Tuberculosis

Tell me what you think of when you hear the name John Green. Most probably his novel The Fault in Our Stars, which has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. 

I'll tell you what I think of: a boy with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. His name is Henry. He lives in Sierra Leone, and has got open sores in his neck and shoulder from ruptured lymph nodes, yellow clouds in the white of his eyes – a byproduct of the liver toxicity from the not-too-effective treatment he was on. 

John Green writes books other than novels. His non-fiction Everything is Tuberculosis tells the story of meeting Henry, a charismatic teenager who was nearly killed by the same disease which claimed the lives of John Keats, Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.

It has taken four years for Henry to be able to get home. During his hospital stay, he was emaciated and could hardly attend school. Why did it take so long for Henry to be accurately diagnosed? Why did he get worse in hospital? John Green captures the trajectory of a disease that continues to kill over a million people every year. Among them, many could not afford the pills. For those who could, they abandoned the pills because the pills made them terribly sick when taken without food, which they could not afford.

John Green came to the inescapable conclusion that the root cause of tuberculosis is injustice. Depressing as it is to utter word injustice, I do believe he is right.

Decision

If optimism and happiness are twin cherries on a single stalk, a runaway bride and wedding oath are opposite poles of a magnet. 

There is a huge difference between saying yes "I do" and leaving a man at the altar. So much so that it is the theme of the sliding doors-style novel Written in the Stars by Ali Harris. The conundrum, as in most situations, shows how one decision leads us into completely different paths. It's true in relationships. It's true in sports. It's true in business. No matter how great the incentives to negotiate, how great the flexibility – in the end, the choice is an "either / or" decision.  

We can pick only one. Not two.

Dragonfly

For many, dragonfly is just an insect. 

For biologists, dragonfly is testimony to the power of evolutionary adaptation. A careful look at the fossil records confirms that dragonflies have been around for 300 million years, or a hundred times as long as humans. If dragonflies flew above the heads of dinosaurs during the Mesozoic Era and survived when the dinosaurs did not, this is by itself a great piece of evidence for their evolutionary success. The power of evolution, demanding though it is, has made dragonflies one of the oldest creatures on the planet.

With the announcement of the "extremely hot" weather from the effect of severe typhoon Bavi, I heard the forecast of temperature as high as 36 degrees Celsius over the weekend. I can't think of better outdoor activity than field trip of dragonfly watching. I ended up learning the way dragonflies make adaptation for thermoregulation. 

The first lesson from male crimson-tailed marsh hawk is the wax-like coating on their body, known as pruinescence. This beautiful dragonfly has a vibrant red abdomen, and a powdery (or pruinose) blue thorax. The wax-like pruinescence isn’t a pigment, but a “bloom” secreted by the insect’s cuticle to reflect harsh sunlight. So smart is it that it can cool down in hot weather. 

Another tactic is the blue dasher's posture at rest. The characteristic “obelisk” posture reminds me of my daughter’s handstand-like pose. Why does this dragonfly raise its abdomen into an almost perfectly vertical position, pointing the very tip directly toward the sun? Again, that has to do with thermoregulation for the cold-blooded insect. The vertical  body alignment significantly reduces the surface area exposed to direct solar radiation, thus avoiding overheating.

Cool.

STEM

If you've ever asked elementary school students to draw you a scientist fifty years ago, you'd be guaranteed that more than 99% drew you a man in a white lab coat. You could be mistaken for thinking that women are meant for housekeeping, and less good at maths, physics, or engineering.

Has there been a paradigm shift in stereotype portrayals of women in science? More recent research showed that around a quarter of children depicted a scientist as a woman, although these are mostly drawn by girls. 

Now that we saw more females depicted as pioneers on magazines or media (think Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas who makes CRISPR genome-editing technology breakthrough), the ongoing unevenness of female visibility seems to be making progress. 

Think we're having equality of opportunity? Well, think again. Go read the book Not Just for the Boys by Athene Donald. You shall then find the story of Katie Bouman who took up the position as an Assistant Professor at Caltech and became an international sensation after creating an algorithm to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. The image went viral, followed by anti-feminist internet trolls making angry attacks. 

Unfortunately, the misogynist trolls show us there is a long way to go for women in science.    

Lips

When it comes to censorship, all writers develop skills to minimise risk of accusations. 

Susan Conley, an author who grew up in Maine and lived in Beijing for more than two years, has shown us the style of mealy-mouthed language. In her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, there are many occasions for touching the "Three T's and the One F" (Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong), but she prefers to dodge touching the taboo subjects. 

Instead, Conley writes a candid story of her breast cancer during her stay in Beijing. Subjects like mastectomy, mortality, and median survival are better go unsaid. Behind these uncomfortable subjects, Conley faces the difficulty of walking on eggshells. 

Should Conley mention the Camel Lights she smoked in high school? Can she? And what about the answer for her chance of being alive in ten years? And the odds to see her two boys graduate from high school? What about her boy's watching her armpit skin change after radiation? She nodded after her son suggested, "Mum, you've got to put sunscreen on there." For many subjects, Susan Conley chooses to keep her mouth shut. 

Silent tears are mean't to be wiped, not to be heard.

Capsaicin

If the mention of David Julius doesn't ring any bells, it's safe to say you're new to the field of nociceptor or physiology.

If you haven't heard of David Julius, you should at least think about him next time you have wasabi or chilli pepper. He received the Nobel Prize after discovering the first capsaicin receptor – a protein called TRPV1. The compound capsaicin unlocks the secrets what makes chilli pepper "hot". When TRPV1 or capsaicin receptor is activated, a burning sensation results. 

We now realise TRPV1 receptors are abundant in the mouth, lips, throat and tongue; that explains the "burning" sensation of chilli pepper. In the meantime, capsaicinoid molecule is hydrophobic and not water-soluble. If you want to quench the burning by fetching a water jug or a beer, it is unlikely to work. So, a good solution is to reach for milk as it contains the lipophilic casein, which is an important key to remove the lipid-like capsaicins. 

David Julius then showed that mice lacking the gene for the TRPV1 ion channel were impervious to both hot peppers and heat. The same applies to birds, whose TRPV1 channel is not activated by capsaicin. The good news for birds (and chilli pepper, for that matter) is that they can consume chilli pepper seeds unharmed and disperse the viable seeds. 

What about other mammals like squirrels? They do respond to capsaicin in the same way as humans. Therefore, you can coat bird food like nuts with chilli powder dust (or Tabasco sauce) to keep squirrels away from the bird dining table.   

Kingdom

At first glance, the novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi seems to be about animal optogenetics study carried out by Gifty, who is a gifted researcher with two papers in Nature and one in Cell.

As I go through the chapters, arranged in a back-and-forth structure, the story turns out to be more than a neural circuit experiment for the reward-seeking behaviour of mice. Gifty is one of three black PhD candidates in the entire American medical school, and one of five women in a laboratory of twenty-eight. Unsurprisingly, she has a hard time to overcome the stigma and self-doubt as a black immigrant from Ghana. 

And that's why I think the word Kingdom comes to appear in the novel's title. Her family are the only black people at the church. Gifty can't figure out why her kindergarten classmate says black people can't be princess, why black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, and whether black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime. 

Gifty is puzzled – so much so that she has to check if the God of America is the same as the God of Ghana.