Camping

After a full week of rebound in local coronavirus infections, I haven’t had time for running. All hours seemed to be taken up by the one objective of clearing the cases.

It’s not just a matter of keeping my head above water; I have to keep my head behind surgical respirator and, yes, face shield.

If I had a dollar for every time I don personal protective equipment, I could be dining at Four Seasons Hotel.

At long last, I have taken two days off for a family camping vacation. The air is colder here, but being in the outdoors lifts my spirits. It’s a pretty landscape, but not in an extravagant way. There is no Michelin star, but we were happy to be the chef ourselves. It's not about the five-star dining, it's not about the wine. It's not about the world-class gastronomic experience. It's about the raw experience of making and cracking open our own beggar's chicken in the wild.

Change

All of the ways we've been talking about the coronavirus involve changes: changing strain with new variants, changing reproduction number R-naught, changing rules of the game.

We'd all been shellshocked. We worry. We panic.

But then, I try to remind myself to get prepared for changes. Today, one has fun at school or on school bus. The next day, there is in-person school suspension. Pretty soon many parents - including me - hear about the news of a teacher being quarantined and their children thus declared as close contact.

How should we make sure nothing bad happens? Try this. Open our eyes to the new opportunities. That's what my daughter showed me when school closure was announced without warning. She had come up with many pen-and-paper games when she spent time with classmates on school bus. She then switched to teach me her self-made game. First, write a list of categories: name of celebrity, villain character of any book, city, song, body parts, elements in periodic table. Next, think of an alphabet. We then have to race to complete the list by giving one example for each category, using that alphabet as the first letter of the example.

As it happened, we ended up having a non-stop-laughing night when we kept competing, and changing the categories for fun.

Monk

Omicron is anything but blameworthy. I suppose that's what most of us think.

Little did I expect silver lining on such cloudy days, when things turn dark earlier than usual. Actually, everything, cafeteria and restaurants included.

Besides the curfew on dine-in services, many venues are closed. No bars. No karaoke roooms. No gyms. No swimming pools. No cinemas. No libraries. 

In my case, there was something quite magical about my clairvoyance to time my public library visit. I was able to check out more than ten library books one week before our government ordered all those premises to shut. I then took a deep breath, sipped my coffee and nodded, feeling accomplished like Chip 'n' Dale after stocking enough for the winter. It's simply more than awesome. Quite a number of the books have been reserved by others, and I could have had only two weeks to finish them if not because the library is closed.

Good, simple, hassle-free. I'd figure I should have more than enough time to go through all those highly popular books before the library re-opens: Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk, Michael Lewis' The Premonition, Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?, Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall.

Hero

BioNTech is a wonderful vaccine developed from a brand-new technique. So much so that some of us remain skeptical of the new technology of messenger RNA platform. Consider how we compare with any earlier vaccine - the fastest one was mumps vaccine which took four years to develop - and we are amazed by the way Pfizer-BioNTech was developed within 12 months.

The fact is, we all forget how much longer the scientists have been solving the puzzle of mRNA vaccine. The answer, as it turns out, is more than 15 years. That's what l learned after reading the story of a Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who is named one of 2021 "Heroes of the Year" by Time magazine.

During these years, Karikó has been fascinated by RNA. If DNA makes up the letters of life, RNA creates the words, and ultimately the sentences, as explained by Time. In her pursuit of turning our body into its own drug-making factory, Karikó has been figuring out ways to use messenger RNA to instruct the body to make proteins, enzymes and different molecules. Think about her working late nights and early morning, writing at least one new grant application every morning, being turned down and rejected again and again - at least 24 times. But the key is that she kept pushing, even after being fired by her supervisors at the University of Pennsylvania.

The breakthrough came after her collaboration with an immunologist years later, when they found out the trick of encasing the mRNA inside a fat bubble, thus protecting the precious genetic code without triggering a cascade of inflammatory storm. The next thing they knew, in a lightbulb moment, is the flexibility of creating any vaccine once they get the readout of a virus's genetic sequence. Get the code, build the correspoding mRNA with chemical compoundes, pop it into the fat bubble and that's the birth of a new vaccine. Simple and smart. When this smart solution was first published in the journal Immunity in 2005, the beauty of their findings was clearly not appreciated by the scholars around the world. The night before the paper was published, Karikó was expecting a flood of phones calling to congratulate next morning. No one called. Nothing.

Not until 15 years after the original work of Karikó, when we are now blessed with the protection by BioNTech.

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."