherited neurodegenerative condition, it might be used to edit out a defective gene which would otherwise severely reduce body height. That seems ethical and reasonable, as most of us would think. But what about a genetic edit that could add eight inches to a kid's height? Should we allow CRISPR to be used on a boy who would otherwise be under five feet tall to turn him into someone of average height? Well, as if the slope is not slippery enough, let's take another step to ponder the use on a boy who would otherwise be average height to make him six-foot-five?

To make this thought experiment even more interesting, Walter Isaacson raised the key difference between an absolute improvement and a positional improvement. Increased height, when we think about it carefully, is a positional one. Walter Isaacson dubbed it the standing-on-tiptoes problem. Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a crowded room. To see what's going on in the front, you stand on your tiptoes. This trick works. But then everyone else around you do the same. They all get two inches higher. Then nobody in the room, including you, sees any better than the people in the front row.

Uh-oh.

Memory

If you believe our memory is like indelible ink, I'm with you. We thought we experience and remember anything - the way we celebrated our child's first birthday, the first "papa" she said, the first day of school. Who won't?

And then I brought with me a book by the neuroscientist Lisa Genova, Remember, during our family vacation this weekend. I come to appreciate how episodic memory about an autobiogrphical event can be warped. In the words of Lisa Genova, retrieval and reconsolidating an episodic memory is like hitting SAVE in Microsoft Word. Every time we recall an episodic memory, we overwrite the earlier version of the memory and update it. Any edits we've made are then saved to to the new version in our neural circuits. The old one is gone.

We happened to bring our daughter to the Kowloon Park this time. And then I noticed that she cannot recall having visited the large public park housing flamingos. Let me be honest: I have to look through my photo album to find out that it has been more than eight years since her last visit of Kowloon Park.

Now that I understand how fallible our episodic memory can be, I must mention a more stable and long-lasting memory: muscle memory. The memory for how to do things, as it turns out, is quite different from the memory for what happened. Muscle memory is unconscious, and remembered below our awareness. Once learned, the motor skills can be retrieved effortlessly. That's why my daughter doesn't have to think about how she's going to swing her body across the monkey bar at the Kowloon Park playground. Easy-peasy.

Unknown

As 2021 draws to a close, no one knows the answers to the how and when for ending coronavirus pandemic, least of all the WHO and CDC. Now you dont't see it, now you do. It's an "unknown unknown."

All these questions whetted my curiosity. After delving into Mark Honigsbaum’s lively account of the epidemiological mysteries, I have learned a great deal from his book The Pandemic Century.

To his credit, we know no one can say for sure when there will be new plagues or new pandemics. And we are more often wrong than right. His narration of the last century's struggling against disease outbreaks speaks how we make downright mistakes, one in 1976 and another in 2003, one at Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, Philadelphia, and one at the Metropole, a mid priced hotel in Hong Kong. In both instances, scientists thought the world was on the brink of a new influenza pandemic, only to realise that’s false alarm and that the real danger lurked elsewhere.

Next comes one baby after another born with unusually small heads, with virtually no foreheads, when Zika virus hit Brazil. Unbeknownst to the public, the exceptionally high rate of birth defects has been triggered by a frightening mosquito-borne virus outbreak. Unfortunately rumours abounded that it’s all due to insecticides or vaccines. It's an all too common story. Similar conspiracy theory keeps repeating itself in history.

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world," Albert Camus had already warned us, "yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky."

Birthday Party

Long ago, when my daughter was toddler, clueless, and looking for us to think of things to do, we decided the way of celebrating her birthday. Now that she turns twelve today, she has her say.

One thing I discover on seeing my daughter enjoy her way of orchestrating a sleepover party is how much she has grown up. She reveled in seemingly infinite topics of talking with three classmates she has invited. The four of them just kept laughing till midnight; their enery was astonishing.

By now, as I write this, after an hour of chasing swallowtail butterflies and kingfisher with my camera this morning, I have come to understand how much zoom telephotos matter for wildlife lovers. Come too close and the bird flies away. Too distant, no good. The same applies to my daughter. The relationship is complicated, that much is known, and we learn to keep a good-enough distance. A distance that would give both a balanced frame.