by R. Passov

Recently, I watched a YouTube of a talk given by Jennifer Doudna. This past May, in front of some her UC Berkeley colleagues, Doudna shared, “a story … about some research … that led in an unexpected direction … ” producing “ … some science that has profound implications going forward…but also makes us really think about what it means to be human and what it means to have the power to manipulate the very code of life …”

It all started, Doudna explains, when she got a call from someone at Cal who said you don’t know me but you’re doing the type of research that’s connected to my work. Her colleague had noticed that “ …many types of bacteria in their chromosomes have a sequence of DNA that is a storage site for sequences that come from viruses that infect those cells.”

“These are the CRISPERS …” a record of the DNA from all prior infections, “… a genetic vaccination card for bacteria.”

Doudna is generous with praise, never missing an opportunity to share credit. One lucky lab member collected soil samples, then sequenced DNA from bugs in those samples looking for alternative CRISPER pathways. The result uncovered different flavors of the CRISPER-Cas immune system. Which got Doudna to thinking “… about the difference in the type of CRISPER systems in nature…” Read more »

Seema Singhal, M.D., is a Professor of Medicine (Hematology Oncology) and Chez Family Professor of Myeloma Research at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago Illinois. Dr. Singhal has conducted numerous clinical trials and published more than 230 publications describing her findings. She is the key opinion leader in Myeloma treatment and authored the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines for Myeloma Treatment.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Bill Murray

First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert.

The men smoking outside the concrete block terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in.

He does not know Robert.

Together we lean over his counter to look down to the harbor. One boat is speeding away and there don’t seem to be any others. He flips his palms up and shakes his head, “I think you just go down there and wait. That is your only chance.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Benzon

Frank Foster leading and fronting the Count Basie Orchestra in 1994

I headed off to the State University of New York at Buffalo (aka UB) in the Fall of 1973. While I was going for my Ph.D. in English Literature, I was also interested in the school’s music offerings. I’d just gotten my trumpet out of “storage,” a year or so ago and I decided I wanted to sharpen my jazz chops. So I looked through the UB catalogue and noticed they had some guy named Frank Foster teaching jazz improvisation. I’d never heard of him. But, hey, I looked him up anyhow, you never know—played and arranged with Basie, Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan, “hmmm,” says I to my little-too-smart self, “maybe he’ll do.”

He did.

I forget just how I made my way into his improv workshop. While I was registered in the English Department and took courses there, there was no problem about showing up in Frank’s class and just hanging out. I didn’t even register for credit. Just showed up. (Maybe I officially audited the course, as it’s called, but I don’t really remember the arrangement.)

Frank had no problem with that. Neither did anyone else. Read more »

Driving to Innsbruck on the A22 Autobahn in fog in November of 2013.

by Tim Sommers

So, here’s a game. Try to imagine: “What unbelievable moral achievements might humanity witness a century from now?” Now, discuss.

“The trick, of course, is that if you can seriously contemplate its occurring, you are thinking too small, or so history suggest.” So says David Estlund who proposes “The Unbelievable Moral Progress Game” in his new book “Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy”.

The argument that political philosophy is, or theories of justice are, too often unrealistic is familiar enough. Estlund turns that argument on its head. He argues (among other things) that, at least sometimes, political philosophy is not unrealistic enough. Or, at least, that we should not be afraid to imagine the highly-unlikely, even the impossible, when thinking about what might be possible for us morally and politically.

Estlund’s previous book, “Democratic Authority”, besides being an influential, admirably clear, and widely read work on democracy is the source of the word. “Epistocracy.” It means the rule of the knowledgeable. You may have heard of it. He’s against it.

In “Utopophobia”, he takes head-on on a wide-variety of entertaining, often challenging, topics around the theme, obviously, of the wide-spread allergic reaction to utopianism in our culture. (In an earlier column, I used his “fallacy of approximation”. (“What if Equality of Opportunity is a Bad Idea?”) To simplify a bit, “It is not the case that where the first best solution is not available, the second best is always to be preferred.”) But this is not a book review. Let’s play the game.

There are real cases of unbelievable moral progress. Estlund mentions (among other things) the abolition of slavery and the legalization of same sex marriage. I asked a number of people for their thoughts on what the next great leap forward might me. (The list of those people is at the bottom.) This is some of what some of them said. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

The translated versions from Tamil into English of Perumal Murugan’s two books, One Part Woman and the The Story of A Goat, weave stories of the complex life of the rural people of South India in an engaging and highly readable form.

Murugan’s use of imaginary language in both books effectively brings to life the rural context and lifestyle of poor farmers. Likewise, they are infused with subtle references to the caste system in India.  But while the caste system is a crucial issue that warrants the scrutiny that it gets, it is but one theme in Murugan’s complex novels; they are, in effect, thematically layered narratives  and they deal with the issues common to various degrees in most societies: the relationship between the individual and society and the state,the disciplining force of social norms and expectations and the extent to which religion plays a crucial role in the lives of the people.  In doing so, Murugan creates a fiction that has, at its core, a human essence which makes his novels highly accessible and relatable.   

In One Part Woman, Murugan explores the sad tale of a young couple, Kali and Poona, married for twelve years, and childless.  By choosing this topic as his main theme, Murugan has hit on a sensitive issue and he examines it from many cultural perspectives. Read more »

Jack Youngerman. Long March II, 1965.

More here, here, and here.

by Claire Chambers

In Owen Bennett-Jones’s ten-part podcast, The Assassination, which he made for the BBC World Service in 2017, listeners become immersed in the circumstances around the murder of Benazir Bhutto ten years earlier. They learn of the security concerns, sectarian hatred, and patriarchal demands faced by even this most privileged woman. Benazir, a dynastic leader from Pakistan’s best-known political family, was perceived by some extremists as belonging to the despised sect of Shiism because her Iranian mother was Shia. She and her husband Asif Ali Zardari – ‘Mr Ten Percent’ – were rightly under investigation on extensive corruption charges. On top of that, misogynists were incensed by her claims to power; indeed, her son Bilawal has written that ‘she was held to a different standard just because she was a woman’.All that being said, the most alarming danger at this authoritarian moment in 2007 was that the powerful wished to silence her calls for the reinstatement of democratic rule in Pakistan. 

As she returned to her country after eight years of self-imposed exile in Dubai, Benazir reflected in her posthumously-published memoir Reconciliation that she ‘understood the dangers and the risks’. Yet nothing could have prepared her for the violence that erupted within hours of her arrival in the fatherland. What Benazir called her ‘caravan of democracy’, a specially adapted flatbed truck with an escape hatch through which she could wave to the vast crowds gathered to greet her, was attacked by a suicide bomber. The unsuccessful sortie against her on 19 October resulted in the deaths of 179 people in Karachi, including more than fifty of Benazir’s volunteers who were acting as human shields. It is chilling to read Benazir’s words: ‘It was the worst sight I had ever seen, and I’m sure the worst sight that I will ever see as long as I live’. She was right in this assertion, as she would only live for ten more weeks Read more »

Leroy “Lee” Edward Hood is a Senior Vice President and Chief Science Officer, Providence St. Joseph Health; Chief Strategy Officer, Co-founder and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology. Previously Dr. Hood served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Washington. Dr. Hood is a world-renowned scientist and a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 2011. He has developed ground-breaking scientific instruments which made possible major advances in the biological sciences and the medical sciences. These include the first gas phase protein sequencer, a DNA synthesizer, a peptide synthesizer, the first automated DNA sequencer, ink-jet oligonucleotide technology for synthesizing DNA and nanostring technology for analyzing single molecules of DNA and RNA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. Of the more than 6,000 scientists worldwide who belong to one or more of these academies, Dr. Hood is one of only 20 people elected to all three.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Gibraltar in the background, I pose sideways, wearing a Spanish Chrysanthemum claw in my hair, gitana style, taking a dare from my husband. The photo is from an August afternoon, captured in the sun’s manic glare. My shadow in profile, with the oversized flower behind my ear, mirrors the shape of Gibraltar, Jabl ut Tariq or “Tariq’s rock.” An actual visit to Gibraltar is more than a decade ahead in the future. I would spend years researching the civilization of al Andalus (Muslim Spain, 711-1492) and publish a book about the convivencia of the Abrahamic people before finally setting foot on Gibraltar. “In Cordoba,” I write, “I’m inside the tremor of exile— the primeval, paramount home of poetry” and that “I am drawn to the world of al Andalus because it is a gift of exiles, a celebration of the cusp and of plural identities, the meeting point of three continents and three faiths, where the drama of boundaries and their blurring took place.” At the heart of this pursuit is my own story, one that is illuminated only recently when I see in Gibraltar more facets of my own exile and encounter with borders.

On the flight from Karachi to Frankfurt, before my first train trip to Spain, I’m in my silk shalwar kameez and high heels, a young newlywed: halved, doubled, protean, wearing a new identity I have not yet divined or defined. When the immigration officer in Frankfurt asks questions, my husband who is half-German, responds in German and I in English. No, I do not speak German. Yes, we were married two weeks ago. My passport has my maiden name, but I have now adopted my husband’s family name Hashmi. Yes, our flight out of Europe is from Frankfurt and we will fly to the USA where we will live.

A few months earlier, when I designed my wedding cards, I had an emotional exchange with my father on the matter of changing names; it was a difficult decision to give up my family name for my husband’s. The topic of my name was fraught. My first name was my father’s gift, my middle name was my mother’s and the family name held the possibility of either reinforcing my attachment to my birth family by retaining it after marriage or giving it up as a gesture to honor my husband’s family. I chose the latter. Read more »

by Niall Chithelen

Night Bus—Beijing

The night bus takes you across the city in a straight shot. This city has straight shots, it’s wide across, you span some middle area, and who knows where the night bus goes when you leave.

The night bus shows up at odd times; you realized shamefully late that there even was a schedule. The other people who take the night bus aren’t like you, not taking it for your reasons, whatever those reasons are. They take their folded-up delivery bikes and sigh off at their stop. You stand up a few blocks out and then swing out, tilting home.

The night bus is where you collect yourself after a social evening, where the emptied streets remind you that you are anonymous and you return to the grey neighborhood where your footsteps are loud after midnight. Usually you are grateful for this strange nighttime routine. Sometimes you wish you stayed longer among the neon lights.

Seaside—San Diego

In the daylight, this route takes you up and down a hill along the water and you can breathe some ocean breaths. Bus or no bus, this is a sight better than most people get to see today. You’ve stepped in this ocean only once, though, dunked yourself into it, nervous, unsure what you had to lose; mostly you’ve seen it through windows or past stone walls.

On the way back, in the dark, you don’t notice the water. It’s not window time anymore, but instead looking down at your black plastic grocery bag time, or your phone, where you have pulled up a video that will stop playing if you change applications, so that you don’t check your messages so often. But you’re not good at not checking. You change applications. It’s a shame you’re heading home for no reason other than being done, out there.

As you step off at your inland corner, the ocean waits quietly, not too far away, wondering when you might return again.

Line 52—Tompkins County, New York

My winter boots are much too big, not in fit, just in general, so I’ve ruined some pretty nice shoes treading carefully during snow season. To or from work, I saw a bus I never took, bus 52, from Ithaca to Caroline. I suppose Caroline is a town, but maybe it isn’t—I was struck with the thought of the bus, plaintive, searching:

Line 52: Caroline
please come home

Old warehouse in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, where customs duties were assessed for train cargo in the days when the border between Italy and Austria meant something. Photo taken in February, 2020.

by Ariane Koek

The architect Sou Fujimoto  thinks of space as ‘densities’ and says architecture ‘is like handling the densities of the air’

“An endless sea of possibilities…of particles jumping in and out of existence” – that’s the description of space by the physicist Bilge Demirköz, who helped build the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) detector on the International Space Station, thinks of space.

“Matter is creation, its evolution, it’s nature, it’s us” – that’s how Fashion designer Iris van Herpen describes matter.  The physicist Michael Doser  describes matter, the subject of his life’s work, as ‘massive, compace, heaty, light, transparent, filmy, an illusion.”

Different ways of looking at the same phenomena, revealing different ways of knowing and experiencing it through the mind or body or both. Laid out side by side in my book Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination,  seven  physicists and seven  artists  individually explore what seven different phenomena mean to them. Their interviews reveal the differences as well as connections of seeing the same phenomena through different eyes. It is my belief that it is in the connections, the differences, and the gaps in between, that the two most unique aspects of being human thrive and grow – the sacred space of the imagination and creativity. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Many find fault with liberal democracy because it exacerbates inequality, particularly when wedded to unbridled capitalism. But inequality has been rampant in authoritarian countries as well, with or without capitalism. Many non-capitalist countries in actual history have been friendly neither to liberty nor equality, never mind the soaring rhetoric, whereas some liberal democracies have provided their alert citizenry with the means of taming the harshness of capitalism, showing the possibility of liberty and equality working together at least up to some distance.

Others find fault with liberal democracy because its emphasis on individual freedom may loosen community bonding and rootedness, but ‘liberty’ and ‘fraternity’ need not work at cross-purposes, and one should keep in mind that communitarian excesses without liberalism can hurt interests of minority and dissident or non-conformist groups and individual autonomy. For a discussion of these issues see my piece, “Can the Local Community Save Liberal Democracy?”. Yet why is liberal democracy so fragile? All around us demagogues rule even in traditional bastions of democracy; and majoritarianism so easily hollows out democracies and keeps only the shell (and even sometimes triumphantly gets that shell described by the oxymoronic term ‘illiberal democracy’).

In my article, “Coping with Resurgent Nationalism” I have suggested that if the constitution in some democratic countries incorporates liberal inclusive values and is reasonably difficult to change, it can provide the basis of some form of civic nationalism (or what Habermas called ‘constitutional patriotism’) that may resist the marauding forces of majoritarianism or exclusivist ethnic nationalism. But the ethnic nationalist leaders are so adept at whipping up our primordial or visceral evolutionary defensive-aggressive urge to fight against so-called ‘enemy’ groups, that such resistance is currently crumbling in many countries –for example, conspicuously in India under the onslaught of Hindu nationalism, even after several decades of reasonably successful civic nationalism based on values of pluralism enshrined in the constitution and undergirded by centuries of folk-syncretic tradition of tolerance and pluralism of faith among the common people. Read more »