Many years ago, after finishing my residency, I decided to become a researcher. Around the same time, I went home to India for a visit. In those days, one of the standard accoutrements found in the living room of a Tamil Brahmin home was a wooden swing. My grandfather was still alive then and would occupy the swing each night. I remember once sitting by his side during this postprandial ritual. We sat swinging peaceably, no doubt immersed in our own thoughts, when he turned and asked, in his

Image: Anthony Canamucio I serve on the senior appointments and promotions committee (SAPC) of a medical school. Over the years, I've realized that male basic scientists, as a group, sail through the SAPC effortlessly. Many of these men work in fields that include probably 10 other individuals in the whole world, half of whom are their mentors, or former fellow graduate students or postdoctoral fellows. These are their peers, and we can readily obtain laudatory letters of recommendation from t

In one of my pathology lab courses for second-year medical students, we were reviewing the gross and microscopic findings from the autopsy of a patient who had died following acute pulmonary embolism. As I was going through the features that help one distinguish an ante-mortem thrombus vs. a postmortem clot, one of my more outspoken students said sardonically, "This will help me take better care of my patients!" That comment raised, at least in my mind, a question that I've been wrestling with

After attending the last meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists in New Mexico, I don't understand why it took me 32 years as a U.S. resident to visit what must surely be the most surpassingly lovely corner of this bountiful country. I don't know whether there has ever been a landscape that has so captivated me. There is something almost eerie about the crystalline clarity of the light falling on the burnished landscapes with their spectacular earth tones, a surreal, Buñel-esqu

When I was young, my mother's father used to read me a poem by the English poet, Leigh Hunt, entitled "Abou Ben Adhem." The poem narrates the story of Abu Ben Adhem, who wakes up one night "from a deep sleep of peace" to find "An Angel writing in a book of gold." Emboldened by the "exceeding peace" of the setting, he asks the angel what he is writing. The angel tells him that he is making a list of those who love the Lord. Abu asks whether his name is on the list. He's told that it is not. In th

I recently sat on a grant review panel to evaluate a proposal seeking to determine if nonlinear electrical fields, whatever they are, have any role in the development and progression of osteoporosis. The hypothesis underlying the proposal was that in our primal state, we humans were exposed to these cosmic nonlinear electrical fields. With the emergence of housing, motor cars, and perhaps even clothing, the premise is that we have insulated ourselves from them, leading to the proliferation of th

I have been in the scientific arena since 1972, 30 long years. By my rough estimate, I have attended an average of four seminars a week, for a total of over 5,000 seminars. I have lost count of the meeting presentations. However, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, I'm offering here some random thoughts about the scientific talks I have heard over the years.   At a meeting, graduate students often stick to the time limit; Principal Investigators usually go over. I think that the r

Illustration: A. Canamucio I came to this country in 1969, trying to be a pathology resident. After finishing my residency, I decided to try my hand at research. Deep down I suspect that I used it as a ruse to prolong my already long apprenticeship and delay having to make an honest living as a practicing pathologist. A particularly influential event that convinced me to enroll in the immunology program rather than any other was a journal club presentation by Frank Lilly, who was then chairman o

Illustration: A.Canamucio When I look back on my life and attempt to understand the factors that influenced my decision to become a scientist, two stories inevitably come to mind. The first, which I remember reading when I was in grade school, is the famous story of Archimedes figuring out, while he was immersed in a bathtub, a method by which he could determine whether or not the king's crown was truly made of gold. The image that stays vividly in my mind is that of Archimedes jumping out of hi

In the National Institutes of Health initial review group (IRG) on which I serve, we are now reviewing at each session a handful of proposals that seek to analyze the genetic basis of susceptibility to the infectious diseases that afflict great masses of the world's population. There is much excitement among my peers about these proposals, and by and large they have done reasonably well, in that they usually receive fundable priority scores. This trend in the Tropical Medicine and Parasitology

At a recent meeting of a National Institutes of Health study section, a colleague dismissed a proposal as "descriptive." In study-sectionese, this is essentially the kiss of death. Several aspects about this attitude trouble me. The first is the proposition that the word descriptive is synonymous with bad. Perhaps I am being a hopeless 19th century romantic, but it appears to me that some of the most important contributions in the history of biomedical sciences have come from what would now be

De-emphasis Of Scholarship I have just returned from another study-section meeting. During a typically excruciating discussion of the most minute and insignificant details of a grant proposal, my mind wandered off a little, and I began to wonder about the enterprise that I have been part of for almost 30 years. What is science, anyway? At its best, science is an attempt to understand the natural world through a shared idiom-an understanding that can be enjoyed by anyone who is willing to lear