In my last post I mentioned “The New Yorker”.  I have been an avid reader of this magazine since high school.  Each week I start off my reading by opening to the table of contents and scanning the list of authors.   After so many years, I have become familiar with many of the authors.  In particular I look for Seymour Hirsh and Roger Angell.   I do the opposite with the Talk of the Town section.  I read each item and guess which author wrote it.  I pick out Hendrik Hertzberg about 90% of the time.

This week’s issue (which is actually last weeks published issue, mail from the Big Apple to the Big Cactus takes a while) featured no frequent authors.   My next move was to then scan the titles.   There was an article filed under “Annals of Medicine” titled “The Tangle”.  

As soon as I read that title a felt a chill as goose bumps spread across my arms.   I instantly knew the subject of the article and my thoughts raced back to a similar article in the New Yorker back in 1991 that launched my foray into neurobiology.  

The subject of both articles is the subject of neurodegenerative diseases that are unusually common on the island of Guam.  “The Tangles” refers to clusters of proteins that show up in the neurons of people infected with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s and a disease called PSP 

The earlier article was by the noted neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.  His research was focused on the role of cycad plants in the high number of cases of these diseases on Guam.  As I recall, his theory was that when the Japanese invaded the island during World War II, the villagers were forced to eat cycad plants to survive.  The toxins then surfaced years later when the epidemic reached its peak in the late 1950’s into the 1960’s.   Sacks thought that the toxins in cycads had some role in the epidemic, but couldn’t pinpoint the exact role. 

At the time the first article was published, I was a student at Utah State University studying Philosophy.  My particular interest was Concept of Mind.   I was spending quite a bit of time reading Wittgenstein, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard and other philosophers on the topics of ontology, epistemology and any other topic related to how we understand the world around us.   After several semesters of this, I decided that I needed to know more about how the brain worked so I signed up for a class called “Brain and Behavior”.  The course was taught by a professor who seemed every bit the classical image of a professor, tweed jackets, aloof deadpan sense of humor, strong devotion to teaching.

I read the Oliver Sacks article half way through the semester and formed a hypothesis about the role of cycad toxins in these diseases.   I had a particular interest in one the two major diseases, ALS.  It was the disease that ended the career of Lou Gehrig.  Reading the biography of Gehrig when I was in third grade launched my devotion to the Yankee’s.

My hypothesis was that tangles of proteins blocked retrograde axonal transfer in cholinergic neurons, resulting in gradual atrophy of the axonal body and a slowly widening synaptic gap, rendering the neuronal path unusable.

I was so convinced that I was right that I stopped by the office of the professor who taught Brain and Behavior, Charles Lent.   He invited me in, listened patiently as I described my theory.  At the end of my soliloquy I asked “What do you think?”.  His response was “It has merit, if you can prove it you will win the Nobel Prize.”   I asked him if we could do experiments using Giant Squid axons.   He said that his lab wasn’t equipped for the type of work that it would require, but he offered me a volunteer job in his lab.

The next 10 months was spend in wonderful bliss working on the neuropharmacology of feeding behavior in the medicinal leech, Hirudo Medicinalis.   During this time I decided to switch careers from Philosophy to Neurobiology.   My job in the lab was to soak leeches in saline solutions with varying amounts of dopamine, serotonin and other chemicals.  After the soaking I would place the leeches on a wax sheet that was on top of a tank that was heated to 98.6 degrees, a mechanical mimic of mammalian skin.   A Petri dish was placed over the leach to keep it from slinking away.   For 5 minutes the leech would wander around and occasionally bite into the wax.   I would place the next leech on the wax and take the previous wax to a microscope.   The bites of the leech looked like tiny Mercedes symbols.   I would count up the total number of bites and enter it in a lab notebook.   If I was working fast then I would go over to the Macintosh IIx computer and enter the data into our Abacus  statistical software and see how the test affected the trend lines.  

After a while I realized that I was having more fun working on the computers than working on the leeches.  That was the beginning of my computer career.   Neurobiology had beat out Philosophy as my major interest, and computers slowly beat out Neurobiology.

Dr. Lent became Chuck, my mentor.  I spent every available minute in his lab, doing everything from washing dishes to dissecting leeches and hooking up electrodes to the Retzius neurons in their ganglia.   It was a very happy time.

Chuck Lent died of cancer in 1993.  By that time I was working for Apple selling Mac’s to scientists at the university.  

On Saturday when I read the article in last weeks New Yorker I was taken back by memories to 14 years ago when the cause of Guamian ALS was at hand, my Nobel Prize in sight.   The fact that the article also mentioned the Nobel value of the research only made me second-guess my life decisions even more.

I visiting professor from Dickenson College (Eric ??, how have I forgotten his name?) suggested that I broaden my investigation into related fields.  Chuck Lent gave me an opportunity and a Macintosh.   Trish Blair gave me a job selling Mac’s, even though I admitted in the interview that I didn’t feel I could sell anything but Mac’s.  Jim Haefner gave me a job as a Computer Specialist in the same Biology department and 1000 other opportunities working there gave me the experience and confidence to get the job I have now.

One slight change in that path and I am an assistant professor of Biology at some Midwestern state college.  Michael Dickenson was mentored by Chuck a few years before me.  That is the path he took.  One more change and I am working in a bookstore, wishing that society had more demand for people with a Ph.D. in Philosophy.   

There was little or no emotional impact of throwing out a dozen Fast Company magazines collected over the years.   Each week the New Yorker is met with much more anticipation.  How many other ways have the 800+ issues I have read over the years changed my life?  Impossible to know.

I went to the scientific article mentioned in the New Yorker version.  I like to think I understood what it was about, but the chemistry of biology was always a problem for me.  Maybe the paths I take are not random fate determined by cause and effect.  That doesn’t stop me of thinking of my life in that alternate universe:  Birkenstock’s,  Grateful Dead on the stereo in the lab, hectic teaching schedules, sweating over the grant proposals, student’s with quirky hypothesis’s and a disdain for the corporate life.

I spent some time today throwing out/recycling a bunch of accumulated stuff around the house.   I recycled the last vestiges of my optimism from the dot com boom of the late 90's:  my copies of Fast Company magazine.  Back in the day, this magazine was a must read guide to the boom.   I remember picking up my first copy, the September 1997 issue.   I was hooked from that first issue.   The articles in that magazine were a big factor in convincing me to leave my job at Utah State University and get a job with my current employer. 

The plan back in early 1998 was to get a job with a traditional "brick and mortar" company as a way to add credibility to my resume, then go get rich at some dot com company.  It was all derived from the first article I read in Fast Company, Brand You. Didn't turn out that way.

Last week was my 7 year anniversary at the "brick and mortar" company.   Once I got there I really liked the work.  More importantly, I divulged my plan to leave to someone there who became my mentor in many things.  He was the CFO of the company and could see the bubble for what it was, even in 1998.  He predicted the bursting of the bubble, the worthless stock options and the unemployment of so many who followed the plan I was pursuing.  I stayed and have had no regrets about my decision.

Sometime around 2000 I let my subscription lapse.   Fast Company seemed to be so much hype.   Some of it I still use, the "Brand You" concept works at a personal level, and I still preach it to my employees, but the perennial corporate brand articles lost their savor once I signed on to the Cluetrain Manifesto. 

The stack of magazines was tossed in the recycle bin without much sentimentality.   Hours later I came across this article that sums up why Fast Company lost my attention.  On the way back from bin I stopped at the mailbox to get my this weeks New Yorker magazine.  That magazine hasn't failed me in the 17 years I have been reading it.

I have spent a good 12-15 hours this week listening to my iPod (that I picked up in Singapore).   Atypically, I have spent less than an hour listening to music.  Instead I have been listening to podcasts.

Here are my favorites so far:

Polymorphic Podcast  Very good .Net technical cast.

.Net Rocks  This has been around for a while, but now the delivery mechanism is streamlined by podcasting.

CIO Podcast  Good general industry news, keeps me from having to read eWeek and C|Net news.

IT Conversations  Hour long interviews with significant members of the IT industry.

Daily Source Code   This is more general interest, but interesting.  It is done by Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ from the 80's.

I spend about 90 minutes a day driving, this time was previously such dead time.  I would often listen to AM talk radio (Air America or Michael Savage).  Now, I have a daily collection of podcasts to listen to and just like Tivo, I can fastforward or dump a program that can't keep my interest.

The tools required for all this:  An iPod, iTunes, and iPodder.

I have been thinking more about my comments below regarding Terri Schiavo.   Her parents appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United Status (SCOTUS).   I had been of the opinion that the SCOTUS should have issued a ruling.   The only change in my opinion is that the Supreme Court has ruled on this issue.  By declining to take up the case they have said in effect that "Mr. and Mrs. Schindler, you do not have standing or merit for us to hear this case."   What more do they need to say.

I came to this opinion after my post on Bob Reselman's Coding Slave blog.

I caught a couple of minutes of CNN, they were running a retrospective of Terri Schiavo’s life.   The narrative was warm and compassionate about her life prior to her lapse into a coma.  That bulimia as a likely cause of the potassium imbalance that caused the coma was quickly covered, without judgment.   The bit seemed more in place on Fox, but Fox vs CNN, liberal vs. conservative will be saved for a future post.

The Schiavo case has grabbed headlines because it is such an emotionally appealing issue.  A woman is lying in a bed and slowly dying.  She is in a coma and mostly non-responsive.   That her husband is the one who pushed for the feeding tubes to be removed seems, at first glance, to be the cold calculated moves of a man wanting to be done with caring for his crippled wife after 15 years of being in a coma.  It is easy to see the case in this emotion charged light.

I look at it as a test of the legal concept of the rights of a guardian.  Children, the elderly and those unable to make choices for themselves have or are appointed guardians.   In cases such as the Terri Schiavo case, the guardian is her husband.  His role is to make choices that she has previously directed, or are determined to be consistent with her wishes or at least in her best interest.  

If Terri Schiavo’s parents were successful in overruling the determination of her guardian then that would open up a huge on notable legal precedent that the will of the public can remove a guardian from his/her responsibilities.

Imagine the following:

•  A mother is caught on a security camera physically disciplining her child.   An outraged public demands that her child be removed from her guardianship. 
  
• An Amish family refuses medical treatment for a sick child.   Activists liken the decision to murder and have the child removed from the family for medical treatment.
  
• A mother takes her son from Cuba to the US, but is killed trying to reach Florida.  Anti-Castro activists and distant relatives succeed in preventing the return of the child to his father in Cuba.

These cases are not far-fetched, and they share, in my untrained legal mind, a strong similarity to the Schiavo case.   Her husband is her guardian, and the courts have repeatedly upheld his judgment of what actions she would prefer to be taken in this situation.   It is hard to look at the anguish of her parents, who disagree, but this is a significant issue that needs to be looked at not in light of the plight of one woman, but in the light of the impact a precedent would have on our society.

I think it appropriate that so many courts have weighed in on this matter.  I wish the Supreme Court had been willing to take this matter up.  While not a matter of strict constitutional interpretation, the SCOTUS should have spent the time to offer what jurisprudential wisdom they could spare.

I have many more experiences to write about, but I am one hour away from leaving India.  Outside it is pouring rain, the first rain of my visit.   I don’t want to leave without posting a few words of thanks.   There is an old saying that a journey of 10,000 miles begins with the first step.  In my case that first step was working with many individuals to gain the knowledge, confidence and permission to go on this trip.  I know I am leaving people out, it is unintentional, I am sorry if I have left someone out.

First I am grateful for Bob and Jim for authorizing this trip.  Without a business purpose I would not have been here.

At the first vendor I visited:  Bhaskar, Syamil and Subrata for being the perfect hosts.  You paid attention to every detail and addressed every need and question.  

The original Kolkata team: Subrata, Sabyasachi, Anabik, Soumen, Prosenjit, Samadarsi, Anup and Manas.  You guys are the brainpower that drives our group.  Your hard work shows in every success we have.

The Noida team:  Kamlesh, Avinash and Som.   I had a great time working with you and I was amazed how much stronger our relationship grew in 3 short days.   Thanks also to Sanjeev for running a great team and for Sudakar for all the advice and information.

The new team I setup in Kolkata:  Radhakrishnan, Abu, Samik, Sandeep and Harish.  I have been very impressed by your energy and enthusiasm.   I look forward to working close with you in the future.

Thanks to Sathish and Sriram in Chennai for all of your help in building this team.

To my good friends and colleagues in Woodland Hills:  Thanks for all of your interest in my trip and much more importantly for your hard work in my absence.  Thanks to Travlin for running the show while I was away.

In particular I need to thank Arnab for the immense amount of information that you have shared with me.  Your patient explanations and suggestions of all things India have made this trip the success that it was.  I am also very grateful for your long hours and expertise on our team. A tin of Rosogulla is nowhere close in value to all of your help, especially when I bought the sweets in Chennai.

Jyoti and Samadarsi:  Orissa, and particularly Puri, Konark and Bhubaneswar were so much better with good friends and knowledgeable guides.   I can’t wait for the opportunity to host you in my country and return the favor.

 LeAnn and Paul on the train back from Agra: The 2 hour long train journey that took 5.   What a great way to spend an evening.  Thank you for sharing your spirituality with me.  May God bless you in your labors, best of luck in your missionary work and music.

There are several nameless individuals that have made a permanent impact on my throughout this journey:

The man in Siliguri that suggested I move to the front of the train ticket line.  That was the one time I lost control in India, and you immediately made me feel like a fool for loosing control, but that I was valued as a guest.  I can still here him say to me “India is our country, you are our guest, please..”

The people I met on the beach in Pondicherry.   Any time I feel that I am in a bad situation I will remember the heartache that you wore so visibly.

The “woman in the blue sari”:  Thank you for allowing me to feel a bit of your reality.  You have permanently changed the way I view poverty and homelessness.

Thanks to all the honest cab drivers and shopkeepers in India.  Knowing that there are people of integrity in your ranks kept me from losing hope that I meant more on the streets of India than the contents of my wallet.

Thanks to everyone who has read this website.  Knowing that there were a few readers has fueled my desire to share my experiences.  Putting these experiences into words has given much more meaning to my travels and perceptions.

There are a lot of friends in Gilbert Arizona who have helped my family in my absence.  I don’t know many of the details but I and Amy are very grateful to have such good friends

Josh, Ian, Sarah and Abby put up with my absence far too often.   I miss them terribly and can’t wait to experience India with them.

Nothing I have accomplished or experienced would be possible without the love and support of my wife Amy.   I can’t come up with words to describe how much I appreciate her.

Rounding the corner at the end of Nehru Street, my destination was a store that maintained a set of phones.  Next to this phone store was a food counter.  Standing near the food counter was a woman in a dirty blue sari.   She was watching me approach.  I steeled myself to resist her begging.  I had to walk right up to her to get in the door.  I did so, took my sandals off and reached to open the door, as I did she just looked at me and smiled. I talked to Amy on the phone for about 15 minutes and then headed for the hotel.  The time was about 11:30, later than I had stayed out and probably not the safest thing to be doing, but I am more comfortable being out late in Pondy than I am in the US.   Putting my sandals on, I started across the street, the hotel being on the outside of the road forming the ring around Pondy.   Crossing streets in India is tricky, even late at night.   I got stranded in the middle of the street as a bunch of cars raced around a corner.   As I was waiting for an opportunity to cross the second half I noticed that I was now heading directly for a group of women holding babies, including the woman I had noticed earlier.   As I crossed the street the women surrounded me with hands outstretched.   My focus landed on the infants sleeping undisturbed in the woman’s arms as they swarmed around me.   I had accumulated a bunch of 1 or 2 rupee coins throughout the day.    Further deviating from my no money to beggars promise, I dropped one coin in each woman’s hand.   I noticed at this point that the woman I had seen earlier was not among the beggars.  She had sat down in the street next to a sleeping girl, another baby in her arms.   I walked on to the hotel.

Back in my room, I opened the bag of sweets I had been carrying.   I didn’t feel much like eating them anymore.   I closed the bag, tried to wash some of the grit of the day and went to bed.    I couldn’t stop thinking about the women on the street.   Where they from a scheduled-caste of beggars, where they from successful middle-class families but had fallen on misfortune?   My thoughts were evenly divided between curiosity and empathy.

I just couldn’t sleep.    Getting dressed again, I grabbed the bag of sweets and left the hotel.  As I walked out onto the street my watch indicated the time was 12:00 midnight.

I walked up the street.  The women were sitting on the sidewalk.   My purposeful stride and the late hour must have caught them by surprise.  They remained sitting as I walked right into the middle of the group and handed the bag of sweets to the woman whom I had first noticed, the one who hadn’t asked anything of me.

Then I sat down in the dirt.  The sidewalk was covered in black sooty grime, the same color as the slimy sewage that seeped by in the ditch a few feet away.

As soon as I sat down the women sprang to action, placing a baby in my arms.   My own daughter Abby would have been fussing and screaming with all this commotion.  The first baby just kept sleeping.  I had the feeling that this was more a factor of health or nutrition than a peaceful demeanor.   After a few minutes I handed the first child back.  The woman who I had given the sweets to now handed me her younger child, a boy.   Her daughter slept between the two of us.   She was lying on a multi-colored sheet but her head had moved off and was on the raw dirt.   The woman started to shake her awake but I stopped her.  

As I held her baby I asked her a single word question: “Why?”

She understood.  With the help of another woman she explained that she had married at 17 and when she was 20 her husband left her.   She was 23 now.  She had no idea where he was.  She showed me a leather strand, about the thickness of a shoelace, around her neck, an evident symbol of her status as a married woman.  

I asked if she had lived in a home, she had.   Husband gone, she lost the home.

Were the other women in this group her family?  No.  But they helped each other out.   They would watch each others kids while taking a shift begging.  They would get about 25 rupees per day.  60 cents.

The hopelessness of their situation was apparent to me.  It pulled on my shoulders like a heavy weight.   My work and educational training is essentially centered on solving problems.   I could see no solution to this problem.   For the 10 minutes that I sat there taking turns holding babies I lost the impulse to find a solution to their problem.  But I decided that I could no longer withhold money from a woman asking for help to feed her family.  I would continue to refuse to give money to children, my part of an attempt to break the cycle.  Otherwise I would take each supplicant on a case-by-case basis, with a goal of giving as much as I could.

I don’t know why the woman in the blue sari had never asked anything of me.   Maybe it was the icy indifference of my face, initially steeled to oppose her request.  Maybe the dignity of an earlier time had resurfaced.  I don’t know, but her resolve and poise marked a change in my attitudes.   Being part of the group in India that have the money, the jobs and the future provides a certain filtered perspective on the problem of the hopelessly poor that probably appears aloof and distant to the poor.

Sitting in the dirt in the middle of the night, with rats and cockroaches scurrying around the sleeping children gives you an entirely different perspective.   I felt connected to them in a “there but for misfortune go I” type of sentiment.   What if it was Sarah sleeping in the dirt, with Abby too malnourished to cry in my arms?

I tried to summon the guts to hand them my hotel room key, explain which hotel, explain how to get to room 305, instruct them to return tomorrow, I would be here, taking their place sleeping in the dirt.  Couldn’t do it.

Instead I returned to my room.  It was too much for me to comprehend how so many people could get in this situation and have no possible way out.  

My last night in Pondicherry was destined to be an eventful one, literally.   It was a full moon and evidently the Hindu astrologers had noted that this was an important and valuable date for taking the idols out of the temples and immersing them in the sea.  I returned my motorcycle to the rental shop at 8:30 PM.  The shop is near one of the temples and there was lots of loud bell ringing, drumming and trumpeting in the air nearby.   Walking over to see what the commotion was I found a throng of people following a cart carrying a statue of one of the gods.   There was a young brahmin on the cart dressed only in a dhoti.  He was accepting offerings from the crowd and them handing them a brass plate that had a flame burning in the center of it.  People would gather their hands together through the smoke and flame of this fire and then bring their hands together in front of their face.   It was impressive to see this whole event happening without any real sense of civic coordination.  The people knew what to do, as if this event had been held regularly for 1000+ years, which it probably has.  

I followed this slow moving procession for a while, before noticing a similar procession heading down a side street.  As I briskly walked through the streets I found about 10 different processions, all making their way through the city in a seemingly random route.

I am not sure which god these are, maybe one of you can tell me.  

The whole evening was pretty surreal.  The air had a certain electricity to it, the crowds were even more friendly than usual and there was no annoying people trying to get me to buy trinkets anywhere near these processions.   I had missed the part where the dip the statues in the ocean, but watching these events gave me another dimension to my understanding of the Hindu faith.

The processions winding down, I realized that I was pretty hungry, and had wanted to try out one of the nicer restaurants in town on my last night.   It was on the far side of town, so after a long march through the empty streets of the French Quarter I arrived at Seagulls for a surprisingly lacklustre dinner.   But the view of the ocean at moonrise made up for the food.

Short time lapse of the moon over the Bay of Bengal.

I was on the opposite side of the city from my hotel, it was nearing 10 PM.   I started the long walk back and stopped at a store selling sweets that was jammed with nearly 100 people.  As I walked in the store another customer motioned for the manager to greet me.  He walked me down the length of the counter offering samples of different sweets.  At one point he described how a fruit cake would last for up to 90 days.  I contemplated trying to explain how the fact that not even bacteria would take to fruit cake was not a desirable feature, and that this "delicacy" has a bad reputation in America, but in the end I bought a small piece.  I figured I could use it if anyone asked for a gift from India.

I left the sweet shop with 450 rupee worth of sweets at about 10:30 PM.  The first of the cookies I ate reminded me again of the sweet snack I had been given on the ride up to Gangtok.  It didn't taste bad, but it wasn't the best tasting.  Walking up Nehru Street I was accosted for about the 10th time by a little boy who had asked me daily for money.   I have a strict policy about not giving money to kids, but I did reward his persistence with a cookie.   I think at that moment the gods, newly refreshed in the ocean on the auspicous night of the full moon decided that I needed an entirely different perspective on India.  I thought I was 10 minutes from calling it a day, but little did I know that one strongest experiences in India was just around the corner on Anna Salai Street.  More on that later.