Here is a podcast I did for The Economist on August 29, 2012. We discuss attempts by the Indian government to block social networking and text messaging, a new motor-racing series for electric cars and the legacy of Neil Armstrong.
Author: Akshat Rathi
Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.
Repairing voices: Good vibrations
How to restore people’s voices
Injury, disease or sheer old age mean that as many as 7% of Americans (and, presumably, a similar proportion of the population of other countries) have some kind of voice disorder caused by scarring of their vocal cords. Such scarring makes the cords stiff, and stops them producing sound in the normal way. But that could be overcome if a method were found to restore the cords’ flexibility.
Robert Langer, a pioneering biomedical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues think they have one. They have developed a material that mimics the characteristics of natural vocal cords and could thus help restore distorted voices.
To make their new material, Dr Langer and his team took polyethylene glycol, a substance widely used in the cosmetics industry and thus known to be safe, and altered the chemical linkages between its molecules. This allowed them to control the polymer’s viscosity and elasticity. After some trial and error, as they described on August 20th to a meeting of the American Chemical Society held in Philadelphia, they hit on a mixture which matches the traits of human vocal cords. Laboratory tests have shown that when air is blown through a model of the vocal cords made from this material, the model responds in the way that real cords do.
The new polymer gel is not intended to heal scarred tissue, but rather to make the whole tissue flexible enough to restore vibrations to normal. To achieve this Dr Langer proposes to inject the gel under the tissue membrane (a thin layer of cells that covers the vocal cords), forming an additional layer within. Patients with different voices could be treated with gels that had different physical characteristics, in order to produce the desired effect.
There is a limitation. The new gel is prone to degradation and in some cases would need to be topped up regularly. But trials on animals suggest the procedure is safe, and human trials are expected to start soon.
First published in The Economist.
References:
- A material to rejuvenate aging and diseased human vocal cords (Press release)
- Karajanagi et al, Annals of Otlogy, Rhinology and Laryngology, 2011
- InVivo therapeutics
A list of main references here. Image credit: The Economist
The virtues of restlessness
As a kid I was infamous for my mischievousness and the ability to not get tired. More often than not my parents’ visits to friends or family ended with apologies for my pranks. I got told off many times, but it made little difference. There was just so much to do and so little time.
My mum tells me that there was a point where she didn’t know whether her love for me was making her too soft. That she feared that wasn’t doing a good enough job in making sure that I behaved as most kids of my age did. That by then she should have been successful at instilling some civility in my actions. But it hadn’t happened. My restlessness was baffling my parents.
I don’t think I have changed much since then. Of course, I am lot more civil now. But I am still very restless. The only thing that has changed is that I have become aware of what it means to be restless. After realising that I could do little to reduce my restlessness, I started thinking of ways in which I could harness the power in someway. Now I think I’ve managed to do that, at least to a certain extent.
Today my restlessness helps me achieve many things. The simplest one is when I know I should stop doing something. In any activity there comes a point beyond which being involved in it is usually a waste of time. It is a tricky thing to know when that point comes. But somehow, over many years, I have found that when I notice my mind getting restless, it is probably the time to take notice of whether what I am doing is useful or not
Restlessness also forms the very basis of the creative process for me. For instance, when writing an article there are three stages: spark, research, writing. The spark usually occurs when I come across an idea that seems too cool to ignore. Then, if the idea hasn’t already been used by someone else, I spend time researching. It involves reading papers, gaining background knowledge, interviewing relevant people and feeding my brain with more ideas. Now before I start writing, I need to form a plan of how I am going to write that article. This is where my restlessness helps me. In my head I have this primordial soup of ideas, each struggling to make it to the top. This period is a very cumbersome yet enjoyable experience. My restlessness pushes me, and hopefully before I get exhausted I have picked out the relevant ideas and started writing the article.
One other thing that features on this blog quite often is finding sources of motivation. My restlessness, it turns out, is definitely one such source. I am rarely at peace with myself if I don’t have something that I am working on. It could be a long-term project like finding a job, or a short one like understanding a scientific phenomenon. My restlessness makes sure I have something to care for all the time and that helps me wake up every morning to go out and do something I can be proud of.
There are limitations too, though. Before I understood how to tame this beast, it has put me in trouble many times. Even today there are times when I can’t do anything about my restlessness and I end up being utterly exhausted. Another thing I’ve had to battle is balancing my restlessness with giving up. In someway it has made me become a lot more determined at finishing things than I remember ever being.
Something that helped me learn how to maneuver my restless mind, and it won’t come as a surprise to many, was learning how to meditate. I went to a ‘vipassana shibir’, Marathi words for meditation camp, when I was about 12 years old. It happened in Igatpuri, one of the most underrated hillstations in Maharashtra, at a beautiful monastery. For three days no one at the camp spoke a single word. No writing or reading either. Everyday we spent hours meditating or thinking. Any form of communication was restricted to gestures, including living in a dorm with many kids of the same age (boys at that age end up fighting quite a lot and these fights had to be without words, too). To me it opened doors to a new world, one where my mind could be made to focus on a single point on the horizon. (For adults they do a 10-day course of this kind. Whenever I get 10 days of free time to spend in India, this is going to be on the top of my list of things to do.)
Because being restless isn’t always a joyful experience, it forces me to seek moments of peace. For example, one of the best things about writing non-fiction is the time I spend researching. I have this freedom to dive as deep as I like into something and stay there for as long as my curiosity drives me for. I can jump from one pool to the other, and even connect them if that’s what I want to do.
Restlessness gets a bad rap. It is a double-edged sword, and, rather than fearing it, we must learn to wield it in battle. It has done wonders for me, and I am sure I am not alone.
Photo credit: wargecko
Akshat Rathi 