Distinguishing statistical significance from clinical significance

In the past post I was talking about the difference between statistical and clinical significance and how many reported studies have apparently mixed up the two. Now here's a nice case where people seem to be aware of the difference. The article is also interesting in its own right. It deals with AstraZeneca's cholesterol lowering statin drug Crestor being approved by the FDA as a preventive measure for heart attacks and stroke. If this works out Crestor could be a real cash cow for the company since its patent does not expire till 2016 (unlike Lipitor which is going to hit Pfizer hard next year).

The problem seems to be that prescription of the drug would be based on high levels not of cholesterol but of a protein named C-Reactive Protein whose high levels are supposed to constitute an inflammatory marker for high cholesterol. The CRP-inflammation-cholesterol connection is widely believed to hold but there is no consensus in the medical community about the exact causative link (many factors can lead to high CRP levels).

The more important recent issue seems to be a study published in The Lancet which indicates a 9% increased risk of Type 2 diabetes associated with Crestor. As usual the question is whether these risks outweigh the benefits. The Crestor trial was typical of heart disease trials and involved a large population of 18,000 subjects. As the article notes, statistical significance in the reduction of heart attacks in this population does not necessarily translate to clinical significance:

Critics said the claim of cutting heart disease risk in half — repeated in news reports nationwide — may have misled some doctors and consumers because the patients were so healthy that they had little risk to begin with.

The rate of heart attacks, for example, was 0.37 percent, or 68 patients out of 8,901 who took a sugar pill. Among the Crestor patients it was 0.17 percent, or 31 patients. That 55 percent relative difference between the two groups translates to only 0.2 percentage points in absolute terms — or 2 people out of 1,000.

Stated another way, 500 people would need to be treated with Crestor for a year to avoid one usually survivable heart attack. Stroke numbers were similar.

“That’s statistically significant but not clinically significant,” said Dr. Steven W. Seiden, a cardiologist in Rockville Centre, N.Y., who is one of many practicing cardiologists closely following the issue. At $3.50 a pill, the cost of prescribing Crestor to 500 people for a year would be $638,000 to prevent one heart attack.

Is it worth it? AstraZeneca and the F.D.A. have concluded it is.

Others disagree.

“The benefit is vanishingly small,” Dr. Seiden said. “It just turns a lot of healthy people into patients and commits them to a lifetime of medication.”

To some this may seem indeed like a drug of the affluent. Only time will tell.

A promising book falls apart

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were such horrific and singular historical events that any new retelling of them deserves to be read seriously. It was with such thoughts that I picked up Charles Pellegrino's "The Last Train From Hiroshima". The first few pages were enough to glue me to my chair. In an almost poetically clinical manner Mr. Pellegrino describes the effects of the bomb on human beings in the first few seconds after the detonation. His accounts of people evaporating and the "iron in their blood separating" while their friends who were protected in "shock bubbles" that were mere feet away were absolutely riveting.

Yet in spite of this promising start I could not shake off the gnawing feeling that something was wrong. For instance I have read my fair share of atomic history and so I was astonished to not find absolutely any mention of William "Deke" Parsons in the book. Parsons was a physicist and naval captain who played a part in designing the 'gun type' Little Boy and was instrumental in arming the Hiroshima bomb on flight. Earlier his hands had almost bled from practicing the arming, which had to occur at a precise given time twenty five thousand feet up in the air on the 'Enola Gay'. There is a superb account of him in Stephen Walker's "Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima". In response to a comment I made on Amazon, Mr. Pellegrino replied that he did not mention Parsons simply because he has already been part of so many accounts, which to me does not seem a good enough reason for the exclusion. Apart from this omission I also noted Mr. Pellegrino's statement that Stanley Miller and his advisor Harold Urey won a Nobel Prize for their classic experiment pioneering origin of life research. Urey won a Nobel, but for his discovery of deuterium. Miller was nominated for the prize a few times, and in my opinion should have won it.

Alas, the riveting start of the book and the author's accounts have now virtually fallen apart. In two New York Times articles it has been reported that the most egregious error in the book consists of the story of one Joseph Fuoco who was supposed to be on one of the planes. Mr. Fuoco makes several appearances in the book, and I had found myself scratching my head when I read his accounts, having never heard of him before. The New York Times and other resources discovered that Mr. Fuoco never took part in the bombing missions. Instead the relevant man is one Charles Corliss who has not been mentioned in the book. Astonishingly, Mr. Fuoco seems to have completely duped the author as Mr. Pellegrino himself admitted; he submitted several photographs and letters to Mr. Pellegrino as proof of his role in the mission, including a letter of commendation from President Truman. Clearly Mr. Fuoco proved to be a remarkably facile con man.

But sadly, this and many other errors have cast serious doubt on the validity of the book. This is a pity since Mr. Pellegrino is an interesting writer who has written books on diverse topics ranging from Jesus's tomb to Atlantis . As of now the publisher (Henry Holt) has a blurb on the Amazon page saying that further printing and shipping of the book has been halted (which makes me cherish my first printing copy). Even Mr. Pellegrino's PhD. from Victoria University in New Zealand is being questioned. As usual, an otherwise fine author seems to have sullied his name by sloppy writing on an important topic.

An alternative BBC list for the "educated" mind

So there's this little blurb going around on Facebook in which the BBC has listed 100 books written over the last 200 years or so and asked people how many they and their friends have read. The books are diverse and include everything from Jane Austen to J D Salinger to Harry Potter.

Obviously the BBC thinks this list is important in some way or that people who have read some of these books are educated or well-informed. There is a note informing us that most people would have read only 6 out of those 100 books. Perhaps this is startling.

But what is startling by orders of magnitude is that this list of 100 books does not include a single scientific work. Now of course people would not be expected to have read The Principia. But what about Darwin's "The Origin of Species"? Or, looking at something more modern and still pivotal, Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"? These volumes are comparable to many of the books listed by the BBC, certainly in terms of comprehension, and also almost certainly in terms of importance.

Most prominently, what about C P Snow's "The Two Cultures" which lamented the rift between science and the humanities? You want to see a classic example of this rift? WItness the BBC list! Snow would have nodded his head vigorously, especially and most ironically because the exclusion of his own volume from the list makes his point resoundingly clear.

So, dear BBC, if I were to draw up my own short and admittedly limited list of scientific works that surely deserve as much of a place in the "educated" man's mind as the august books you present, I would cite the following. I haven't read all of these works; but with all I have a passing familiarity and some I have read more seriously. Let's even forget Newton's "Principia" for now and focus on the last 200 years as the BBC mostly has, and even just on the 20th century. Of course some of the following are more important than others; some are popular treatments while others are defining and fundamental volumes for their respective fields. But one can still come up with a highly readable list, which in my opinion would enrich the mind of any human being.

1. The Origin of Species- Charles Darwin

2. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions- Thomas Kuhn

3. The Logic of Scientific Discovery- Karl Popper

4. Silent Spring- Rachel Carson

5. Science and the Common Understanding- J. Robert Oppenheimer

6. Principia Mathematica- Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead

7. Physics and Philosophy- Werner Heisenberg

8. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions- Edwin Abbott

9. On Growth and Form- D'Arcy Thompson

10. What is Life?- Erwin Schrodinger

11. Men of Mathematics- E T Bell

12. Microbe Hunters- Paul De Kruif

13. The Mismeasure of Man- Stephen Jay Gould

14. The Selfish Gene- Richard Dawkins

15. Sociobiology- E O Wilson

16. Mr. Tompkins- George Gamow

17. The Double Helix- James Watson

18. The Nature of the Chemical Bond- Linus Pauling

19. Chaos- James Gleick

20. Advice to a Young Scientist- Peter Medawar

and finally

21. The Two Cultures- C P Snow

Consider the diverse and varying importance of these works. Kuhn and Popper are defining volumes in the philosophy of science. Darwin needs no explanation. Schrodinger inspired a generation of physicists like Francis Crick to change fields and initiate a revolution in biology. E O Wilson's book started a fierce chapter in the "nature vs nurture" debate whose ramifications can still be felt. In one fell swoop Gould demolished the foundations of scientific racism and eugenics. Pauling's book is one of the most important scientific works of all time and redefined chemistry. D'Arcy Thompson's beautiful volume established the mathematical foundations of developmental biology. Bell and De Kruif both inspired dozens of famous scientists like Andrew Weil and John Nash who went on to do groundbreaking work and win Fields and Nobel medals. Russell's book was a landmark event designed to provide a foundation for all of mathematics. Watson's book is considered the archetype of how real science is done, warts and all. Carson became the godmother of the modern environmental movement. On a more limited but important level, Gleick, Gamow and Dawkins made chaos theory, quantum physics and selfish genes comprehensible to the layman. And Medawar, Oppenheimer and Snow wrote deeply thoughtful volumes on the relationship between science, society and culture.

Now I suppose it would not be too presumptuous to ask the question; how many of these have the BBC list-makers read?

The writings of John Cassidy

For the last several weeks I have been enjoying John Cassidy's "How Markets Fail". I am almost done with the volume and have to say that it is one of the best and most balanced critiques of markets that I have read. Cassidy who was educated at Oxford and certainly knows his economics carefully documents the history of how academic mathematical theories like Arrow's impossibility theorem and Robert Lucas's theory of rational expectations came to be mistaken as practical rules for application to the free market when they were really supposed to be not much more than ideal mathematical constructs. Quants fell into the same trap (incidentally I saw a book today by Scott Patterson named "The Quants" which looked quite engaging).

Cassidy also documents very well how most free market theorists did not include the behavioral economic approaches later pioneered by psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. One of the important points that Cassidy makes is that a lot of these people who came up with models for finance and the free market thought that anomalies would not persist for long and that the market would iron them out, except that it doesn't, usually as a result of the (rather obvious) failure of models to forecast human behavior.

Even more enlightening is Cassidy's series of interviews with Chicago school economists like Richard Posner, Gary Becker and Eugene Fama in the New Yorker. It is heartening to see how most of these people who were once die hard free marketeers are now taking a more moderate stance towards the world and accepting the limitations of things like rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis. One reason for the decline of the Chicago school has been the death of Milton Friedman, but another reason seems to be the genuine flaws that at least some of the practitioners seems to have acknowledged. All except Eugene Fama, who in his interview appears to be as much of a stubborn free market "fundamentalist" as anyone else; the last man manning the fort, keeping a brave face and clinging to the flag known as the efficient market hypothesis, with smoke and mirrors being his main weapon of combat. Behavioral economists who were once despised at Chicago are now part of the establishment there.

Very enlightening and more than a little gratifying. I would strongly suggest especially the interviews and also the book.

Mandatory movie post

Since everyone and his uncle seems to have held forth on this, I have a few words about the great Avatar.

I saw it in an IMAX last week and was totally underwhelmed. Sure, the special effects were interesting and novel but almost everything else was sub par. The dialogues were leaden, the attempts at humor were so weak that I am still confused about whether they were indeed such attempts or not, the performances were unimpressive and most annoyingly, the characters defined "stock" and "stereotype".

The scientist, arrogant at first and motherly later, the embodiment of a woman staking out her territory in a man's world, generally consigned all female scientists to a skeletonized cliche. Most prominently, the general or colonel or whoever he was must have been the most stereotypical Curtis Le May wannabe I have seen in a long time (of the "Yeah, we are gonna bomb those critters back to the stone age" variety). Plus, the "law of economy of characters" seemed to admirably kick in halfway through since you could tell exactly which brave-hearted souls were going to die.

In short, the story was generally childish and the direction was terrible. I expected much better from Cameron who I consider to be a pretty good even if not great director. Compare this with "Titanic" which even with the love story and the Bollywood type drama is still a fantastic movie.

I really hope Jimmy does not get another chance to yell at the top of his voice on the stage at the Oscars this year.

Is the Drake Equation for hookups borrowed from The Big Bang Theory?

The Drake Equation was devised in the 1960s by pioneering astronomer and "extraterrestriologist" Frank Drake who was the main founder of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). The equation essentially lists the product of a variety of probabilistic terms related to intelligent life arising on an earthlike planet somewhere in the universe to come up with an estimate of "N", the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe.

The equation's rather limited utility can be gauged from the fact that over the years, estimates of N have ranged from "infinity" to one to essentially zero. In any case, it does provide for a useful way of thinking about the sheer number of obstacles that would come in the way of a mirror image of myself arising a million light years away and saying "Howdy".

But Peter Backus does not care as much about green-blooded aliens as he does about very much red-blooded earthly females. He has used a modified version of the Drake equation to calculate his chances of finding a girlfriend in 2010. You can read his paper here.

While some of the analysis of the terms is delightfully droll, it does seem uncannily similar to a Drake equation for hookups that the great Howard Wolowitz formulates in an episodes of The Big Bang Theory. As a BBT fanatic, the episode immediately popped up in my mind when I read about Backus. It's Episode 20 in Season 2, "The Hofstadter Isotope". Watch Howard expound on the equation just after Sheldon rattles off the terms.

There is no indication in Peter's article that he was inspired by this episode. If he was, I think poor Howard deserves a nod. If not, the odds of both Peter and Howard coming up with such a formula are...well, similar to estimates of N.

When radiation misfires...literally

The New York Times has a rather chilling account of how radiation overdose in the treatment of some cancer patients caused deadly side effects leading to death. The entire sobering article deserves to be read. In one case a man's tongue was going to be selectively irradiated; instead his whole face received a blast of radiation that led to a horrible, slow death. His story makes for very painful reading. In another case, misguided radiation beams literally cut out a hole in a woman's chest that gradually killed her.

And all this mainly because of computer errors that were not detected by human beings, errors that caused the radiation to be overdosed or misdirected. Seems like one of those classic "technology is a double-edged sword" kind of scenarios with the whole system just becoming too complex for human understanding. In one instance, a wedge in a linear accelerator delivering the radiation was supposed to focus the beam in the "in" position. But the computer that used Varian software- the same software that I used in grad school for operating the NMR spectrometer built by the same company- made a mistake and instead pivoted the wedge to the "out" position, removing the radiation shielding. The mistake was not detected 27 times, leading to acute radiation overdoses in the wrong parts of the body. In the case of the man whose tongue was supposed to be treated, an error in the software failed to save the critical settings for the accelerator which would have focused the radiation to the right parts.

The statistics unearthed by the Times are startling. From 2001 to 2009, more than 600 cases of improper radiation treatment were reported. Out of those, 255 were related to an overdose, while 284 were related to the wrong parts of the body being exposed to radiation. Even in its idealized form radiation has side-effects, so one would assume that doctors and technicians would be deathly serious about operating these protocols. These statistics were collected for New York State, which is apparently supposed to have some of the strictest radiation standards in the country.

What is even more shocking is the lack of transparency due to "privacy laws". Names of the culprits have been withheld, and some of them seem to have been let off the hook with a simple reprimand. Some doctors who have participated in the treatments refused to talk to the journalists. There also does not seem to be a single agency responsible for these radiation safeguards. On top of it all there seem to be scant ways for patients to pick beforehand which hospital they would like to receive radiation treatment in, since records of mistakes are not available to the public. The whole shebang sounds appalling.

Now I understand that 600 cases in 8 years is probably peanuts compared to the total number of cases in which radiation has worked successfully. Nonetheless, the factors responsible for the lapses and the horrendous consequences deserve scrutiny (seriously, death due to "computer error" sounds like something out of a bad science fiction horror movie). For something as serious as radiation treatment for cancer, one would assume that the same kinds of safeguards, fail-safe mechanisms and backup checks would be in place as are used in nuclear reactor safety. Yet it seems that shoddy training, computer error, and lack of accountability are dealing out death and enormous physical and psychological suffering to patients and their families.

Is a book refund a "bribe"?

So here's an experience I had with an Amazon used book seller named "Booxygen". I had ordered a book from him and the book arrived on time. However the book's spine was detached about halfway down the middle. Problems with the spine constitute probably the most serious problems you can encounter with a book. So I wrote a lukewarm review on Amazon in the "seller feedback" section complaining about the spine.

About two days later I get an email from Booxygen. While they apologize for the problem, they also make me an intriguing offer. They say that they will refund the price of the book if I take back my negative review and either write a positive review or no review at all.

Now I know this sounds reasonable and is probably the norm for most book sellers, but in my view, such an offer clearly constitutes a "bribe" for a simple reason. Reviews are supposed to attest to the quality of a particular bookseller. Consider what happens if I accept Booxygen's offer. While my money is refunded, because I don't write a negative review, future buyers like me who are planning to buy from Booxygen never get to know that I was shipped a defective item. The whole purpose of reviews is to accurately represent the quality of a bookseller's service, warts and all. A failure to write an unfavorable review or the misrepresentation of such a review clearly misleads future buyers.

Thus, while it sounded reasonable, I regarded Booxygen's offer as a bribe. My reply somehow got buried in the drafts section of my email. I discovered it three months later and emailed Booxygen a deal which to me sounds much more honest; mail me a good copy of the same book and I will gladly take back my review and write a new favorable review for the book. Regrettably, Booxygen sent me a very rude reply saying that they refuse my suggestion and that I should not do business with them again. I am glad they said this themselves because I am pretty sure I won't feel the need to buy from them again. In addition I am quite sure I am not going to accept such a bribe from other booksellers; if you want good reviews, sell me good quality products. It's that simple.

Book reviews: A hawk, a dove and the missile man of America

Two books on the Cold War

1. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War - Nicholas Thompson

In this book, Nicholas Thompson provides a fascinating account of the life, times and work of probably the two most important American diplomats of the Cold War. George Kennan and Paul Nitze were starkly opposite in many respects, yet both provided immensely important direction to American geopolitics through their advice to many Presidents and shaped the Cold War more than any other two American policy makers.

Of the two Kennan is the more famous and is regarded by many as the most important American diplomat of the twentieth century (he passed away in 2005 at the ripe age of 101 and was known for the resplendent prose in his many books which I could strongly recommend). Kennan is mainly known for a famous 1946 telegram that he sent from the Soviet Union. At this time Americans were still trying to understand the looming Soviet menace and Kennan was probably the most knowledgeable Soviet expert in the country. He rightly understood Stalin's bluster and sent a telegram describing the intentions and nature of the Soviet state. The telegram instantly catapulted him to recognition and set in place the official policy of "containment" which Kennan's name became synonymous with. In the telegram Kennan indicated that the Soviets would respond to only strength and not reconciliation and weakness. In his book on the hydrogen bomb, Richard Rhodes says that it was this telegram along with Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech and Stalin's rousing speech in Moscow that inaugurated the Cold War.

However Kennan did not advocate necessarily employing military strength. This was advocated by Paul Nitze, a man who may not be as famous as Kennan but who was no less important. Nitze is regarded by many as the "father of threat inflation". As a measure of his influence as a hawk, it suffices to realize that many of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration were either Nitze acolytes or acolytes of Nitze's proteges. Just like Kennan Nitze also became famous for a secret 1950 document called NSC-68 that advocated the use of preemptive force against the Soviets and exaggerated their military might. This was a pattern that Nitze and his growing band of followers (among them in various ways were Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld) would consistently pursue; whenever they thought that liberals were trying to be too reconciliatory toward the Soviet Union, they would prepare documents and advocate polices exaggerating Soviet military potential and intentions. Their policies frequently worked and became especially influential during the Reagan administration (formerly they did a good job of portraying Carter as being weak on the Soviets). To some extent they were responsible for the dangerous arms race between the two nations.

Needless to say, such hawkish views radically differed from those of Kennan the dove whose more measured opinions fell somewhat out of favor in later years. Yet the book does an outstanding job of showing that the agendas of both men were more subtle and complicated. Occasionally when it was necessary Nitze would take a softer approach, and during the later Reagan years he joined the President in pressing for open disarmament and reconciliation when many of his followers continued to take a hard line. In his later life Nitze mellowed down, and in 1999 went so far as to write a New York Times op-ed recommending unilateral nuclear disarmament for the US. Although Nitze rightly perceived the work that he had done to be very important in dictating Cold War policy, it is tragic that unlike him, others did not have the sense to see the shortcomings and detrimental effects of these policies in a post Cold War world (Nitze and the accompanying rise of the neo-cons are very well-documented in J. Peter Scoblic's
"Us vs Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security").

With such differing perspectives one would think that Nitze and Kennan would have been mortal enemies. But remarkably, through several decades of acute differences and disagreements, the two men remained close personal friends. As Thompson who is Nitze's grandson shows, it is a mark of the character of both men that they managed to rise above their political differences no matter how severe these were. Thompson shows in this highly readable volume, the tremendous impact on US foreign policy that the work of Nitze and Kennan had. He bring both of them to life and sensitively and wisely dissects their personalities, thoughts and lives. Very strongly recommended for foreign policy/Cold War enthusiasts.

2. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon- Neil Sheehan

Neil Sheehan apparently spent 15 years writing this account of a little known Air Force General, Bernard Schriever, and the time he spent on the man shows in this comprehensive account. He has performed a very valuable service in bringing this rather obscure character to life and driving home the importance of his accomplishments. Schriever was one of the individuals most responsible for jump starting the US's missile program, especially shepherding the development of the ICBM. Sheehan does a great job bringing to life all the characters that Schriever was associated with, from his mentors in flight school (including General "Hap" Arnold) to his bete noir, the notorious Curtis LeMay, to his contact with brilliant scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller whose contributions were critical for America's missile and atomic bomb programs.

Sheehan provides ample background and little known tidbits of Schriever's life and times. For instance I was not aware that the US Air Force was a rather inefficient backwater organization till the mid-1930s, easily outclassed by its European counterparts. Apparently at one point, pilots were asked to deliver the mail in the wake of a post office scandal. Their inexperience in flying and the loss of life that resulted galvanized FDR and others to issue directives for a modern Air Force that would become among the best in the world.

The main problem I have is that while Sheehan's digressions (for instance on the atomic bomb project and Soviet espionage) are fascinating and reflect the most up-to-date information, they are too many and too frequent. An editor who could have shaved off a few pages and encouraged a tighter narrative would have definitely helped. The digressions draw your attention from direct information about General Schriever. To be fair the book is not supposed to be just about him, but a little less meandering would have been a boon.

In spite of this deficiency, the book will be fascinating for Cold War enthusiasts who want to know about the development of the US Air Force and its atomic and missile arsenals during the early Cold War. There is also a fair amount of technical detail about missiles explained in relatively plain and accurate language. After JFK came to power Schriever's influence waned and the latter part of the book is not as interesting. Nevertheless, Sheehan has done a valuable and outstanding job in bringing a little known individual to life and telling us about his enormous contributions during a critical period of American history.

Particle or nuclear?

This is interesting. A Tehran University physics professor has been killed by a bomb planted outside his home. There is speculation whether this could be the work of outsiders, especially from Israel or the US.

To me the accusation that this was an Israeli operation seems anything but far fetched. After all there has been ample talk of the Israelis bombing Iran's nuclear facilities the way they did with Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1980. But any such action would likely cause immense international outrage and political problems for Israel, not to mention added Arab animosity. Thus from their perspective the next best option would be to do something like this, assassinate someone who was playing a key role in the nuclear program with the hope that it would at least slow down Iran's plans and intimidate them.

The trouble is that until now the specialty and role of the assassinated professor is not known. As the NYT reports,

There was some dispute about his field of scientific specialization.

The English-language Press TV said he taught neutron physics at Tehran University, although it was not clear whether he was part of Iran's contentious nuclear enrichment program.

The broadcaster called the professor a ?staunch supporter of the Islamic Revolution? of 1979 that overthrew the Shah and initiated three decades of theocratic rule.

But two Iranian academics, who spoke in return for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said in telephone interviews that he was not a nuclear physicist and had specialized in particle and theoretical physics. The Web site of Tehran University lists him as a professor of elementary particle physics.

Now that's silly. A professor who teaches neutron physics would likely know a lot about nuclear reactors and bombs; in 1939, the greatest expert in neutron physics in the world was Enrico Fermi, probably the most important physicist working on nuclear energy. Everyone should know that it does not matter much whether the dead professor's field of specialty is "nuclear" or "theoretical and particle" physics since it is quite easy for a particle physicist to learn nuclear physics and vice versa (even the movies seem to have understood this; in the George Clooney-Nicole Kidman blockbuster "The Peacemaker", the scientist working for the bad guys is an astrophysics PhD.)

Thus the unfortunate man's specialty by itself does not at all preclude him from working on the nuclear program. Only time will tell what his exact role was.

A biochemical parody of Bryan Adams

For some reason when I was in high school Bryan Adams was big, and we used to listen to his songs all the time. These days I find many of his songs too sappy, but I still love some of the melodies and find myself going nostalgically down memory lane when "Summer of '69" or "Everything I Do" or "Cloud Number Nine" wafts on to the air from somewhere.

So yesterday I happened to be looking at a particularly ravishing picture of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) and Adams's "Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman" randomly started playing on my iPod and Bam! The two topics meshed together in an ungodly union. So here is my tribute to Bryan Adams with profound apologies...an ode to that perfect protein which we can only covet. Chemically inclined folk will appreciate this more but others should also be able to smack their forehead. The original version is copied first to mitigate the trauma that will follow.

HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOVED A WOMAN

To really love a woman
To understand her - you gotta know it deep inside
Hear every thought - see every dream
N' give her wings - when she wants to fly
Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms
You know you really love a woman

When you love a woman you tell her
that she's really wanted
When you love a woman you tell her
that she's the one
she needs somebody to tell her
that it's gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a woman?

To really love a woman
Let her hold you -
til ya know how she needs to be touched
You've gotta breathe her - really taste her
Til you can feel her in your blood
N' when you can see your unborn children in her eyes
You know you really love a woman

When you love a woman
you tell her that she's really wanted
When you love a woman
you tell her that she's the one
she needs somebody to tell her
that you'll always be together
So tell me have you ever really -
really really ever loved a woman?

You got to give her some faith - hold her tight
A little tenderness - gotta treat her right
She will be there for you, takin' good care of you
Ya really gotta love your woman...

Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms
You know you really love a woman
When you love a woman you tell her
that she's really wanted
When you love a woman
you tell her that she's the one
she needs somebody to tell her
that it's gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a woman?

Just tell me have you ever really,
really, really, ever loved a woman? You got to tell me
Just tell me have you ever really,
really, really, ever loved a woman?


HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOVED A PROTEIN

To really love a protein
To understand her - you gotta know her deep inside
Hear every helix - see every sheet
N' give her energy - when she wants to jiggle
Then when you find yourself staring helpless at her domains
You know you really love a protein

When you love a protein you tell her
that she's really conformationally correct
When you love a protein you tell her
that she's catalytically perfect
she needs somebody to tell her
that her half-life?s gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a protein?

To really love a protein
Let her hold your high-affinity binders-
til ya know how she needs to be crystallized
You've gotta mass spec her - really sequence her
Til you can feel her atoms in your spectrometer
N' when you can see the unformed hydrogen bonds in her pockets
You know you really love a protein

When you love a protein
you tell her that she's really evolutionarily conserved
When you love a protein you tell her that she's peptidase-digestion preserved
she needs somebody to tell her
that her fold will always hold together
So tell me have you ever really -
really really ever loved a protein?

You got to give her some metal ions - hold her co-factors
A little pH-control - gotta treat her ionization state right
She will be there for you, takin' good care of your ligands
Ya really gotta love your protein...

Then when you find yourself staring helpless at her PDB coordinates
You know you really love a protein
When you love a protein you tell her
that she's really conformationally correct
When you love a protein you tell her
that she's catalytically perfect
she needs somebody to tell her
that her half-life?s gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really
- really really ever loved a protein?

Just tell me have you ever really,
really, really, ever loved a protein? You got to tell me
Just tell me have you ever really,
really, really, ever loved (that helical, sheety, hydrogen bondalacious) protein?

Barbara Crossette is a computer (and she almost fails the Turing test)

That is the delightful conclusion I have drawn after having read her appalling "critique" of India in "Foreign Policy". Crossette seems to have been assigned a rather easy task fit for a search engine- trawl the internet and gather as many negative statements about India as can fit in a two page writeup. Even in this endeavor her failure seems to be laughably transparent.

Both Manasi and Nitin do excellent short work of the article so there's not much I can add. Among Crossette's most egregious transgressions are accusing India of being something of a rogue nuclear power who has not signed the NPT. Crossette blithely ignores India's impeccable non-proliferation record, its highly admirable success in the peaceful uses of atomic energy (India's thorium program has been praised by nuclear analysts worldwide) and the structural problems that have kept the NPT from being definitive and effective since its conception. And of course, with North Korea and Pakistan around, India should be a meek footnote when it comes to nuclear proliferation in South Asia. Perhaps Crossette conveniently forgets (or more probably ignores since it does not fit into her assumptions) that India has not been part of the China-North Korea-Pakistan club, members of which have regularly slapped quality control stamps on each others' missiles and bombs and in addition exported them.

Nor does Crossette's article hold even nanoliters of water when she accuses India of meddling in climate change legislation. As noted, India's emissions profile is significantly below the world average and it has made a commitment (non-binding perhaps but commitment nonetheless) to 20-25 percent reductions. Plus, India's achievements in nuclear power can have a very positive impact on reducing emissions. And of course the US is never out of practice when hypocritically preaching to the rest of the world to reduce greenhouse emissions while flying high on its own.

Crossette's criticism that India is "hardly a liberal democratic paradise" seems to be an exercise in making pithy, simplistic, misleading statements. Sure, incidents like the banning of James Laine's book on Shivaji sound discouraging, but these incidents are few and far in between compared to the big picture. In the bigger picture, India has survived probably the greatest assault of diversity, chaos and disagreement among its politicians and citizens of any country to remain a successful democracy, notwithstanding the serious flaws. The press in India is among the freest in the world (so free in fact that we have to berate journalists for being loose cannons who could endanger national security), the internet and other public forums in India are vigorously argumentative and even though taking offense to trivial things has become a fashion in our country, everyone is free in turn to take offense to taking offense and vociferously voice their opinions. One would be hard pressed to find a developing country where such robust and cantankerous debate exists amidst so much diversity and flared tempers.

Did Crossette sleep-walk through her tenure as a New York Times journalist in Delhi? Maybe it is another growing sign of the New York Times's waning days and their increasingly shoddy journalistic standards.

With such a fanfare of cherry picking and misleading statements, Crossette claims that India is the "elephant in the room". She needs to think twice if she plans to assault it with a spear, since if she does so she is almost certainly going to run straight through this invisible entity and smack her head on the wall. That should give her the "headache" which she thinks India is.

Rewiring my brain: A musical offering

For the last six months or so I am having to rewire my brain. That's because I am taking formal classical piano lessons for the first time. The piano lessons are making my brain do things it has never done before, and it's taking even longer for the message to get from my brain to my hands. But it's been an enriching experience so far, and I am getting there.

I have been playing the piano and keyboard for more than 20 years. My school and college days were filled with music as documented before. But being congenitally lazy, I never took the effort to actually formally learn to read and write music. I also used to let my fingers run willy nilly over the keyboard, fingering be damned. My parents and others never got tired of telling me what a difference it would make if I actually learnt something formally, but like many other things I dismissed their wise advice with cheerful repudiation. To some extent I myself was to blame for this state of affairs. That's because I have a reasonably good memory for music and can remember the main parts of a musical piece after hearing it a couple of times, unless it is hideously complicated. Since my memory filled in for formal instruction I never felt the need to learn how to read and write.

While learning to play by ear served me very well for all these years, it also had some distinct drawbacks. Many notes in a musical piece are contrapuntal notes, sometimes playing in the background, gently cajoling louder notes, making the musical landscape richer. But these notes are usually very hard to decipher because of their transient nature and low amplitude. Many of the "contra melodies" both in eastern and western music fall into this category. Thus, while learning by ear is adequate for the general structure of a piece and entirely satisfactory for most Indian songs which did not have dominant contra-melodies, it fails to various extents for more involved pieces, and fails spectacularly for compositions by composers like Bach who was the unmatched master of counterpoint.

Thus my musical education has always been somewhat lacking. So it was with immense trepidation as well as anticipation that I looked forward to my first lessons. The first lesson was terrifying since my music teacher asked me to directly compose a piece of music and write it; I almost felt like running away. Fortunately I realised that I have found an extremely patient piano teacher who, when I confessed to her that I could be abysmally slow, dismissed my concerns by pointing out that she has even taught mentally challenged children with special needs. The piano lesson is at 9 PM which also makes things slightly challenging. But her enthusiasm and patience rub off, and even after a long day at work I find myself feeling energetic after a while.

The last six months have been quite an experience. Learning how to read and decipher music felt like being someone who has lived his life until now in a candlelit room and has just found the switch for the 100 watt lightbulb.

At first the going was tough and not much was possible; I was learning how to play the classical equivalent of nursery rhymes. In addition I have to say this; a lot of musical notation is not exactly meant to simplify things. For instance consider the 22 notes spread across the treble and bass clefs. Each line as well as each space corresponds to a note (A, B, C etc.). However, the fact that the line and space are of unequal width make this notion counterintuitive, and a beginner tends to regard only spaces as notes (more so because that's how the notes on a piano would look if turned by 90 degrees). However upon further contemplation it becomes clear that the particular notion employed is a considerable space saving device, since one can essentially represent the entire spectrum of the instrument in a short space.

But even that experience of playing the most elementary pieces was immensely valuable as I could truly develop my left hand for the first time, that left hand which until now had been engaged only in playing chords and no melody, acting more as a substitute for rhythm than as my right hand's equal.

It was only in the last three months that I have progressed to intermediate stage. If beginner stage is like riding a bicycle, intermediate stage is like driving a car. Landscapes that were previously inaccessible suddenly bloom exponentially in front of you. Relatively few pieces by leading composers are at the beginner stage but many more are at the intermediate stage. Once I got to this stage it was like opening the door to a garden full of exotic flowers. I could take full advantage of Pianostreet.com which has a lot of sheet music from various composers. Intermediate stage is when the turbo charging starts. I could branch out from what my teacher taught me and strike out on my own a bit.

I started with simple pieces like Bach's Minuet in G and Beethoven's Russian Folk Song, but even here the advantages of learning formal music were eminently clear. I would never have been able to disentangle the relatively complex intertwining of notes in these pieces by ear alone. I felt like a physicst who has previously performed experiments to watch balls rolling down inclined planes, but who knows no mathematics to understand what's happening in all its fine glory.

However, curiously, my musical memory which has served as an asset until now actually became a liability. That's because the moment I painfully deciphered one part, my brain would immediately commit it to memory, which meant that the next time I could play it without looking. Now that would be a good thing if I weren't actually trying to learn how to read! But learning how to read means getting enough practice at reading and re-reading the notes and symbols, just like learning a language. Memory opposes this process.

The most difficult thing has been to learn and stick to fingering. Previously, certain of my fingers have been used to playing certain notes. The interrelationship of the fingers to each other has also been hardwired because of years of using them that way. For instance, for certain patterns of notes, my index finger will invariably arch over my thumb, whereas traditionally it would not be done that way. Every time I am supposed to use specific fingering, my fingers strain to break free of the new rules that their upstart owner is trying to impose on them. They prance around and resist and have a life of their own, like Dr. Strangelove's gloved arm. They insist on obeying their own laws of motion. I have to constantly command my brain to rein them in. It is sometimes excruciatingly painful and yet I know that after some effort, order will be restored to this unruly landscape.

So this is the first time that I am having to actively suppress my memory. Part of this effort has also meant that I deliberately ask my teacher to give me pieces which I haven't heard before, so that my memory does not help me play them at least during the first time. This is not very easy since I have listened to a substantial amount of classical music until now. But the treasure chest of classical music goes deeper than I think, and she always finds something. The latest effort is for a long transcription of Bach's famous Air on a G string. The measure is slightly tricky at times, and the piece should keep me occupied for some time.

Mostly I spend my time practicing these assigned pieces, but with my newfound ability I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to go beyond what she is teaching. In this spirit I have tried several pieces which I have heard before, which I could even play to some extent before, but which have acquired a whole new quality now that I can pry their notes apart. I tried "Fur Elise" of course, and I am trying out Schumann's beautiful "Traumerei" and Chopin's Mazurka in D which is a real challenge.

The most challenging of these right now in terms of coordination is Mozart's fast "Turkish March", the 3rd movement of his 11th Piano Sonata in A Major. Before I had spent literally months listening to this piece hundreds of times before I could get the right hand reasonably accurate. But the left hand's role was hidden in that sheet music, waiting all these years to be uncovered. And now that the left hand can dance over the landscape on equal terms with the right, life has acquired a golden hue.

A hermitian operator in self-imposed exile

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century
Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who at the turn of this century solved one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, the Poincare Conjecture, is sadly or perhaps appropriately an almost perfect specimen of this belief. For Perelman, even the rudiments of any kind of monetary, professional or material rewards resulting from his theorem were not just unnecessary but downright abhorrent. He has turned down professorships at the best universities in the world, declined the Fields Medal, and will probably not accept the 1 million dollar prize awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the solution of the some of the most daunting mathematical problems of all time. He has cut himself off from the world after seeing the publicity that his work received and has become a recluse, living with his mother in St. Petersburg. For Perelman, mathematics should purely and strictly be done for its own sake, and could never be tainted with any kind of worldly stigma. Perelman is truly a mathematical hermit, or what a professor of mine would call using mathematical jargon, a "hermitian operator".

In "Perfect Rigor", Masha Gessen tells us the story of this remarkable individual, but even more importantly tells us the story of the Russian mathematical system that produced this genius. The inside details of Russian mathematics were cut off from the world until the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian mathematics was nurtured by a small group of extraordinary mathematicians including Andrey Kolmogorov, the greatest Russian mathematician of the twentieth century. Kolmogorov and others who followed him believed in taking latent, outstanding talent in the form of young children and single-mindedly transforming them into great problem solvers and thinkers. Interestingly in the early Soviet Union under Stalin's brutal rule, mathematics flourished where other sciences languished partly because Stalin and others simply could not understand abstract mathematical concepts and thus did not think they posed any danger to communist ideology. Soviet mathematics also got a boost when its great value was recognized during the Great Patriotic War in building aircraft and later in work on the atomic bomb. Mathematicians and physicists thus became unusually valued assets to the Soviet system.

Kolmogorov and a select band of others took advantage of the state's appreciation of math and created small, elite schools for students to train them for the mathematical olympiads. Foremost among the teachers was a man named Sergei Rukshin who Gessen talks about at length. Rukshin believed in completely enveloping his students in his world. In his schools the students entered a different universe, forged by intense thought and mathematical camaraderie. They were largely shielded from outside influences and coddled. The exceptions were women and Jews. Gessen tells us about the rampant anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union which lasted until its end and prevented many bright Jewish students from showcasing their talents. Perelman was one of the very few Jews who made it, and only because he achieved a perfect score in the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Perelman's extreme qualities were partly a result of this system, which had kept him from knowing about politics and the vagaries of human existence and insulated him from a capricious world where compromise is necessary. For him, everything had to be logical and utterly honest. There was no room for things such as diplomacy, white lies, nationalism and manipulation to achieve one's personal ends. If a mathematical theorem was proven to be true, then any further acknowledgment of its existence in the form of monetary or practical benefits was almost vulgar. This was manifested in his peculiar behavior in the United States. For instance, when he visited the US in the 90s as a postdoctoral researcher he had already made a name for himself. Princeton offered the twenty nine year old an assistant professorship, a rare and privileged opportunity. However Perelman would settle for nothing less than a full professorship and was repulsed even by the request that he officially interview for the position (which would have been simply a formality) and submit his CV. Rudimentary formalities which would be normal for almost everyone were abhorrent for Perelman.

After being disillusioned with what he saw as an excessively materialistic academic food chain in the US, Perelman returned to Russia. For five years after that he virtually cut himself off from his colleagues. But it was then that he worked on the Poincare Conjecture and created his lasting achievement. Sadly, his time spent intensely working alone in Russia seemed to have made him even more sensitive to real and perceived slights. However, he did publicly put up his proofs on the internet in 2002 and then visited the US. For a brief period he even seemed to enjoy the reception he received in the country, with mathematicians everywhere vying to secure his services for their universities. He was unusually patient in giving several talks and patiently explaining his proof to mathematicians. Yet it was clear he was indulging in this exercise only for the sake of clarifying the mathematical concepts, and not to be socially acceptable.

However, after this brief period of normalcy, a series of events made Perelman reject the world of human beings and even that of his beloved mathematics. He was appalled by the publicity he received in newspapers like the New York Times which could not understand his work. He found the rat race to recruit him, with universities climbing over each other and making him fantastic offers of salary and opportunity, utterly repulsive. After rejecting all these offers and even accusing some of his colleagues of being traitors who gave him undue publicity, he withdrew to Russia and definitively severed himself from the world. The final straw may have been two events; the awarding of the Fields Medal which, since his work was still being verified, could not explicitly state that he had proven the Poincare conjecture, and the publication of a paper by Chinese mathematicians which in hindsight clearly seems to have been written for stealing the limelight and the honors from Perelman. For Perelman, all this (including the sharing of the Fields with three other mathematicians) was a grave insult and unbecoming of the pursuit of pure mathematics.

Since then Perelman has been almost completely inaccessible. He does not answer emails, letters and phone calls. In an unprecedented move, the president of the International Mathematical Congress which awards the Fields Medals personally went to St. Petersburg to talk him out of declining the prize. Perelman was polite, but the conversation was to no avail. Neither is there any indication that he would accept the 1 million dollar Clay prize. Gessen himself could never interview him, and because of this the essence of Perelman remains vague and we don't really get to know him in the book. Since Gessen is trying to somewhat psychoanalyze her subject and depends on second-hand information to draw her own conclusions, her narrative sometimes lacks coherence and meanders off. As some other reviewers have noted, the discussion of the actual math is sparse and disappointing, but this book is not really about the math but about the man and his social milieu. The content remains intriguing and novel.

Of course, Perelman's behavior is bizarre and impenetrable only to us mere mortals. For Perelman it forms a subset of what has in his mind always been a perfectly internally consistent and logical set of postulates and conclusions. Mathematics has to be done for its own sake. Academic appointments, prizes, publicity and professional rivalries should have no place in the acknowledgement of a beautiful mathematical proof. While things like applying for interviews and negotiating job offers may seem to us to be perfectly reasonable components of the real world and may even seem to be necessary evils, for Perelman they are simply evils interfering with a system of pure thought and should be completely rejected. He is the epitome of the Platonic ideal; where pure ideas are concerned, any human association could only be a deeply unsettling imposition.

A stunning achievement in 600 pages: The Storm of War

The contemporary Second World War historian faces a monumental task. He must sort through the enormous literature on the most devastating conflict in human history, both known and recently unearthed, and then pick out the gems. He must then string these gems together into a narrative that strikes the right balance between offering all important details and yet not miring the reader in a dense thicket of minutiae. The achievement of this objective is the mark of a true historian, and in his new, stunningly succinct and yet comprehensive history of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts more than accomplishes this objective and reveals himself as a historian of the first rank, in the words of The Economist, "Britain's finest military historian".

What distinguishes Roberts's book from other World War 2 histories is that it's simply the most stunning encapsulation of every single front in the conflict in a relatively slim 600 pages. In his drive to leave no stone unturned and his capacity to compose brief portraits of key people and events, Roberts surpasses even eminent historian John Keegan. Roberts's style is distinguished by terse, tightly knit chapters that deliver the goods in brief paragraphs and analyses. While generally chronological and covering each important front, the chapters also include separate ones on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. A single, absolutely masterful chapter summarizes the conflict at the end. Bringing new information to bear on well-known events, Roberts provides striking new insights into the war and puts some long-harbored beliefs to rest.

The most important thread running through Robert's retelling of the War constitutes the singular mistakes that Adolf Hitler made and his underlying motivations while also highlighting his strengths. Hitler had an unusually prodigious knowledge of military equipment and detail and was a shrewd controller of men; a striking example was when, in the aftermath of his victory over France, he suddenly promoted twelve generals to Field Marshals, thus generally diluting the distinguished character of the rank and emphasizing his dominion over his officers. However, whatever his strengths were were far overshadowed by the stupendous mistakes he made. Admittedly the greatest was to decide to attack the Soviet Union. Hitler completely underestimated the sheer tenacity of the ordinary Russian soldier and citizen and on the other side of the continent, also underestimated the tenacity of that tiny island named England. His second greatest mistake was to foolishly declare war on the United States. Here Hitler made an even more elementary error in underestimating the enormous resources and production capacity of the United States which soon started bolstering the great Soviet war machine as well as the British. Most importantly, Hitler committed both mistakes fueled by his essential Nazism and thirst for Lebensraum (living space) in the East. And the fundamental underlying ideology driving this thinking which finally drove a stake into his grand plans was his racial theory about inferior Slavs and Jews. It was this rabid racial ideology which prevented him from shrewdly taking advantage for instance of Eastern Russians' contempt for Stalin's regime and turning them into allies; instead Hitler assigned the feared Einsatzgruppen to essentially wipe out Russian towns from the map. These SS units participated in the wholesale personalized murder of a million Russians in 1941 alone, killing on a scale whose sheer personal nature and horrifying brutality dwarfs even the later industrialized gassings of The Holocaust. Roberts does a superb job of highlighting how it was this basic racial and xenophobic mentality that drove almost all of Hitler's mistakes including most of his military ones.

Roberts also has revealing analyses of more tactical errors by Hitler. These include not ramping up U-boat production in time to possibly starve Britain and make her sue for peace, not focusing on fighter development without which his cherished bombers would not be effective, being almost blissfully indifferent to the Japanese whose help he could have considered in invading the Soviet Union, and of course his two cardinal tactical errors; letting the British get away at Dunkirk (Roberts demolishes the belief that Hitler did this because he was interested in peace negotiations with Britain) and even more importantly, halting the advance on Moscow in the summer of 1941, sudden driving his forces to the South. This miscalculation, combined with Stalingrad and the later great tank battle of Kursk, signaled the death knell for the Nazi regime.

Roberts also pays due attention to the Pacific theater of war including the incredibly bloody fighting at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His discussion of this front includes a superb chapter on the Battle of Midway which was the turning point in the Pacific war, and most notably a detailed and riveting analysis of the more under-appreciated stage of the battle in Burma. The British response in Burma against a determined enemy in a sweltering thicket of tropical heat and rain forests was comparable to anything else in the War, and Roberts calls the defeat of the Japanese in Burma the "greatest gift that the British could have given India". He also has detailed and tactically accomplished accounts of the war in North Africa, (against Rommel's famed Afrika Corps), Normandy, Sicily and Italy and of the Ardennes offensive (The Battle of the Bulge) and the march towards Berlin. These accounts are interspersed with sharp portraits of men like FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Manstein, Rommel, Keitel and Goring.

Robert's chapter on the U-boat war is particularly skilled and he carefully documents the initial disasters that befell the British navy in the Atlantic. The U-boats sank millions of tons of shipping, and if Hitler had stepped up production earlier he could have starved off Britain much sooner in the war. However, in the end it was not the resilience of the Royal Navy nor Germany's increasingly dwindling war production capability that were decisive; it was a secret weapon that was developed by mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park near London. It is difficult to overemphasize the absolutely crucial role that breaking the Enigma code of the Nazis played in the war. It is a silent undercurrent running through Roberts's narrative but its overwhelming importance is clear; it was code-breaking that won the critical Battle of Midway, and it was code-breaking that proved pivotal not just in the U-boat battle but in North Africa and in Normandy. It was not the atomic bomb, not even radar, but the obscure code-breaking work of brilliant scientists toiling away in the utmost secrecy that really won the war.

Further on Roberts has separate chapters on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. His chapter on the Holocaust is painful to read and captures the key facts, including why FDR avoided bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz; there was genuine concern about killing prisoners (concern that in hindsight seems misguided) and such bombing was seen as a diversion of bombers from German cities. Roberts's analysis of strategic bombing is highly readable. Along with the atomic bombing of Japan, it's strategic bombing that is the most controversial part of the Allied campaign in the war. The destruction of Hamburg and Dresden are well known (the latter made famous by Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"). Roberts wisely avoids passing any moral judgement and simply analyses whether the carpet bombing of German cities worked, and whether it was necessary. The answer to the first question is decidedly yes. There is a clear correlation between dwindling German war production and air power and the Allied bombing campaign; the bombing also kept German aircraft away from the Eastern front. The answer to the second question is more ambiguous, but in hindsight provided by the first answer it too appears favourable. Certainly the number of people killed in German cities by bombing, while quite high, was dwarfed by ground losses on both Western and Eastern fronts.

If I have a minor gripe with the book, it is that Roberts could have added about a hundred more pages and fleshed out the chapters on Stalingrad and the Holocaust in more detail. No matter how many books you read about the War, the Eastern Front and the Holocaust comprise a set of events which constantly beggar belief by their sheer magnitudes and leave one's mind shatteringly numbed. While 6 million Jews and others were murdered in an orgiastic frenzy of factory-like slaughter, 27 million Russians lost their lives in what can only be described as Dante's worst nightmare, a sea of blood whose volume is unmatched in human history. Just one statistic puts the staggering Russian losses in perspective; for every American soldier who died on the battlefield, 60 Russian soldiers lost their lives. About a million men died at Stalingrad alone compared to half a million or so American soldiers in the entire War. At the same time, the unimaginable ferocity on the Eastern Front was possibly matched only by Josef Stalin's own monstrous barbarity toward his own people; not even Hitler personally tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own officers and generals for absolutely no reason. In the annals of twentieth century brutality nobody can match the excesses of Stalin, and these excesses manifested themselves dangerously in the complete lack of preparation the Soviet Union faced during the early Nazi onslaught. It was only the gargantuan resolve of ordinary Russian citizens and soldiers combined with the certain death at the hands of of their own officers that deserters would face (thanks to Stalin) that forced every Russian to fight for his life. The Nazi-Soviet conflict can only be seen through the lens of one of those mythical conflicts signaling the end of the world. While tomes have been published both on this conflict as well as the singular horror that was the Holocaust, Roberts has relatively brief (although highly well-informed) chapters on both topics and I thought that an addition of a hundred or so pages would have been a small sacrifice for some added narrative on these earth-shattering events.

But these are minor issues. In the purview of his analyses, the crisp and riveting style of his narrative and the comprehensive detailing of every single important front, battle and fact of this great conflict, Roberts is second to none. While Roberts's basic thrust is to highlight Hitler's tactical mistakes, his overweening racial ideology and his conflict with his generals, in retrospect of course such analysis is relatively easily enunciated. Just think of how we would have written history differently had the Nazis, God forbid, won the war. We would possibly be talking about French casualties by Allied bombing instead of British casualties in the Blitz (the former actually exceeded the latter), and General Mark Clark letting the Nazi tenth army get away in Italy instead of Hitler letting the British get away at Dunkirk. Given the capacity of Hitler's armies, the experience and fighting capability of the German solider (probably the most well trained of any in the conflict), the superiority of German weaponry and the brilliance of his generals (of whom some like Manstein, Rommel and Guderin were regarded as the finest strategic minds on any side), it was by no means obvious that the Nazis would lose. But as Roberts's overall message in the book indicates, in the end Adolf Hitler lost the war because of the same reason that he almost won it; because he was a Nazi.

I cannot recommend The Storm of War enough. The Second World War was a transformative event in human history that should be remembered until the end of time. It deserves the constant and passionate attention of the finest historians of their generations, and Andrew Roberts proves himself as one of the best of this class.

Note: The Storm of War is not available in the United States until 2011. It is available in Britain and can be ordered through the British Amazon.

A rollicking romp through quantum connections

Very few physicists have emphasized the human side of physics as well as Jeremy Bernstein. A veteran physicist and writer who has known many famous physicists of the twentieth century, Bernstein has penned highly readable portraits of Oppenheimer, Bethe and Einstein among others and has written books about nuclear weapons, quants on Wall Street, Bell Laboratories and the German atomic bomb project. In this book he explores the several ramifications of the strange proliferation of concepts from quantum mechanics into popular culture, theater, art, philosophy and cinema. Perhaps this proliferation is not surprising considering the bizarre implications of the actual meaning of quantum theory, but as Bernstein indicates, non-physicists have extended the reach of quantum concepts far beyond what the scientific creators of the theory would have intended.

Bernstein takes us through a diverse variety of topics and characters. He describes the Dalai Lama's writings in which he draws parallels between Buddhism and quantum theory, and this gives him an opportunity to talk about two central characters in the book, physicists John Bell and David Bohm who the Dalai Lama knew and who played crucial roles in the development of the interpretative parts of the discipline. Bernstein describes the famous conflict between Einstein and Bohr about the meaning of quantum theory and explains Bell's groundbreaking contributions that argued against Einstein's belief that quantum mechanics might be governed by some kind of "hidden variables" which we have to discover; Bell showed that any such hidden variable theory would have to involve superluminal communication and would be at odds with the theory of relativity. Later many remarkably precise experiments verified Bell's ideas, and Bell would almost certainly have received a Nobel Prize had he not died untimely of a stroke.

Bernstein also discusses the extension of quantum theory into non-scientific realms and describes the plays of the playwright Tom Stoppard (writer of "Hapgood" and "Arcadia"), who seems to have incorporated some concepts into his writing. Along the way Bernstein discusses the famous double slit experiment of quantum theory (best discussed in the Feynman Lectures on Physics) which inspired Stoppard and other writers including Princeton philosopher Rebecca Goldstein (author of "Incompleteness", a fascinating book about Kurt Godel) whose work Bernstein also describes. Bernstein also uses these narrative threads to talk about his own background at Harvard and Princeton where he came in contact with many of the key figures in the development of quantum physics. He has a clear and readable discussion of Bell's theorem and its background.

The last chapters in Bernstein's book talk about New Age-type expositions of quantum theory discussed by writers like Gary Zhukov and Fritjof Capra (author of "The Tao of Physics") who seemingly find many parallels between the philosophical parts of the discipline and Eastern philosophy and mysticism. Bernstein is admittedly not very impressed with these interpretations as many of them sound rather fuzzy and devoid of concrete meaning. Perhaps Bernstein should have also taken a well-deserved jab at the New Age guru Deepak Chopra, whose use of quantum concepts seems to have been divined from thin air.

Readers might be forgiven for Bernstein's digressions which usually constitute a common part of his writings. For instance his first chapter is about his encounter with poet W H Auden and the philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr which seems to have little bearing on the rest of the book. A chapter on Niels Bohr's protege, the physicist Leon Rosenfeld, suddenly digresses into how quantum mechanics came in conflict with Soviet Marxism and dialectical materialism, and how Soviet physicists struggled to reconcile physics with their political ideology. A lot of this has to do with Bernstein's own background and it usually makes for interesting reading, but as in some of his other books, one cannot help shake off the feeling that Bernstein is trying to pack too much into the book and jumping from one topic to another with alacrity. However, I personally enjoy such digressions, and while some others may not, there is still enough interesting material in this slim book to keep most readers with a variety of interests hooked.

Coyne vs Dawkins

This year being Darwin's 200th birth anniversary, we have seen a flurry of books on evolution. Out of these two stand out for the authority of their writers and the core focus on the actual evidence for evolution that they provide; Jerry Coyne's "Why Evolution is True" and Richard Dawkins's "The Greatest Show on Earth". I have read Coyne's book and it's definitely an excellent introduction to evolution. Yet I am about 300 pages into Dawkins and one cannot help but be sucked again into his trademark clarity and explanatory elegance. I will have detailed reviews of the two books later but for now here are the main differences I can think of:

1. Dawkins talks about more evidence than simply that from biology. He also has evidence from history, geology and astronomy.

2. Dawkins's clarity of exposition is of course highly commendable. You would not necessarily find the literary sophistication of the late Stephen Jay Gould here but for straight and simple clarity this is marvelous.

3. A minor but noteworthy difference is the inclusion of dozens of absorbing color plates in the Dawkins book which are missing in Coyne's.

4. Most importantly, Dawkins's examples for evolution on the whole are definitely more fascinating and diverse than Coyne's, although Coyne's are pretty good too. For instance Coyne dwells more on the remarkable evolution of the whale from land-dwelling animals (with the hippo being a close ancestral cousin). Also, Coyne's chapter on sexual selection and speciation are among the best such discussions I have come across.

Dawkins on the other hand has a fascinating account of Michigan State University bacteriologist Richard Lenski's amazing experiments with E. coli that have been running for over twenty years. They have provided a remarkable window into evolution in real time like nothing else. Also marvelously engaging are his descriptions of the immensely interesting history of the domestication of the dog. Probably the most striking example of evolution in real time from his book is his clear account of University of Exter biologist John Endler's fabulous experiments with guppies in which the fish evolved drastically before our very eyes in relatively few generations because of carefully regulated and modified selection pressure.

Overall then, Coyne's book does a great job of describing evolution but Dawkins does an even better job of explaining it. As usual Dawkins is also uniquely lyrical and poetic in parts with his sparkling command of the English language.

Thus I would think that Dawkins and Coyne (along with probably Carl Zimmer's "The Tangled Bank" due to be published on October 15) would provide the most comprehensive introduction to evolution you can get.

As Darwin said, "There is grandeur in this view of life". Both Coyne and Dawkins serve as ideal messengers to convey this grandeur to us and to illustrate the stunning diversity of life around us. Both are eminently readable.

The official slide into absurdity

There's been so much said about Obama prematurely winning the Nobel Peace Prize that I cannot possibly add to it. This was one of the very few times when both his detractors and his supporters were united in their recognition of this absurdity. I bet the news has given a headache to Obama and undoubtedly introduced another lofty expectation and complication in his life.

Suffice it to say that it's at times like this that I feel gratified to be working in the sciences. Sure, Nobel Prizes in the sciences have also been controversial, but nowhere as controversial as the literature, peace and economics prizes. The peace prize has officially turned into a joke and the economics prize is close to being one. But the ribosome, DNA structure, symmetry breaking in weak interactions and high-temperature ceramic superconductors have a ring of certainty and permanence that no achievement in finance or peace can have, although an achievement in literature might come close to being this way. Uncle Alby's words speak again; "Politics is ephemeral but an equation is forever"...

More on V. Ramakrishnan and a book that started it all

You could start with the telephone interview on the Nobel website. What's interesting is that Ramakrishnan did his PhD. from a not particularly distinguished university; his rather peripatetic career really seems to have taken off only several years after graduate school. I think this is a good illustration of what you can achieve even later in life if you put your mind to it. In the interview he says that in fact he was not very interested in his PhD. research project. He used to subscribe to Scientific American at the time and it was through the magazine that he realized that the most exciting developments were happening in biology (I was about to switch my subscription from Scientific American to Discover; maybe I should stick to Scientific American now). He was also inspired by the example of famous physicists like Francis Crick and Walter Gilbert who switched to molecular biology and made pathbreaking contributions.

It is worth remembering that one of the key influences that propelled physicists into molecular biology after the War was a little book by Erwin Schrödinger named "What is Life"? which laid out the basic questions- but tantalizingly, not the answers- necessary for addressing the questions of life and heredity at a molecular level. It makes for very interesting reading even today. The book was based on lectures that Schrödinger gave in neutral Ireland in 1943, one of the very few places not torn by the conflict. Schrödinger was also woefully ignorant of chemistry and therefore did not focus on metabolism (proteins), only on heredity. Now we know that metabolism might have evolved separately from genetics and is at least as important as genetics.

More links; profile of Ramakrishnan in TOI featuring interviews with his father. It's always amusing when, the moment someone wins a Nobel Prize, the fact that he or she does not own a car and bicycles to work every day suddenly becomes the title of a news piece! In this particular case, given that Ramakrishnan works in bicycle-friendly Cambridge, it's probably not surprising that he rides to work. He would probably not have done this had he worked in San Diego or at Yale.

Ramakrishnan is astonishingly the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology's 13th Nobel Laureate. The laboratory has been to molecular and structural biology what Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory was to physics in the first half of the twentieth century. It was set up by Nobel Laureates and has served as a magnet for biostructural research for half a century.

More: A video interview with Ramakrishnan about his ribosome work, recorded at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (another molecular biology pioneer). It's worth noting how, in addition to being extremely perseverant and creative, Ramakrishnan was definitely also in the right place at the right time. For instance after his PhD. he ended up working with Peter Moore at Yale, a scientist who was then one of the very few people working on the ribosome. In addition, most modern high resolution structure determinations need access to a synchrotron which provides a very high intensity beam of x-rays. Ramakrishnan ended up at one of the world's premier sources of synchrotrons, Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Ramakrishnan also spares few words in castigating both the press and the general public for taking cognizance of important work only after it wins prizes. He says,

I think it’s a mistake to define good work by awards. This is a typical mistake that the public or even the press make. None of you called me about my work even two days ago… right?”

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics: Kao, Boyle and Smith

Seems nobody saw this coming but the importance of optical fibers and CCDs is obvious. It's also interesting that Indian physicist Narinder Kapany's name is not on the list. I am not completely familiar with the history but from what I know Kapany was one of the early pioneers in fiber optics.

It's no small irony that the CCD research was done in 1969 at Bell Labs. With this Bell Labs may well be the most productive basic industrial research organization in history, and yet today it is less than a mere shadow of itself. The CCD research was done 40 years back and the time in which it was done seems disconnected from the present not just temporally, but more fundamentally. The research lab that once housed six Nobel Prize winners on its staff can now count a total of four scientists in its basic physics division.

The 80s and indeed most of the postwar decades before then seem to be part of a different universe now. The Great American Industrial Research Laboratory seems like a relic of the past. Merck, IBM, Bell Labs...what on earth happened to all that research productivity?