27 Year Old American Family

On the Solvanam (Tamil) web magazine, there was an article about television shows in the west (U.S. & European). I wrote a follow up Tamil piece to that article. It got published yesterday as the lead/cover story of the latest issue! This is a quick & dirty translation of that article for your enjoyment.

When I watch a movie or a TV show, rather than being a superficial viewer, I try to learn what I can about  the thought/creative process that went into developing the show. This is not in preparation for me to become a movie director or TV show producer in future. I just think understanding background details will help me enjoy the show/movie with more depth. That’s all. Perhaps once I retire, this knowledge will help me write some useless books. But for now being able to enjoy few good shows like Breaking Bad in depth is RoI enough. :-)

One TV series that should be part of that good shows collection while being a show of very different kind is The Simpsons that has been on the air for the past 27 years on Fox.

Adults who may not have watched this show closely brush it aside thinking it is a children’s show like Tom & Jerry. You may remember ex-first lady Barbara Bush commenting in the early nineties that it is the stupidest show she has ever seen. That is the height of this ignorance. But the Simpsons show not only laughed aside such silly comments but made fun of the elder Bush and Barbara Bush themselves in one episode and is cheerfully running along till date.   

Serious TV shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter continue to narrate one overarching story without any logical error from episode to episode. So, you need to watch them from the beginning and continue till the end. But Simpsons follows the sitcom model and so each episode comes with self-contained stories allowing a new viewer to watch & enjoy any random episode.  

The main characters in this show are the Dad, Mom and the three children forming the nuclear family the show revolves around. They live in a small town called Springfield somewhere in the US of A. The location/state where Springfield is located is never revealed paving the way for so many jokes by itself. This fictional town is similar to Indian writer R.K.Narayan’s Malgudi that forms the backdrop for many of his stories/novels. Though the town is fictional, noting down various remarks & references that have appeared in various episodes, superfans have put together a very detailed map of Springfield that is fun to virtually roam around!

In cartoon shows such as Tom & Jerry, generally there will only be a small set of (single digits) characters. Where they live, their family members and other such details will not be important to the kind of simple stories being told. In contrast, some TV shows like Jetsons and Flintstones that were popular in the 1960’s have tried to create consistent broader backdrops with recurring office, home, small/large story characters and so forth. Simpsons creators have taken this idea an order higher creating a complete universe within the show. Click on the picture below to enlarge it. You will see ~400 characters that have appeared just once or few times or hundreds of times on The Simpsons!

A very unique characteristic of the show pioneered by the writers of this show is its layered approach to storytelling. Even a five year old child can enjoy the show watching the brightly colored cheerful looking characters that often do a lot of slapstick comedy. Slightly older teenagers can notice and enjoy how the two or three story threads weaved into each episode nicely blend with each other to form a coherent story line. For the enjoyment of older audience, there are references to American culture, politics, religions, world events, latest technology, sports and so on strewn all over the show with very funny takes.

Writers of this show don’t bother explaining each joke or story detail at length to ensure audience get it. As you learn more and more about the show and the world in general, you will find more and more details hidden in the show waiting for you to discover & enjoy! It is practically impossible to note and enjoy all the details packed inside any given episode when you watch it for the first time. This model encourages fans to watch the same episode multiple times to identify details they missed on their previous watching sessions. Superfans that have caught on to this model have been listing details hidden in the episodes on Did you notice? themed websites for decades! After watching any given episode couple of times, you can visit one of these sites to read & realize how much you have failed to notice yourself despite watching the episode more than once!

Several books have been written about this show. For example, “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets” by Simon Singh discusses all the math related details, theories and subtleties that have appeared in various episodes. Let us look at just one example. The Dad in the show Homer Simpson is portrayed as a not so clever dimwit. In one episode, realizing that he hasn’t accomplished anything worthwhile in his life, Homer attempts to become an Edison like inventor/scientist quickly. As a part of that effort, the figure below appears on the show for a second or two.

Scene is designed to make it look like Homer is scribbling down some meaningless numbers/symbols on the blackboard. But take a closer look at the second line alone. In the world of mathematics, the Xn + Yn = Zn equation is quite famous. Everyone remembers the instance where n=2 as Pythagoras Theorem that we encounter in middle school trigonometry. But as per Fermat’s Theorem, that equation does not have whole number solutions when n>2 is well known in math circles. (We can ignore the stories where many lost their hair becoming bald like Homer over 300 years trying to prove it. It is an interesting story in itself discussed here.) If that is the case, then how can 398712 + 436512 = 447212 be true? It will certainly make Fermat’s Theorem false! Even if you plug in these numbers into your calculator, it will come out right forcing you to think perhaps Homer has disproved Fermat’s Theorem! But in actuality this is a near miss solution since the correct answer for that sum is 4472.000000007112 which is way too precise for any of our regular calculators to compute correctly!  Unless we know these details, it is really hard to even notice this joke passing by right in front of our eyes when we watch the show! In fact, the first line on the blackboard talks something equally arcane about Higgs-Boson particle physics! Notice the level of details packed into a seemingly innocent shot that floats by in a jiffy! If such details tickle you, try watching this 4 minute long YouTube video. There Simon Singh explains the math secrets hidden behind 3 different numbers that flash by in another Simpsons episode innocently asking how many people are watching a baseball match in a stadium.

In another episode when the question P=NP? flashed by innocuously in the background of a scene, my friends and I have high-fived each other during my grad school days. If you know of Computer Science Professors, you can ask them about it. They might be surprised to hear you talk about P=NP? if you are not a C.S. major. Writers of the show possessing masters and Ph.D.s in Math, Physics, etc. is one of the reasons for such references popping up everywhere in the show.

You shouldn’t think that these references are limited only to the fields of Math and Computer Science. Two decades back, I came to know about the ancient Egyptian custom of burying a dead royal family member with hundreds of little servant dolls called Ushabtis that are meant to serve them in the next world only through a Simpsons episode!

Man of yester years Mr. Montgomery Burns (owner of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant where Homer works as a safety inspector) always answers the phone in the show with the greeting, “Ahoy Hoy”. It is because that is the appropriate greeting for answering the phone suggested by the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell! Even though the world has moved on to adapt “Hello” universally, old man Burns is not ready to give up and change! One can keep writing page after page about these nuances. Berkeley and other universities in US have been offering courses centered around this series. For an example, see http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/muse/intro.html

Since this show has been on the air since 1989 continuously, averaging about 20 episodes per year, there are more than 550 Simpsons episodes on the planet. There has been a full length movie as well. During the last year, a new cable channel called FXX has been advertising that they are showing every episode ever created back to back and have done that more than once. Since each episode lasts about 21 minutes, even if they run them without any commercial interruptions, one run will consume more than nine days!  

Creators of the show have declared that the characters will not age. So, for the past 27 years Homer has been a 38 year old father, Marge has been a 34 year old mother, Bart & Lisa have been in fourth and second grades in the Springfield Elementary School consistently while Maggie has remained a pacifier sucking baby that never utters a word. Stories are always told as if they occur in the present day. So, the date of birth of characters get adjusted accordingly ignoring any inconsistency with what was said in another episode ten years back. While human beings have five fingers/toes in each limb, evolutionary biologists have argued that logically four fingers (three fingers + thumb) or toes are adequate. As per that notion, all the characters in this show are portrayed as having only four fingers/toes per limb! These are all intentionally introduced illogical paradoxes that have been maintained consistently!

Artists Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner,Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer have been the voices of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Apu respectively from the beginning of the show. Nancy who does the voice for Bart has even written a book called My Life as a Ten Year Old.   

Starting from India, Simpsons have been to England, France, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Iceland and even outer space in various episodes. There aren’t that many movies, cultural memes, games, politicians that have not been made fun of in the show. There are also several different experiments that have been tried out including recurring TV show within this TV show, clips of videos that are shown as trailers of a fictional movie that when sequenced form a self-contained storyline, 3D animation, real actors acting/appearing side-by-side with show’s cartoon characters, several dance and song sequences and so forth!

Depending on the storyline, new characters may appear in just one episode and vanish forever. Acting in the show by providing voice for a character is considered an honor by celebrities all over the world. So, starting from ex-British PM Tony Blair, Michael Jackson, Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Beetles band drummer Ringo Star, Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Prof. Stephen Hawking and other hundreds of celebrities have appeared on this show either as themselves or playing a character. You can see a really long list of who appeared in what episode on this site. Even the crisp dialogs deserve their own mention/appreciation as they have captured the hearts and minds of the audience for decades. Couple of good samples will be Homer’s lines such as “Trying is the first step to failure”, “Alcohol: The cause and solution to all the problems in the world”, etc.

Following the success of this series, Fox itself has created (& cancelled) a slew of similar shows such as Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, etc. Since many of the Simpsons show writers/artists worked on Futurama as well, it had many similarities to Simpsons in the style of drawing, hidden mathematical references and so on. Other TV channels such as Comedy Central have created similar cartoon shows with a lot of consistent background (e.g. South Park). But AFAIK, no other show matches The Simpsons in depth, (though not always) humor suitable for the whole family, continuing quality and the permanence that is successfully leading the show towards its thirtieth year!  

In the early 1990’s when I started watching this show routinely, DVDs & Internet weren’t in existence. Since I liked the show, I started recording the episodes as they aired on VHS tapes, manually pausing the tape during commercials to edit them out. Since I was recording in SLP mode, I could fit about eighteen episodes per 2-hr cassette. Since I started the collection this way, despite all the digital technologies that bloomed since then, I stuck to it like Montgomery Burns till 2014, collecting more than 500 episodes in 28 VHS cassettes! I also maintained a spreadsheet listing which episode starts from what minute in which cassette. It was a labor of love. But now, going beyond DVDs, you can watch any episode you wish  from the cloud whenever you want. The days of popping in a six hour long VHS tape in the VCR and watching one episode after another with friends seems to be long gone. Current need seems to be more like searching for a specific two minute clip for a reference, being able to attach it to an email or create a pointer on the web. Since all trends point to this mode being the permanent one in the forthcoming years, people have started writing articles advocating for such distributions. So, about an year back I posted a note on our town’s freecycle.org site saying, “I have this 28 cassette VHS tape collectiion containing 500+ Simpsons episodes. Anyone interested in taking them for free?”. Next day an elderly gentleman stopped by and took away the whole box. I got an email from him after a few days that said: 

I don’t have close family or friends nearby. I am not rich and I struggle with multiple health issues these days. In this situation, the Simpsons collection you gave me gives me very good company, keeping me in good spirits making me laugh all the time. If we had met years back, probably we’d have become good long time friends who share good tastes. Thanks for your gift.

When I finished reading his email, I couldn’t help tearing up. Who said The Simpsons can only make you laugh?

-- o0o --

Book Review: Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty

Read Capital in the 21st Century written by this French Economics Professor named Thomas Piketty over the last one month. I should mention that the book was originally written in French and has been translated into English by Arthur Goldhammer whom I heard speaking well on an NPR interview. Quality of his translation and perhaps the original writing itself is quite good that the flow, prose, tempo and information density of the book remain consistent throughout this tome. Depending upon the eReader font/page size, this could appear as a 700 to 900 pages long book and so may not be for everyone. But I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and would recommend it.

Piketty argues that the rate of return capital produces (r) is invariably more than the rate of growth of the economy (g). When this r > g status continues for long periods of time, the importance of capital increases creating a "rentier" class that becomes richer and richer simply by holding on to capital while the segments of the population that depends on their labor to generate income is permanently put on a disadvantage making them poorer with no real path/opportunity to catch up. This wealth inequality leads to conditions where the wealthiest 1% of the population (top centile) often disproportionately receives >20% of the nation's income, while the wealthiest 10% (top decile) takes away >50% of the income/wealth, leaving the bottom 50% with just about 10% of income. 

He marshals in volumes and volumes of data that is analyzed in detail (lots of Excel generated charts :-) to bring these points out over time (over hundred years) and space (France, US, UK, Japan, Sweden being the countries analyzed the most). He can't appreciate enough about the quality of probate records available for analysis in France and complaints about how little data is available from countries like China, India and Russia. There is hardly any analysis of African countries for the same reason. But his conclusion is that analyzing data from these rich countries clearly spells out as to how the rise in inequality will continue unless governments take concrete steps to arrest this trend. 

Book is segmented into four parts. Parts 1 titled Income and Capital & 2 titled The Dynamics of the Capital/Income Ratio covers all the basics of economics one needs to know to understand the rest of the book. Part 3 titled The Structure of Inequality dives into how the current world is made up of people deriving their wealth mostly through capital and those that get paid for their labor and how the inequality gets magnified between the two classes. On the labor side, there are these super managers (CEOs of MNCs) that get paid absurd amounts of money. He points out well as to how the increase in margins of productivity brought about by these CEOs can never really be that high to match the salary they draw and how often they get enormous raises when factors totally outside their control increase their company revenue or stock price. Then he digs into the capital side with even more vigor to show that capital that usually provides 5% annual return while the growth of the mature economy average only about 1%, people holding capital can live a very comfortable life and still reinvest most of their profit to keep building up their wealth endlessly. Only during the two world wars capital actually got decimated correcting this trend. Now that the world wars are long past, we are back to the normal mode where the inequality trends higher and higher. 

He points out as to how France and UK used to be more inegalitarian in early parts of the last century compared to US. But during the last 30 years this trend has changed considerably making US one of the most inegalitarian states in the world. In US there is a general sense ensconced in the collective conscious that inequality is a prerequisite to entrepreneurial dynamism. It is contrasted with Europe which is denounced as a poster boy of socialism that is a sanctuary to Soviet style egalitarianism. But letting this trend to continue will be devastating to the overall wellness of the society. So, what is his prescription to address the issue? On part 4, he suggests a small progressive tax on capital, say 0% on wealth less than 100K Euros, 0.2% for the band between 100K to 1 million Euros and say 0.5% or more above that band. He says this will be similar to property taxes we pay now but will include all kinds of wealth including  bank balances, stocks, mutual funds, real estates, and so forth. He concedes that all the countries in the world sharing their banking data across the world will be a prerequisite to implement such a tax policy. I'd fully endorse such transparency as it can bring in phenomenal changes in the world. He argues that bringing that level of transparency may look daunting initially, successful implementation of FATCA type laws clearly show that it is possible. He sees lot more value in bringing this global transparency than the actual revenue that will be generated by this capital tax, though it won't be anything to laugh about. Since he is not talking about replacing income or estate taxes but complimenting them with capital tax, it does make sense. Countries like Sweden are moving in that direction already. My main worry will be how effective will governments be in properly collecting and spending so much more money. I think being in Europe where there are several small countries (Nordic & Scandinavian countries comes to mind) with homogeneous population, similar values, small but rich economies and good technology manage to run high tax/high government services model well supporting a very egalitarian setup might push one to think that the same model could be extended to the whole world. In reality in large countries with diverse population with varying values and technology, it may be much harder to implement. But as he argues, though it may sound utopian, trying to move in that direction might be better than not trying at all letting the inequality continue to build up towards some eventual societal explosion. 

On a side note, he talks about Bill Gates' wealth and how is portrayed in the US media as the poster boy for reaping rewards for good work and how he should be allowed to accumulate any amount of wealth while contrasting his with current richest man in the world, Carlos Slim and previous richest men from Japan who are portrayed by the US media as shady characters that got their wealth via unacceptable illegal monopoly and due to some lucky real estate investments respectively! I do notice such media biases allover the world. Anyway, Bill Gates maintains a blog site where he talks about the books he reads and has appreciated this book and has even discussed the book via Skype with Piketty. You can see his write up here:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Inequality-Matters-Capital-in-21st-Century-Review

Bill Gates argues that consumption should be taxed instead of wealth. But Piketty doesn't think that is a good idea for multiple reasons. Measuring consumption is even more difficult, making the tax burden progressive will be very tricky and it will impose larger tax burden on the poor again. There are lot more discussions on how arbitrarily drawn national boundaries make countries rich/poor due to availability of natural resources (oil, minerals), how the implementation of the stateless currency of Euro across Europe has to be quickly followed up by fiscal, political integration of Europe without which the whole system will unravel and so forth, that I found persuasive. It is always good to see works that comprehensively analyze data over large periods of time (this one starts from Belle Époque and spans into the recent great recession) and explain trends in similar scales instead of over reading small ups and downs occurring in short time periods in specific markets and extrapolating them to make global predictions. I was quite amused by all the literary references in the book (Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility makes multiple appearances) to explain how in previous centuries idle living using the income generated from large estates is considered the most respectful. He is able to develop lot of ideas using pointers available in old novels as to how much income one needs to get from their wealth (usually 100 times the national average) to live a comfortable life. 

I picked up the hardcover edition from the local public library few months back. But since it was a new book, I could get it only on a two week loan. As you could imagine, I had to return it unfinished as there were holds on the book preventing me from renewing it. But during this Dec/Jan season, our local library is undergoing renovation and so I could check it out for two months. So, jumped on it. Though I read the hardcover edition, since I liked the book and found the eBook on the web for $4.99, bought a copy as well. Buying an eBook reminded me of an article I read about this particular book. Amazon & Google are able to track how far people get to by looking at their bookmarks and what page numbers quotes used in book reviews come from. Apparently not very many get past the first 100 pages. :-) 

-sundar.

Book Review: Genome by Matt Ridley

I remember reading a long while back that if Newton had not explained gravity, someone else would have. This doesn't take away the credit for his contribution but means that such important things cannot go too long without being addressed by someone. I felt that the book "Genome - The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" by Matt Ridley falls into that categoty. It is a piece of work that was just sitting there for someone to locate and pull it out. I wish I had written it myself. :-) 

The human DNA and genome is often incorrectly described as a blueprint for life. Actually each part of a blue print precisely defines how one part of a building needs to be constructed. Though there may be some general definition, individual parts of a blue print has no systemic relevance and the same blueprint is not repeated in every part of the building over and over either. So, looking at DNA as a book of life makes more sense. Once you do that, writing a book with 23 chapters, with each one describing something relevant to one chromosome nicely follows. The author had done a neat job of putting this elegant idea to work, identifying one characteristic gene/quality representing each one of the chromosomes and writing about all its manifestations in that chapter. 

First chapter is aptly titled Life, discussing what is a life form (something that can replicate itself and bring order) and how a filament of DNA contains the recipe for making life forms. He talks about the simplicity of the language of DNA itself with just four alphabets (A, C, G and T) and how the genes in the little finger of our hand are direct descendants of the first replicator molecules from an unbroken chain of billions of copies over millions of years! Next chapter dives into how somehow in their digital language the genes that are almost identical between humans and chimpanzees tell the foot of a human fetus to grow into a flat object with a heel and a big toe, while the same gene in a chimpanzee tells it to grow into a more curved object with less of a heel and longer, more prehensile toes! 

Subsequent chapters dive into history, fate, formation of diseases like cancer due to mutations, really neat discussion on how different parts of the human body gets formed just once in the right order/location correctly as the foetus grows, how telomere copying puts a limit on longevity, cures for diseases, and concludes with discussion on eugenics and free will. In the 22nd chapter discussing eugenics, he points out as to how all the countries in the world including US, Sweden, Germany passed and promulgated eugenics laws to prevent certain sections of the population from breeding. Perhaps being a Britisher, he then gets glib glossing over details to claim how "sanity prevailed in Briton" alone where no such laws were passed! He himself has pointed out as to how most of the material for eugenics came from Britannia and quotes people like Churchill who advocated the use of X-rays and operations to sterilize the mentally unfit insisting the "curse would die with them". In the next page he does correctly points out as to how amniocentesis is used in countries like India to about fetuses of girls with no additional equivocation. How would it sound if I glibly announce that sanity prevails in India based on anecdotal evidence that my own sister as well as many of my close friends have only daughters?!

One quality that puzzles me with most books of this kind is the total absence of any illustrations/photos anywhere! Decades back adding figures in books might have added considerable production cost. This book itself is ~15 years old. But even now most of the books we see don't seem to carry any drawings. In my limited technical writing experience, I always find adding illustrations extremely useful in making materials of this kind more accessible. I looked around the web for reasons that will preclude inclusion. But couldn't find anything meaningful.

Though there is no special gene for free will, last chapter does a nice job of bringing the screen down on the whole narration discussing nature vs nurture and how one influences the other. Many of my friends have read this book a long time back. I am catching up finally. If you haven't, do give it a go, after watching YouTube and Khan Academy videos for quick visual primers on the topics of genes, chromosomes and DNA so that you are all set to digest and enjoy the material as you read through.

-sundar.

Book Review: Adapt by Tim Harford

I found "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"  by Tim Harford a delightful read. It was given to me as a present by a friend. I initially looked at it a bit askew, imagining it to be a pure business management book. But found the material very engaging, covering a wide variety of topics from Iraq war to Broadway plays with hardly anything specifically preachy about running a business.

I think the drab title does a bit of disservice to the book. I remember reading as to how "What they don't teach you at Harvard" wouldn't have been such a best seller if it had been correctly titled as "Few useful management principles" reflecting its true content. This is a case in reverse that could have used a more creative title. :-)

The opening chapter lays out the thesis arguing that nothing turns up perfect and spectacular right on the first time and so we should be ready to experiment while being fully aware that many of the experiments will fail. Then when failures occur, recognize and get out before the loses mount and try again. He points out that even biological evolution is perfecting life only through enormous number of trial and error where most of the trials end in errors that get purged out. Next chapter talks in depth about the Iraq war, how the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld refused to learn from failures on the ground and how couple of specific commanders in field that ignored directions from the top and implemented their own local strategies that finally turned the war around. He then moves on to discuss how such skunk-work efforts eventually turn out to be game changers by citing the example of Spitfire plane design in Briton that affected the outcome of WWII by being lot more nimble compared to humongous bombers that were considered the main reason a side will win the war. I am sure there are lot of other books out there that will exclaim how Spitfire like projects became so effective and successful. But they usually argue that those that were behind them were extraordinary geniuses that could see the clear path to victory that others couldn't. I am always skeptical of such books/views since they ignore the fact that 95 out of 100 such efforts will end in failure. In Homer Simpson's words, "Trying is the first step to failure". :-) What I liked about this book is its recognition that while most will be failures, as long as we structure the system such that the failures won't result in any catastrophe, we can learn to ignore them and move on to try something else without feeling emotionally spent. 

In subsequent chapters author covers the recent financial meltdown, climate change, micro financing, etc. The prose is pleasant and the analysis is not pedantic that makes it an easy but engaging read. Towards the end there are discussions about Google (where employees are allowed to try their pet projects most of which fail while very few turnout to be spectacularly successful), Wholefoods, Timpson retail chains, W. L. Gore (that developed Goretex) and other such organizations that employ different types of localized, flexible strategies that seem to work for them, of course with the right level/kind of oversight so that employees are not swindling the company without doing any work. Last chapter talks about Twyla Tharp & Billy Joel's collaboration that produced the Broadway musical "Movin' Out" that was a total failure when it launched in Chicago first. Tharp being a reputed dancer/producer was willing to take in the criticism (instead of claiming how her genius is not understood by those silly critiques), worked on fixing all the issues and turned it around to create a hugely successful show by the time it came to Broadway. Some of these points could be easily acceptable in abstract. But on a daily basis I do see how people are not willing to accept criticism and change themselves or their work. I try hard not to belong to that club. :-)

Book is an academic lite type since it is a fun read. Still packs in lot of interesting material and analysis, while not sounding like a cliched management book. Give it a shot.

-sundar.

Book Review: Stiff by Mary Roach

While browsing the community public library aisles came across this book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. I had heard about it ~10 years back and so it piqued my curiosity. It easily turned out to be the most morbid book I have ever read! The author Mary Roach being a journalist, book had an easy to read feel to it. It is not hard to comprehend but packs quite a few interesting facts/angles in its 300 pages. 

She starts off the first chapter with an onsite reporting of a CME (Continuing Medical Education) type seminar where plastic surgeons practice their face lifting skills on cadavers. This makes perfect sense since physicians that are training to be surgeons in their residency often learn the trade on the job by assisting board certified surgeons operating on real patients that doesn't leave much room for error. They initially start off with closing sutures and move up stage by stage to doing the surgery themselves under more experienced surgeon's supervision. You can immediately see the value in getting trained on cadavers where you can make all the mistakes you want to acquire the knowledge/skills you need. But the morbidity streak starts on the first chapter itself as she gets into the details of how the training is provided not on full cadavers but just using human heads that have been separated from their bodies and the details of the separation process. Still a gentle start. Next chapter dives into body snatching and other tales from the dawn of human dissection. Since dissection wasn't an allowed practice by the church and there were weird promulgated laws that defined the confines of where/when such research can take place, there were a lot of black market trading/work that went on. Body snatching from graves was a very profitable business for grave diggers themselves in those days!

Next four chapters were the most educational as they dive into so many types of research that won't be possible but for the help provided by cadavers. As the author writes in the acknowledgements section, researchers working on cadavers don't want to be on the spotlight since their work is often and very easily misunderstood and their research funding is invariably very vulnerable to negative publicity it tends to attract. But we need to salute the kind of work that gets done in these areas in one of a kind places. Take the vaguely named Anthropological Research Facility that is part of the University of Tennessee Medical Center outside Knoxville. I heard about this facility on the radio just couple of months back. They study the decaying process of cadavers under varying conditions and publish detailed reports. These conditions include dry, wet, humid, buried, underwater, shallow/deep graves, car trunks, inside concrete, mud, plastic wraps and every other scenarios criminals all over the world might have thought of! Without these studies forensic analysis of murder victims can never be as accurate as it is these days to help nab the culprits. An ORNL (Oak Ridge National Lab) team is working with them to develop an electronic nose that can smell the body and tell you when the person died. Findings like barring extreme temperatures, corpses lose 1.5 degree Fahrenheit per hour until they reach the temperature of the air around them, if the unique volatile fatty acids/compounds of human decay are not found in the soil, the body had been moved and so forth can not be added to our forensic science knowledge base without this work. 

Next chapter talks about cadavers being used in automobile crash tests to first assess what level of force inflicts which type of injury on human beings. While we never hear about this research on the media or car advertisements, the crash test dummies that are often shown in safety test videos come later. Those dummies measure how much force was in play in various crash conditions to be compared to what a human being can withstand based on previously completed cadaver tests! Following chapter talks about what data you can gather from dead bodies found in plane crashes. If a bomb had been exploded from a plane toilet, you'd see burn marks on the fronts of the people sitting right behind the toilet. On the otherhand, if you see burn marks on the back of floating bodies in the sea, it might be from burning fuel that caused the mark after death as dead victims will usually be lying face down on water. 

There is a chapter on tests done to assess the impact of bullets/bombs on victims. This is again very sensitive as relatives like to hear that their dead relative's body was used for organ donation rather than being used for shooting practice. So, even though gathered information could be quite useful, wherever possible researchers use gelatin like substitutes that is also easy for studying exit wounds as the artificial substance is clear (i.e. no need to do surgery to understand what happend inside) and can be reused. One chapter that touches upon embalming was also detailed enough to give a good view of the process the schools put their students through to prepare them for this trade.

Subsequent chapters, while providing the needed comprehensive completeness of the subject, go into weird and gruesome areas of animal research, cannibalism and the so called religious research related to crucifixion. If you read the book and happened to be queasy, you can skip chapters 7 to 10 to save yourself some trouble. Last chapter gets back into alternatives for burial/cremation discussing water reduction and composting of human bodies that are more eco friendly! If you have seen the Body Works exhibit that is making the rounds around the world, the plastination treatment used to produce those exhibits are also covered. If case if you are interested this YouTube video has a quick primer. :-)

Perhaps since the material might be off putting to lot of readers, the author intentionally finds/maintains a sense of humor throughout the book. Though it wasn't disrespectful in anyway, it still felt a bit a odd. But one can understand it from a defense mechanism point of view for the treatment of this subject. 

One heck of an unusual, peculiar, unorthodox book!

It reinforced my conviction that when I die, donating all my useful organs and allowing my body to be used for medical research is the right thing to do.  I already have it recorded in my Last Will and Testament. Do you? 

-sundar.

Book Review: The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth

I have been meaning to read books related to biology since I am not deeply in touch with that field on a daily basis. So, after checking with a good friend in the biomedical industry for suggestions, ordered three books. Finished reading the first one called "The Billion-Dollar Molecule: One Company's Quest for the Perfect Drug" by Barry Werth. It is a 20 year old book that tells the story of the formation of a new company called Vertex Pharmaceuticals, created in 1989 as a scrappy upstart trying to compete against the industry Goliaths like Merck. Since the book came out in 1994 itself, it covers only the first 4 years of the company. Within that time frame, it already did IPO and had become a multimillion dollar entity. 

Main character in the narration is Joshua Boger who is an ex-Merck employee that is the founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer for this new pharma start up. Usually big pharma companies used to keep analyzing soil samples, plants, insects and other existing entities one by one in a hit or miss approach to see if any of them can be identified to have useful molecules that could treat diseases. Boger's apparent path breaking idea is to skip that brute force approach and design a needed molecule from scratch. He calls it structure based design. While there is no guarantee that this will promptly result in useful drugs quickly, his assessment was that drugs created using this model will have lot less side effects since they are built to address a specific need rather than picked out from a more complex product and distilled down to form a drug that may still have lot of residual effects that can manifest into undesirable side effects. Other reason is designing drugs in this fashion could cost a lot less (and so will be suitable for a scrappy start up). Though the idea makes sense in theory, constructing the molecule this way is not easy since you may not even know exactly what is it that you want to begin with. 

The team takes up an experimental drug called FK-506 that belongs to a Japanese company. While the drug's efficacy in immunosuppresant therapy appeared good, it was also found to be highly toxic in several animal study. So, Vertex took it up to improve the drug by redesigning the needed molecule retaining the needed therapeutic effects sans toxicity. Initially for more than a year company tries to to understand the molecular structure of FK-506 to determine how it works as an immunosuppresant drug. As the race goes on, towards the end the Vertex team fails in it attempt as a competing academic discloses the structure and the mechanism as to how it works. Vertex with a few last minute somersaults manages to get its paper also published on the Nature journal to claim co-credit and victory. Around the same time they also start working with the British drug maker Burroughs Welcome to develop a protease inhibitor to address HIV & AIDS and eventually develop a compound called VX-478 that performs better than competing one from Merck. While these research efforts are in progress in their labs (in Massachusetts), Boger runs around Wall Street to get funding for the start up, makes deals with companies in Japan, Europe to get more money, share credit for research, line companies up as collaborators who will manufacture the drug when the Vertex research bears fruit. While the outside world may normally think that serious research work is done in calm, quiet environment with people dedicated to science, book talks about instances where this company scientist and other academics rush to meet Nature & Science journal deadlines to get a paper out with a date stamp to claim credit for their discoveries, push prestigious journals like Nature to re-examine their decision to reject a paper and eventually accept it, how in conferences scientists jockey for positions/credit and so forth.  

The author probably understands the science involved very well and so describes the work glossing over a lot of the details or doesn't understands the details and so is not able to explain them well. Being an outsider, I didn't find the science described well to understand it properly. There are more than a dozen second line characters that appear in the book. Many are described as geniuses but what they they do is not clearly described. To me, other than Boger, many of the characters overlapped each other due to the fuzzy nature of the narration and so I had a hard time remembering each one's important contribution or role. Since the book is ~430 pages long, each time I crossed about 100 pages, I tried to see what was effectively communicated in the previous section. Other than the general notion that a small start up is trying to create drugs, not much else stands out. When I cross another 100 pages and don't seem to have learned anything new, I start wondering how did the last 100 pages get filled up!

Perhaps since I have lived through the dotcom boom and bust, reading this book now doesn't seem to give any extremely new insight as the overall story unfolds very similar to what happens in tech startups. If I had read it in the mid-90's it might have appeared eye opening. Just two decades late, I guess! In the end Vertex (VRTX) seems to have done well. While its IPO in the early 90's was at $12 with its initial market cap hovering around 60 million dollars, its stock is at $127 now fetching with it a market cap of 31 billion dollars! Saw reports that it is the undisputed leader now for drugs to treat Cystic Fibrosis. 

While there are often books, movies, and documentaries about how some little start up managed to hang on by its nails then grew to become a huge multi billion dollar behemoth, I find stories in the opposite end of the spectrum more interesting. There was a documentary I saw a while back called Startup.com. During the dotcom boom era the documentary producer got permission to record developments as a small tech company called GovWorks.com started building its service, working with several local municipal governments in the US. Their business model is to develop a web portal to collect local property tax, income and other taxes, parking fines, speeding tickets, etc., deliver it as a contracted service to the local government and public and take a cut from the money collected for the service provided. It was a novel idea at that time. Even now there is no single portal you can use to pay for local government services as each municipal office maintains its own portal. The documentary maker's goal was to record how this idea becomes a company, does IPO and makes everyone involved a multimillionaire. But as the dotcom bust occurred, this company wasn't able to get enough local governments to sign up for their services and as the funding starts to dry up, the two friends who originally start the company become enemies. The one who became the CEO, calls the other guy who becomes the CTO, not good enough to keep leading the company. The CTO sues the company, heating things up. Finally the whole company craters and is shutdown! While the story might be depressing, that is what happens to most of the new startups. While success stories are needed to keep motivating people to take the jump, failure stories are also needed for us to learn the lessons. I hardly see them being told in the media of any kind!

Picked up Genome by Matt Ridley next. Will see how it fares.

-sundar.