Tag: lokmat times

Rotavac is not India’s first indigenous vaccine

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

While the recently released low-cost rotavirus vaccine, Rotavac, is a great achievement for the country, it is not the “first indigenously developed vaccine”, as the prime minister’s office claims and then was parroted by newspapers. The honour goes to the bubonic plague vaccine developed in Bombay in 1897.

This is also not just a matter of semantics, where we ought to assume that the prime minister’s office implies “indigenous” to mean developed in Independent India. Because, as we have seen in the past, the prime minister is only too happy to (wrongly) claim centuries-old achievements to be “Indian innovations”.

India has played an important role in the history of vaccine’s use to fight disease. Their use means that the poorest of the poor today can live well beyond the age at which most kings died not too long ago. And the least we can do when we take vaccination forward in India today is to honour our past achievements.

Honouring history

The use of the first vaccine was pioneered by English scientist Edward Jenner in 1798. In the two centuries since, we have developed vaccines to fight 25 diseases. Fittingly, the disease against which the first vaccine was developed – smallpox – has been eradicated globally. The next disease on the list of diseases to be eradicated by the use vaccines could be polio.

But for nearly 100 years after the smallpox vaccine came in to use, the process of developing vaccines against other diseases remained difficult. This is because a vaccine then needed a naturally existing weak form of the disease. In the case of smallpox, that weak form was found in cowpox.

However, almost by accident, Louis Pasteur developed a laboratory method to generate a weak form of a disease. He used the method to create a vaccine against anthrax and chicken cholera. This is what revolutionised the work against infectious diseases.When injected into or ingested by the human body, vaccines work by stimulating the immune system and preparing it for when the real thing attacks in the future. Many vaccines provide lifelong immunity to a disease.

A young Russian, Waldemar Haffkine, was keenly following Pasteur’s work. At the time, cholera epidemics were common worldwide and someone had claimed to have isolated the bacteria that caused the disease. Despite Pasteur and Jenner’s work, many believed that that bacteria can’t be the sole cause behind cholera.

However, Haffkine agreed with the theory and worked hard on developing a cholera vaccine. He achieved success in 1892 and conducted the first human trial of the vaccine on himself. Having survived, he made the findings public but was dismissed by senior scientists.

The Plague Laboratory

Determined to see his invention have some impact on the world, he travelled to India where cholera epidemics had caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. His trials in Uttar Pradesh succeeded and he managed to vaccinate thousands. In 1895 he returned to France having caught malaria. But in 1896 was requested by the Governor of Bombay to help develop a vaccine against plague, which was ravaging the population of Bombay and Poona.

Against the advise of his French doctor, Haffkine travelled back to India and worked persistently to develop a plague vaccine. He succeeded within months, and, like the last time, tested the vaccine on himself. Within a few years, the vaccine was used to inoculate millions of people.

In 1899, a former residence of the Governor of Bombay was turned in to the Plague Laboratory and Haffkine made its director. The lab was renamed the Haffkine Institute in 1925, and remains an active institute for biological research in the country.

Haffkine was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1897. A London magazine wrote this about the announcement: “a Russian Jew, trained in the schools of European science, saves the lives of helpless Hindoos and Mohammedans and is decorated by the descendant of William the Conqueror and Alfred the Great.”

If you forgive the colonial tone, it is an apt eulogy in a rapidly globalising world that was being created then. His work is arguably no less “indigenous” to India than Rotavac, so it is sad that we forget such a legacy in celebrating the country’s new achievements.

First published in Lokmat Times. Image from Wikipedia. 

Rahul Gandhi’s shoes are a call to reclaim our right to privacy

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

The latest parliamentary fight is about Rahul Gandhi’s shoes. In a routine profiling exercise of prominent politicians, some police officers visited Gandhi’s home to ask about the colour of his eyes and the kinds of clothes he wore. This has proven to be enough of an excuse for the Congress party to accuse the BJP-led government of snooping.

While it may be true that this routine profiling was set up by Rajiv Gandhi when he was prime minster, if Narendra Modi wants more intimate details about Rahul Gandhi’s life, he would be able to access them without anyone else knowing whether such a search for information was ever made. India’s surveillance laws give the government sweeping powers without any oversight, and citizens don’t seem to care.

Thanks to the Raj

These modern laws are direct descendants of the ones the British set up in the 19th century. The Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 and the Indian Postal Office Act of 1898 gave the British the power to intercept any private message. The intelligence agencies Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) now monitor social media networks freely. While this may be under the guise of counter-terrorism, according to Scroll, their search parameters reflect political slants as well.

Consider an example of the capability of these agencies. In 2006, the then National Security Adviser MK Narayanan, while visiting a secret surveillance facility, was asked to make a phone call to his office using his personal mobile phone. Soon after he was given a recording of that supposedly private conversation, which was intercepted by machines called “stingrays” placed in a parking lot of the same premises. Astonished, he told the officials to be careful with the new machine.

In less than a decade since, mass surveillance has become easier than ever. And without the right oversight there has been no control over the abuse of power these tools give to those who can wield it.

Revelations by Edward Snowden, an American intelligence agency contractor, have shown that the US government is using the internet—the very medium thought to be a tool for liberation and democratisation—for achieving its surveillance goals instead. Those leaks show that, along with the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, these “Five Eyes” dip into the global data pool and spy on anyone they can get their hands on, even if it is the head of a state such as Brazil.

Got nothing to hide?

The Snowden revelations have sparked a global debate about citizens’ right to privacy. Sadly, a lot of people still don’t care. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre found that 40% American respondents find it “acceptable” that the US government spies on them. That acceptability increases to 54% if spying is done on other citizens.

One reason many give when asked why they find spying acceptable is: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” And it’s not just ordinary citizens who say this but also the leaders of tech industry who have been accused of aiding such surveillance. Eric Schmidt said this when he was CEO of Google, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, claims that privacy is no longer a “social norm”.

But is it true? Not really, according to journalist and activist Glenn Greenwald who worked with Snowden on the revelations. He says, “People can say that they don’t value their privacy, but their actions negate their authenticity.” Take the example of Zuckerberg, who is currently suing his neighbour because he is worried about his privacy.

The trouble is that this kind of mass surveillance—where every click, keystroke or phone call can be recorded and analysed—is damaging to the human spirit. In the famous novel 1984, George Orwell describes just such a surveillance state, where “there was no way of knowing if you were being watched at any given moment”. This instinct, says Greenwald, “creates a prison in the mind, which is a more effective way of ensuring obedience than brute force.”

Even while the countries who pioneered such surveillance change to add greater oversight over their capabilities, Indians remain silent about their government’s overreaching powers. It’s high time we reclaim our fundamental right.

First published in Lokmat Times. Image by presidencymaldives under CC-BY-NC license.

Why India must invest more in science

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

You must have read that 38% of doctors in the US are Indians, as are 36% of scientists at the space agency NASA and so are 34% of Microsoft employees. Daggubati Purandeswari, former MP and the minister of state for human resource development under Manmohan Singh’s first term as prime minister, had heard this too. Unfortunately Purandeswari parroted those numbers in a Rajya Sabha session without verifying and, because those statistics are not true, shewas ridiculed in the press for it.

The true numbers are are estimated to be smaller (but still significant). About 5% of doctors in the US may be Indians or of Indian origin, same for about 5% of NASA scientists and perhaps a similar proportion of Microsoft employees. What is probably also true is that most of these people with an Indian connection studied abroad in top universities before taking on these prestigious jobs.

We love to brag about what our fellow citizens achieve, and it is great to see that patriotism. But, sadly, we also love to exaggerate our achievements and inflate our egos in the process.

While it is great that Indians abroad have achieved and keep achieving great things, we must also reflect upon the fact that the country doesn’t do enough towards training its young to achieve those things at home. And a reminder of these facts and fables is necessary today in light of the recently released Indian budget.

Stopping the brain drain

India invests less than 1% of its GDP  in scientific research. Compare that with China’s investment of nearly 2%, the US’s of about 3% and South Korea’s of almost 4%. India’s ambition of featuring among the big nations of the world is being cut short because of our poor investment in science, and the results show.

The Times Higher Education ranking of world’s universities released today does not feature a single Indian educational institute in the top 100. Brazil, Russia and China—countries often considered India’s equal in the global economy—all feature at least one university in the prestigious list.

This mattes because, while we like to proclaim proudly that we are a nation full of engineers and doctors, we must also face the reality that the best of them go abroad to fulfil their dreams and aspirations. India needs to do better to hold on to its talents, and the easiest way to ensure that is to invest more in creating world-class universities for higher education and research.

Many bright minds have paid attention to this problem, and there has been some progress. The new Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, for instance, are welcome developments, but they must be provided enough support to flourish. The recent budget for science has even not managed to keep up with inflation—it is only 3.4% more than that in 2014.

Dheeraj Singh of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur thinks science departments need at least 15% more funds each year to live up to their promise. CNR Rao, former head of India’s Scientific Advisory council, told Nature, “There are scientists in India who want to do cutting-edge science. But to be competitive you need more funds.”

Paisa wise, Rupee foolish

And this plea is not without precedent. According to Space Foundation, for every $1 that the US government spends on NASA, the country’s gets $10 in economic benefit. Such a return is made possible because of the knowledge and expertise that NASA creates. Technologies such as global positioning systems used by smartphone users to find their location on a map and weather forecasting using satellites were developed by NASA researchers. The recent success of the Mars Orbiter Mission shows that Indian space research can do similar things with smaller investments.

Some may argue that India needs to invest in healthcare before it invents new rockets. While that argument has problems, even if accept it, the recent budget did worse for healthcare than for science. A 15% cut to the healthcare budget means that India’s health crisis is going to get worse. For all that prime minister Narendra Modi has promised, his actions speak louder than words. His government prefers the short-term benefits much more than long-term growth.

First published in Lokmat Times. Image credit: NASA.