Web Write-up Abed Chaudhury

Peering through gilded glass

This year marked half a century since the discovery of DNA. It is also the year when the overall human genome sequences were described with clarity and with all the gaps filled. It is also roughly sixty years since the atomic bomb came to be part of politics, of life in general. For a person who is around sixty now, a lot has happened in his life time. In the time scale of the civilised history of human beings, thought to be at most 60,000 years if we include the paleolithic hunter-gatherers, it is a mere wink of an eye. In one thousandth blink of elapsed time of our civilised history we have travelled from a sense of self-cognition to a form of molecular self knowledge; and we have also have taken a leap from being stone throwing hordes to thermonuclear sophisticates. If 60,000 years ago we could only crack a few skulls in our anger, now we can potentially destroy everyone and that too a hundred times over. However, we still carry in us that same primeval skull, that same hate-lust-fear-curiosity infested mind. Suddenly we are beyond gradual and incremental steps and a defined future; now we are being fast-tracked in milliseconds of history in a direction the nature of which we cannot even comprehend.
   This exhilarating journey of the human species is a given condition now. It has been a result of many accidents, many events that were unique and salubrious, while others were reprehensible and loathsome. Many fine minds are involved in cataloguing and thinking through these calamitous changes that shape us. Nevertheless, we as a nation do not have this luxury. In order to keep pace with the rest of the world and prosper, we, the 140 million members of the 6-billion member human community, must find a formula for cohesive, peaceful and prosperous existence.
   My own point of view is informed by a science-based optimism, a belief in human ingenuity. I believe that a nation of 140 million is potentially very strong by definition. Intelligence being randomly distributed in human species irrespective of lineage and race, we have a huge pool of talented individuals amongst our nation. Our challenge is to their future unfettered from the assorted mixture of negative traits such as poverty, conflict, and a lack of vision. We have no option but to make our politics very simple. We have no choice but to be optimistic, driven by a tradition that harnesses the past but one that is at the same time informed by science and a set of pragmatic skills that will quickly help realise the potentials of our people.
   These are not idle or vague or general statements. For Bangladesh, this incantation of the obvious is indispensable. Just a cursory look at our political landscape will convince even the most mellow of observers that our politicians and ruling elite are not interested in taking even the first steps. A platform of national consensus comprising core values and intent is missing. The very fabric of national existence is woven every few years; we are like year-to-year spiders spinning transient cobwebs, never wanting a home, an edifice that will endure time. We are shy of boldly proclaiming who we are.
   Bangladeshis are a unique brand of people distinguishable partly by their language and ethnicity, but also by their religion and unique history. They are a people comprising the aborigines of the timeless alluvial delta but made hybrid through transmigrations through the millennia. A people informed by streaks of animist, Buddhist and Hindu ideas but then modified and reinvented through a sufi syncretic version of Islam. And in this modern era a people that are creative, poetry-infused, spiritual, tolerant and democratic. We do not need to be inspired any more by the urban anglophilic Bengal Renaissance of Raja Ram Mohan Ray and Bankim Chandra; the core values of that movement do not resonate with the people of east Bengal with their peasant heritage; we do not need to endlessly pay homage to those pathfinders, important though they were in that historic epoch. For they advocated a kind of urban, occident-inspired exclusiveness and intellectual snobbery that is still rampant in our educated class and is in fact an obstacle to the true democratisation of our society. It branded the traditions of our villages as "Gramyo" caricatured and lampooned our wise elders of both religions and it nucleated a version of xenophobia against Islam that has not served us well. Our nationalistic educated class still does not have the courage to say that we reject those traits and assumptions totally and categorically, that we have fashioned a set of newer assumptions which serve us better. We do not yet have the courage to say that we carry in us the legacy of what happened in Sylhet and Chittagong, Comilla and Narsingdi and Barisal and Pabna. We have not learnt yet that the history of those places together is our history, the events that resonated through those places through the millennia are our fountainhead of inspiration. Thirty two years of independence and our intellectual classes are still giving us the old hackneyed doctrine of the Bengal renaissance, the First Light that dazzled our eyes for the first time. We are still like poor peasants looking through gilded glass into a house where history is taking place; where we are mere vicarious spectators encountering our enlightenment through others' eyes.
   It has been a long time since the world moved from this kind of second-hand experience and learned to accept every place as a valid unit of history. In European countries, every village, every hamlet is celebrated for its unique contribution to the nation's history. In the USA, every small town is celebrated for its uniqueness. In Bangladesh, we make no such attempt. Our school students memorise lores of Ibrahim Lodhi or Vasco da Gama; our university students wax lyrical about Ram Mohan Roy and yet we do not know or study why our cities are named the way they are; we do not know the history of our villages, the stories behind the ancient parganas. No acceptable intellectual investigations are ever made of these things. Somehow they are devoid of glory, they are only our history, and therefore not important. We still behave like colonised people where our history comes bottled from somewhere else. We copy others history and pass them as our own.
   Of course we celebrate our war of independence as uniquely ours. We pretend as though we did not exist as people before 1971; that suddenly out of nothingness we came into being through this war. We pretend that we only existed as agents of struggle before that forever marching, chanting slogans. We have turned ourselves into cardboard caricatures of history. In reality, for millennia there was creativity in our land, our people were shaped by ancient ideas that proliferated in the landmass of what is Bangladesh. Old primal animist ideas mingled with those of Buddhism, Hinduism and then were transformed and incorporated by the Sufi version of Islam. In agricultural innovations, artistic pottery and craft, maritime ventures people of this delta have left a legacy. They bred better crops, were custodians of the genetic heritage of our flora and fauna. And through their actions they have left behind names of our villages and towns, sometimes enormous reservoirs of water that celebrate their name and they have left us, carriers if those hybrid genes and those songs poems and stories that enrich our mental lives. If the conglomerations of that legacy cannot be my renaissance then I do not want one borrowed from Florence or Kolkata.

Science and technophobia
There exists among social scientists, liberal activists, and other workers and thinkers trained in the humanities a form of technophobia that has its origin in western romanticism. This attitude has been nurtured through millennia as a form of rebel resistance against the machine, often fed by dreams of a utopian arcadia devoid of material wants or machine derived gains. Both the technophobia and the inchoate poetic melancholia that triggers it are human conditions with their genesis hidden deep in our psyche. Loving machines certainly is an acquired taste.
   In the old hunter gatherer society, or even as late as the sixties in the bulk of what is described as “developing” countries, technologies were not significantly visible, especially in the villages. I recall growing up in a rural hinterland amidst breathtaking sceneries but without electricity or running water. There were giant ponds, often celebrating the names of some personality of local history and we swam and bathed with great gusto in those ponds any time we wanted. For more enfeebled ones there was always bathing with warm water poured with a mug, the “bath of a crow”, as it used to be described derisively. At night giant vistas of adjoining rice fields used to scintillate with fireflies and inside our houses we studied diligently in feeble light lit by kerosene lanterns. During full moon the whole village used to glow in a form of light-shadow routine, that in memory, even now brings a chill to my spine. Years later, images of those nights would be rekindled in me by the haunting song of Cat Stevens, “I am being followed by a moon-shadow…”. Somehow, somewhere, it seems that that inner-London music sophisticate had encountered something that I encountered in the bucolic village of Kanihati.
   But poetic memories of rural arcadia aside, what are we to do with technology? Villages are now routinely lit with electricity and the moonlit nights of howling jackals have receded into the deep obscure hinterlands of our psyche. Instead of being gripped by the twinkling stars at night kids ogle the flickering electronic light-shadow of TV screens, deriving vicarious sensations from faraway lands. The passive insemination of easy technology has certainly occurred in all walks of life. The giant high tension electrical poles resembling miniscule Eiffel Towers dot our rural landscape with as much matter-of-fact visage as the undulating betel-nut palm. But has technology entered our attitude in a way that we can be masters of technology? Or has technology remained for us as enigmatic as the mystical moonlight of the bygone era?
   In 1895, a Bengali by the name of Jagadish Chandra Basu demonstrated the effect of radio waves in full view of the British administrative elite in the city of Kolkata. That was virtuoso discovery of a technology that would later change the world; thought up by a Bengali. But instead if getting credit for it, Basu today languishes in obscurity, overshadowed by Marconi, who made the same discovery a year later. In a recent extravagant biography of Marconi, Basu gets a one line cursory reference. That was the first and probably the most dramatic event of someone from our lands making a technological breakthrough.
   Today, in spite of all the paraphernalia of technology around us, Bangladesh remains a technology-averse nation. While Rabindranath, a contemporary of Basu, has kept us mesmerized for a whole century, Basu’s memory has faded or is often linked with his work with plants. In the hundred years since 1895, no discovery of that magnitude has ever been made by a Bengali. In the Pakistan days no significant attempts were made to inculcate a love of science and technology (S&T) in the population. S&T remained, and still remains, soiled by the image of a form of boring obscurity, an arena occupied by nerds and geeks. Bright students gravitate towards subjects such as economics, or commerce, or medicine where the sole motive often is not to conquer new vistas of human physiology and preventative medicine, but simply to mint money as quickly as one can hold a stethoscope. The whole cultural space of the nation, containing its loftiest goals, dearest images, all its pious visions are consummated with songs, dance and poetry. For science there is only a hard shell of ennui, or a grudging acceptance on the grounds of a better life.
   What we need to culture instead is what I would like to describe as the “Jagadish syndrome”, after the great scientist, J.C. Basu (JCB). To JCB, science was not a drab, difficult topic eliciting boredom; it was rather like poetry and music. In fact, the same impetus that causes us to understand poetry and music also could propel us to understand science, not as rote calculations but as a sense of wonder about nature. Somehow in our education system that wonder and the consequent mental energy are allowed to be dissipated.
   What causes this form of subtle animus that makes us resistant to the true spirit of science? I believe that in Bangladesh we nurture a brand of Luddite technophobia that has become a part of the mythical lore of the nation. In that view poetry, dreaming, love, etc., are pitted, in subtle ways, against a genuine appreciation of nature through mental tools of science. Part of the problem is that technology did not develop from within. If we had known radio-waves through the poetry-infused writings of JCB, rather than the radio-sets that came from England, maybe we would have looked at electromagnetic radiation differently. In a way that is not appreciated widely, colonialism robbed us of an attitude towards science that in my opinion is the only way of implementing science successfully. And that is to see it as an extension of our organic self, as a valid and inevitable expression of our inner creativity. We have to re-invent that attitude. We have to love science like we love poetry and music.
   I believe that it can be done. It has to begin very early in our villages where six year old girls look at butterflies with dreamy eyes. It has to begin in our village maktabs where toddlers oscillate their bodies with chants of the Koran that they are memorizing --- where sylvan rice-paddocks with storks and kingfishers flying above look like yet another poem waiting to be written.
   In that nature-infused world, we have to sow the seed of science as a form of wonder about nature, about water, about insects and about the paddy that is growing everywhere. We have to take very basic ideas of genetics, numbers, chemistry, and physics to those kids whose minds have just blossomed and will soon wither. It is about as challenging as instilling poetry and music all over the nation. It will need love and creativity more that it will need number-crunching zeal.

Will he or will he not?
I recently had a meeting with Professor Norman Borlaug, father of green revolution, wheat breeder par excellence and eminent laureate of Nobel Peace Prize. A few of us scientists talked to him one by one, and later he singled me out for further exposition of my own work on seed production, about which he showed great interest. Later he described his own work spanning well over half a century culminating in the huge increase in wheat production all over the developing world including what had become known as the "hunger belt" of South Asia including vast areas of India. Today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are self-sufficient in food grains and any prevailing hunger is not due to an absolute shortage of grains in these countries. In spite of all the criticisms directed at the Green Revolution, its ability to increase the level of production of food grains can never be doubted. Professor Borlaug, and to some extent Professor Swaminathan of India, deserve full credit for that. In Bangladesh, eminent rice breeders such as Dr. Hasanuzzaman and Dr. Mortuza Chowdhury, among others, have played very important roles in making us self-sufficient in rice. From the famine-prone years of early 1970's to the end of millennium our population has increased by 60-80%, and yet from a chronic short-fall of several million tons in the 1970s we have now become a totally self-sufficient, even a marginally food-surplus nation. This remarkable progress has been made possible by elegant work on rice breeding, good agricultural extension and the talent of our rice producers. I have asked both Prof. Borlaug and Prof. Swaminathan about this miracle and who they thought were the post important people behind this awesome improvement. Both scientists put very high importance on the ingenuity of our farmers and breeders --- people who remain nameless and largely unappreciated.
   Indeed it is the genius of the Neolithic farmers that gave us the first agricultural revolution. Since that time plants have been selected meticulously for better and better traits by people who were never formally trained in genetics or breeding science but clearly understood the cardinal principle of improvement through selection. Through millennia better selected crops have been accumulated in many countries. Called land-races, these lines became the raw materials that were used to create new combination of traits through breeding; lines that ushered in the green revolution. The green revolution did not create anything fundamentally new; it simply combined pre-existing traits in a more intelligent way, producing lines that did not lodge and shed its grains prematurely, or ones that used fertilizer better. The individual traits that made these combinations possible were there through millennia, selected and maintained by our farmers, who were often women. The genetic endowment of crops, a noble heritage and wealth of humankind, is owned by the farming women of the world, including the women of Bangladesh. As we celebrate the arrival of the high performing grains most of these original innovators remain unknown to us.
   A large part of the problem of why science has not become an integrated part of our culture in Bangladesh is a failure of understanding the process by which technology, in particular breeding technology, has survived over millennia. This has led to a very low status accorded to our farmers and also formal scientists who study plant sciences. The disdain meted out to our farmers finds its parallel in the way we treat our agricultural scientists and extension workers. In the matrix of social position they often enjoy a low acclaim. While we shower acclaim on our poets and painters and politicians and visionaries, we shower the scorn of neglect on our plant breeders, our veterinarians, our horticulturists. Surely an act of creative ingenuity that increases food production by even one percent is hugely more laudable than the most sublime poetry imaginable. Yet name me one person whose work on producing more foodgrains comes even close, in the scale of national adulation, to fame enjoyed by our poets or painters or musicians. The mental habit and cultural assumptions that have created this science-averse atmosphere in our nation are many and their eradication even more problematic. But those changes are minimal preconditions of any genuine improvement of our nation. A major problem is a lack of people in the higher decision making echelons who understand anything about science themselves, or even have any interest in being informed about science by an adviser. We have a Minister of S&T but does he advise the Prime Minister on Science? In many countries including Australia, the PM has a scientific adviser. In developed nations there are learned bodies such as Academies of Science, think tanks, and universities that are linked to farming communities. In neighbouring India, eminent scientists have access to the PM directly without the need to go through intermediaries. In our country the old-guard bureaucratic mandarins, often products of totally science-less education, make sure that technocrats become "desciencitized" before they become politically influential. Or somehow the process of reaching the stratospheric heights of national leadership causes them to forget that they once were and still could be scientists. After watching a few scientists turned politicians, that is my humble conclusion.
   So we do have a systemic problem on our pathway of becoming a S&T savvy nation? Already these systemic problems have caused us to pay dearly. The lack of adequate IT infrastructure related to a faulty decision regarding under-ocean cable network has already been talked about widely but it is not clear that any remedial thinking is in place regarding these mismanagements. In life sciences, encompassing agro and veterinary and horticultural sciences as well as medicine and molecular sciences we now have a huge gap even by South Asian or regional yardsticks. In scientific productivity as evidenced by publication records in eminent journals, we languish somewhere between Afghanistan and Upper Volta even though we have produced people like JC Basu and SN Basu, of Boson fame. The later Basu was a professor of Dhaka University physics department, the alma mater of our current Minister of Science and Information technology. A life scientist is now President of the Republic. As a ceremonial icon of the nation he could become a highly visible champion of science in Bangladesh. Will he, or will he not? That is now the question.

In search of Maulavi Abdul Ghani
Following is what General Colin Powell the US secretary of State said inter alia regarding his recent trip to Bangladesh.
   “In the course of my meetings in Bangladesh, I spoke with the Minister of Science and Information and Communications Technology, Dr. Ahmed Moyeen Khan, and he’s putting all government services on-line: E-government, e-business. But more importantly, he is determined to make sure that every town and village in Bangladesh — that poor country, a country with such a large population, such desperate need — he is going to make sure that every village and town in Bangladesh has access to the Internet, has access to that marvellous store of knowledge and information up in the ether, waiting to be brought down, waiting to be brought down to educate youngsters, to provide opportunities, to bring in the knowledge of the world to help the most desperate people in the world.
   It is a seductive image, to bring knowledge down from mere ether for the “desperate” people, and although the ether theory has been discredited, the metaphor lingers on and feeds the imagination of developmentwalahs. In reality though, information is stored in real computers, often a world away, and while it is available through internet, everyone, poor peasants of Bangladesh included, must access it through an internet service provider, a decent computer and above all, stable supply of electricity, commodities not in ample supply in rural Bangladesh. And even after all that there are caveats; for instance, ten times as much garbage than genuine information clutter the cyberspace, and unless our rural folks are discriminatory and judicious users of internet, they could be misled in their search for information as innocuous as how to grow better onion.
   While I hesitate to take a stand that might dampen the national enthusiasm for the cyber era, I would like to point out a few realities of our villages that have occurred to me during my recent frequent trips to a particular Bangladeshi village. And that village happens to be the one that I grew up in the sixties. While much has changed since then the issues related to development education literacy etc have remained fairly similar in spite of the cyber era.
   From the age of four till I turned nine I was taught, in a village, by a man named Maulavi Abdul Ghani who was my teacher of the Quran, arithmetic, Bangla, Social Studies and English. Early in the morning he used to arrive, often walking briskly, from a neighbouring village. In winter months we would see him matarialize, suddenly from thick fog that used to accumulate in the plain. In the following several hours he would teach me and my cousins and other rural kids rudimentary Arabic as well as how to read the Quran, and then after a break would change into being the teacher of the local primary school. Our learning tools included the conventional black board, chalk and a duster, and a healthy supply of dried tamarind seed with which we wrote both Bangla and English on the dirt floor of the school.
   We often collected mud from the neighbouring fish pond and made model cars, sculptures etc with that mud. We used to collect flowers and rubbed soda and alkali on them seeing how flowers changed colours which gave us basic ideas of dyes and PH. It was learning through interacting with the elements of nature and with materials available from the local area.
   Maulavi Abdul Ghani was a demanding task-master without a shadow of any sense of inferiority about the humble school of which he was the only teacher. Rather, he would often invite us to measure ourselves against people like Ghandhi, Jinnah and Suhrawardi.
   A seed was planted in me in that bucolic hinterland of a village; a seed of daring curiosity, a home-grown pride, and a learning so intimately linked to nature and elements that it became an organic part of my self. Looking back and many universities of world calibre later , I still remember those dew-soaked mornings of learning rapid-fire mental arithmetic, those tamarind seeds that taught me how to write Bangla and English alphabets and the sticky mud of the flood plains of sylhet that taught me how to carve a shape out of clay.
   All the ingredients of good education was there for me then in that village and it is there now for the kids who are now learning in that village. However, what is Missing is Maulavi Abdul Ghani. A man with intellectual rigour, simplicity, pride and punculaity all parcelled in a deceptively humble and incredible chutzpah-filled personality. That inability, a failure to produce teachers like him has become the biggest problem of our rural education.
   I recently met the state Minister of Education who was visiting Australia along with a high powered delegation from the ministry of education. I met them surrounded by important people representing Australian Government, our High Commissioner to Australia, and many other diginatories. It was not an atmosphere congenial for debate on the strategy of our education but I did mention the bit about Maulavi Abdul Ghani, and the tamarind seeds to the Minister. I also told him that we in Bangladesh always had a healthy tradition of primary and secondary education, that our improvement must flow organically from what we had before and anything new, particularly anything from a culture as different as Australia will invariably lead to teething problems. There are fundamental differences in how teachers are looked at and treated in Bangladesh compared to western countries for example. I do not think I made a good impression with my love of the ancient Bangladeshi ways. An atmosphere of uncritical technophilia and hype has been generated around internet and technology and expectations have been raised through publicity in a way that perhaps cannot be fulfilled.
   In this clamour it is often forgotten that there is no real substitute for actual cognitive changes through education, changes that need emotion-laden attentiveness, a genuine love and close encounter with the learning material, and development of sensory faculties through patience, guidance and actual interaction with nature. These basic human aspects of learning are immutable and cannot be substituted by any cyber experience. Internet mediated learning is simply a tool, like the printing press was a tool and is not a substitute for actual thinking and learning.
   Thus in our head -long fascination for the cyber era we should not forget the good old primary school teaching, of mud-strewn sculpturing, mental arithmetic learnt through rote chanting, and language learnt through actual descriptions of nature experienced through our senses. Along with these essentials our kids can also learn how to download information from “cyber-space” and how to use internet search engines to find the desired information, and even how to make a web-page of their school.
   Let us let our village kids learn, if we indeed can afford to to so, how to use internet based virtual education, but only as an adjunct to, and not as a substitute of the real earthy education that we already have in place in our schools. And in our new found fascination for computers let us not forget that we need more teachers like Maulavi Abdul Ghani.
   And by the way, General Powel, our villages might appear poor seen through American eyes, but believe me, there is more resourcefulness there than there is desperation.

Science and technology: Hoping for a miraculous cognition
Technological breakthroughs are reported with a dizzying frequency these days. Hardly a week goes by without us hearing of yet another wonder discovery occurring somewhere. The human genome has been sequenced, gene therapy is about to become common, cloned animal are routine, cloned babies are just round the corner, and genetically modified food will end poverty and hunger for food. These claims, though with a degree of substance in them, also contain the usual hyperbole and are often described without appropriate consideration being made of the timing, extent and context.
   Yes human genome has been sequenced and we know of our genetic blue-print at the level of DNA, the macromolecule that defines life. But going from this discovery to therapeutic molecular medicines for every human malady is still a long journey. The spin-offs coming out of the sequencing has given rise to a huge industry, but mostly it is outside the reach of countries like Bangladesh. Cloning is often described as a hyped-up caricature, stoking the popular imagination and almost turning it into a spectacle of science fiction. It is often not reported that cloning is inherently an error-prone process generating a lot more sick and nonviable organisms than successful identical subjects, although the latter category generates the publicity.
   The wastefulness of the process could well be temporary; and successful viable cloning could become routine in near future. But clearly, even a low level of impaired and sub-optimal success would create a huge ethical dilemma for human cloning. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs have become a tinder-box in dialogues that are occurring in developing countries. The debate is often confused with other equally important issues such as monoculture in agriculture with consequent loss of biodiversity, the increasing control by multinational corporation of agriculture and food production system and a fair-go for the developing countries in the world trade organization (WTO) regime.
   Technology is intrinsically tied to the power structure of the world and this creates enormous problem on the path of a clear-headed pragmatic dialogue about the utility of vital technologies for the alleviation of poverty. Many development activists, left-leaning personalities working with the poor, and liberal opinion makers without a detailed knowledge of technology often take a stand that is directed against a particular encroachment, arrogance and monopolization by an entity wielding unjustifiable power. But these objections, and the activisms that accompany it often take an anti-technology position. Perhaps unwittingly, technology itself gets branded as a problem through default and an anti-technology Luddite platform gets strengthened.
   In reality there is no reason why technology must remain the handmaiden of the rich and the powerful. Countries with strong socialistic ethos such as China and Cuba have made technology a major focus of their development. In China GM organisms have been released with no official objection leading to huge boost in the production of cotton. Vietnam has made technological adaptation a bedrock of their rural development. In Cuba Fidel Castro himself takes keen interest in technology including biotechnology. In countries with a free-market economy, technology is often touted and applied by private-enterprise organizations; and while global monopolization has occurred in many sectors leading to suspicion and distrust, the technology itself is available for any country that might want to make use of it.
   However for resource poor countries such as Bangladesh, non-investment in R&D has been a huge shortcoming. While immaculate houses are built or rented for Ministers, ambassadors, and while huge delegations peregrine the globe in mere talk-fests, virtually no money is available for Science and Technology or strengthening the country’s infra-structure. Bangladesh could easily have participated in the international efforts of sequencing of the genome of rice, a plant of national importance, by simply curtailing the excesses of some our diplomatic missions. That participation and the resultant intellectual property would have given us enormous clout in the arena of agricultural science. The same thing could be said of research on malaria, use of genomics in medicine, or the whole new field of research on molecular and genomic biology of plants and animals. Having a national lab of consequence in these areas will not need a huge amount of money. While Bangladesh is not an affluent country it can tighten her belt and obtain that kind of fund easily. What is needed is a national will and a belief in our ability as a nation. If necessary, a national levy similar to one instituted for the Jamuna Bridge should be initiated to raise the critical seed fund for targeted research and development of national importance.
   We need to obtain funds by reducing our expenses. Our national leaders, top bureaucrats, diplomats do lead a life of profligate spending. I have visited residences of ambassadors of Bangladesh in Europe, USA and Australia; there is plenty of scope of reducing their expenditure and saving money. One room less in the ambassadorial residence in every country where our missions exist would not reduce convenience too much and yet it might generate enough money for a functional laboratory of molecular genetics for the nation. While it is important for our missions to uphold the dignity of the nation and appropriate funding should be made available to them, it is equally important for our missions to be national outposts of dignified thrift, efficiency without ostentation, and places where ideas and technologies can the gathered, discussed and then disseminated back home. I am not aware of any diplomatic service officer who has even a cursory interest or background in science and technology. Regarding the facilities and performance of diplomatic missions our benchmark should be countries such as Vietnam, Costa Rica, ad Sri Lanka and not countries like Norway, or USA.
   We can obtain part of this crucial fund by simply moving our diplomatic premises to less expensive locales in the expensive capitals of the countries of Europe and USA. Countries with a focus on national performance and goal rather than national pomp and prestige (e.g, Vietnam) often save money this way for crucial endeavours. We have to remember that our prestige as a nation will come from our strength in Science, Technology and other creative endeavours and not from the size, splendour or locales of our ambassadorial mansions.
   Part of this money can be obtained in Bangladesh itself by sacrificing some of the facilities that our VIPs enjoy, like cars driven by chauffeurs taking their families in running numerous errands or shopping, by reducing the size of the houses and constructing enclaves with apartments where secretaries and even Ministers could live. It is a sorry site to see Ministers who are hardly ever value for the huge sum of money they extract from the treasury living in such profligate excesses while the brightest scientists of the nation commuting in crowded buses and not having a decent apartment for their families. This lop-sidedness lead to brain-drain, causing our brightest mind to become victims of despair and cynicism and looking for greener pastures even before they have had a decent chance in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh it is always the big fat unproductive top that is destabilising the precarious bottom; we have a perpetually unstable, perennially fragile inverted pyramid of a nation.
   For the sake of the nation I invite the rich, the powerful, the wise and the senior to think of this problem for a moment. I would like to invite them to come out of the obfuscation, the self-importance and the grandiose posturing and look at what is happening intently directly and without hubris. Anybody with an iota of sincereity would immediately see that we have constructed a very unfair system through which we are failing to invest, appropriate and marshall resources for our future. And through this slothful cowardice we have become dependent on outsiders who are now ordering us around. This dependence and the consequent humiliation is a result of our failure of making hard choices based on pragmatism, courage and a belief in our own abilities.
   That self-discovery is the seemingly unsurmountable challenge that we now face. While I sometimes fear for the worst, I am often tempted to believe in a new cognition that might dawn on us all soon. I believe in miracles.

Our intellects only for hire?
I was invited to a dinner in Canberra where I found myself sitting between a senior but retired Australian parliamentarian and a visiting senior member of the Bangladesh parliament, a man of precise manners and quiet dignity. The Australian parliamentarian at one point turned to the honoured guest from Bangladesh and asked: “So, Excellency, what are your plans for the future of your country? How can we help?”
    It was one of those expansive dinner-table questions, sufficiently vague and partly rhetorical and so did not really require a precise answer.
   But the leader from Bangladesh was animated. With voice becoming almost strident in his genuinely-felt enthusiasm, he replied “We want to export our manpower to your country, please help us”.
   The lady, a past doyenne of the Australian parliament, looked at me and asked; “So what do you think about that?”
   Even though I was sandwiched between two kind soft people, I felt like I was stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. “Exporting manpower”, the avowed and endlessly repeated national motto, is one of those slogans that sound patriotic and dynamic back in Dhaka, but here at this table, where we were all pretending to be genteel and equal, it sounded like a cruel joke. “Why do you want to export our valuable people?” I found myself muttering feebly, crying my heart out and at the same time making it virtually inaudible so as not to dampen the obvious spirit of the guest.
   Indeed, as I asked myself and many others many times after that dinner, why do we want to export our people, our “manpower”, with lesser compunction than exporting natural gas? What the leader from Bangladesh seemed to be suggesting was that Australia should be ready to accept a limitless number of educated trained work-force from Bangladesh with a great deal of enthusiasm for the foreseeable future.
   Indeed it would be a great thing for Australia. In recent years much of the educated and trained work-force in the field of agriculture, aviation, and marine science has migrated from Bangladesh to Australia thereby offering to Australia skilled migrants for which Australia made no investment. But each of these people represents literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment from Bangladesh, starting from their publicly funded early education to their subsequent training and higher education often in developed countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. Often this higher education and targeted training was funded by money earmarked for the development of Bangladesh. Instead, these crucial people opted to take up jobs in Australia, Canada and other developed countries depriving Bangladesh the opportunity of their services. Bangladesh government, instead of lamenting this unacceptable situation and taking remedial measures, in fact welcomes it, and lobbies hard in foreign capitals so that more such people can get employment outside the country with the lame excuse that there are no jobs for them back home.
   So what is our national vision statement, if there is one, regarding our skilled work-force? That they will get educated in Bangladesh using public money and then will be exported overseas where they will stay and send money back home! Apparently, Bangladesh simply needs foreign cash for her survival, she doesn’t need home-grown ideas, nor does she want educated local boys and girls to come back and make the country a vibrant competitive place in science technology, trade and commerce. It seems to me that Bangladeshi planners have aspirations for the country to be like a family where one foreign currency earner living abroad finances the well-being of those who live back home. It somehow seems easy, this scheme, where the national energy, vibrancy and intellect can be sold for easy cash. It is justified by saying that we have too many people, that we need them more to make money for the country overseas than we need them back home.
   To some extent that may be true regarding a work-force involved in construction, peace-keeping, or domestic help. But what about aviation engineers, agronomists, horticulturists, doctors, teachers, economists, and accountants? Do we have them is such large supply that we make a blanket policy of exporting them without any regard to the national need?
   I did a brief anecdotal survey of Dhaka University based on people I knew mainly in the science faculty, engineering and architecture. More than 90% of the bright students that I knew in each of these disciplines now live overseas in a way that they have become virtually invisible from the point of view of Bangladesh’s needs. Not only are they not in Bangladesh, there is no evidence that they are engaged in a substantial way in any activities that relate to Bangladesh. I personally know some of these absolutely brilliant people; together, they represent a whole generation of intellect of our struggling nation. They often yearn to do something for the country, but it seems that the country wants them out.
   One of course hears the usual litany from our leaders; it is dispensed in expatriate gatherings, urging people to work for the welfare of the nation, warning them against “information terrorism” and exhorting them to uphold the image of the nation. There is a theatre of the absurd going on in many foreign capitals where Bangladeshis, in a zeal as complex as a psycho-drama, re-enact the vendetta-prone desi politics of the homeland in overseas capitals. I am not talking about that saga involving our expatriate politicians that generates huge publicity. Rather, I am talking about harnessing the genuine talent of the best brains of several generations which is now lost to the country forever unless these people are given a robust chance to participate in nation building.
   The government should do several things to stem the tide by which we are being deprived of these talents that belongs to Bangladesh. There should be a national assessment of skills that we need in the country, skills that are critical for our technological survival and improvement and the government and private sector should coordinate and try their best to lure good people back home. China and India have done that successfully. Our visiting dignitaries should scout foreign countries for ideas and potential collaborations and joint enterprises rather than simply offering the services of our people everywhere. We should never say that we want to “export our manpower”. That terminology itself displays callousness to one’s own people. A more sophisticated slogan or intent should be searched for and utilized instead of this archaic and rude jargon.
   Why not invite some of our best technical minds on sabbatical leave to local institutions? There used to be a program run by UNDP called TOKTEN, to bring technical experts of the “south” to come back to “south” for a brief period. Our governments, NGOs and private sector could start something like that. Our embassies, consulates, high commissions are sadly inactive in this potential venture. With important exceptions, Heads of our Missions overseas are sometimes caught up in either shenanigans reinforcing their pomposity and self importance, or are busy playing hosts to the endless stream of dignitaries and their relatives from Dhaka. Our missions in New York, Washington, London, and Paris are often glorified travel agencies and hotels for our elites from Dhaka. There is precious little time left on the part of our diplomatic service people after hosting the VIPs and their families that keep coming.
   Our embassies should become outposts of pro-active strategic thinking regarding our development. Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of USA and a man of colossal intellect made it obligatory that each US ambassador brought seeds of crops, fruits etc back from whichever country they were posted to. America evolved from a country of only one or two indigenous crops to a nation of diverse and plentiful crops and mighty in agronomy and crop cultivation. All thanks to the progressive policy of Jefferson. I have seen many suave, well-dressed and sophisticated ambassadors of Bangladesh in many foreign capitals. I am not aware of any who ever contemplated carrying a few seeds back home when they went there during vacation. In my ten years in USA I have never heard of a Bangladeshi ambassador ever visiting a major scientific establishment of that country.
   We, a nation of awesome problems, stunning challenges and needs, unfortunately have very callous and cavalier elite. And to keep the soft and lazy option alive these ruling elite are bartering away our people, rather than positioning them through leadership in a network of vision and enterprise. Incapable of fashioning a challenging course of national will and action, our leaders have found it convenient to simply pawn our brightest people’s talent at the door of the highest bidder. It is a system-loss of generational intellect, and our barren future will surely testify to this crazy folly.

Time to know the process, not only the content
For some reason all the expectations and hype for the new millennium seem to have died now. Since our species discovered time, events are packaged, demarcated, analysed and pondered over in neat packages. We call them days, weeks, years, decades, centuries and millennia. This delineation is a human activity; actual time is of course fluid and seamless. But the seamless primordial fluidity of time inevitably brings discrete changes in objects both celestial and living: the earth, the moon, the trees, human bodies. We recognise these changes and call them seasons; they define circadian rhythms and diurnal biological clocks. Time, both the primordial time that changes us and the constructed cerebral time of digital watches and yearly calendars, influences us, makes us dream, instils in us a belief in idealised events that one day may come and redeem us. We call that notion optimism. We are lucky, we tell ourselves, that we are alive to see a new millennium begin. Such colossal transition of demarcated time is seen to be a holy episode in its own right.
   However, these enthusiasms do not last long. Soon we realise that even a sublime realisation of time’s august transition cannot change human nature. We realise that we harbour in us an entity that is primal and to a large extent immutable, an entity comprising hubris, selfishness, apathy in one extreme and naïve dreaming, expectant yearnings and a craving for love on the other. Human nature, that grandiose concept that engages the minds of great philosophers, remains eternally embedded in this complex destiny defined by biology and environment. Millennium or not, we go on being just the same old self we have always been — part angel, part demon, but always so refreshingly human.
   Why are we the way we are? In this cloudy morning in Canberra an appetite for introspection grips me. It is not the subjective analysis of the personal self, but a scientific self-assessment of what I consider to be the human condition. A condition partly defined by the biological apparatus of the grand continuum of organisms, and partly by the presumptive higher faculties that define the lofty human traits. So what is our unique legacy as a biological organism, and what is our signature as an entity that might have transcended biology and become something greater?
   These are grand questions of philosophy and have engaged the minds of the greatest thinkers of all times. Humbled though I am by these questions, I think it is time that they become topics to be discussed by “common men”. For I think that behind the bulky bodies of these seemingly grandiose questions are hiding the answers of many of our problems. Answers that are common to all people because they are distilled from an understanding of the human condition. Answers that might allow us to make a better society for all of us.
   For most of the time that humanity has been self-aware, these questions have engaged our minds. In fact, it is through these questions that we define our higher consciousness that separates us from other organisms. But intriguing and old though these questions are, they have mostly been dealt with at the level of their contents and never at the level of their processes. So when we think something, we are aware of what we are thinking about, but we never worry about how it is that we are thinking the thought that we are thinking. When we like someone we are aware of it and know the mental image that the feeling of that liking brings, but we never think or know the process by which this adoring image and feeling is being mediated. We take the autonomy and presence of our feelings as a given condition, almost like an objective reality. We seem to think that just like the sun, the moon and the stars exist, just like my hands, my feet and my body exist, so exist these feelings of mine.
    In fact we can read such explicit proclamations of love in literature. A pubescent girl in the rapture of amorous love for her beloved might proclaim, “If this moon and this star exist, so exists my love for you.” This explicit proclamation linked with objective reality is important; it shows how certain and definite we are of our feelings. Feelings are not nebulous entities — to us they are potent manifestations of our very existence. Similarly, with regard to all our other non-amorous feelings such as grief, hate, jealousy, and fear, we dwell on the content but almost never on the process. There exists a biological screen by which the processes are hidden from us.
   As we can digest food without being aware of the acids in our stomach, sing without knowing how songs make sound waves that travel, and speak without knowing anything about our vocal chords, so it is that we can feel anger, fear, hate and hubris without knowing how it is that we have those feelings and precisely what happens to our bodies when we have them. It is the content of those feelings that engages our minds and our actions. It has been our legacy as a biological organism to just know the content and never the process. Nature has constructed us in such a way that we know only what we “need to know”. But in the course of human history that “need to know” idea has changed. Just like modern medicine has enlightened our mind so that we can now fix our digestive maladies, or surgically fix our kidney, or transplant our blood-pumping heart, so it is that we now need to know the process of how we think in order to truly know ourselves, and if necessary to change it.
   For almost all the known times of human history the search for the mechanics of the human mind has been the domain of just a few. We call these few the philosophers, gurus, maharishis, savants. In more recent times civilisation has produced the psychologists, the psychiatrists, the tele-evangelists, or even the executives of the advertisement industry. Armed with a little knowledge of the human mind they have explored us and manipulated us, and sometimes even enlightened us. But the accumulated knowledge of all these people is little compared to what is needed to understand the human mind. It is almost like the way Physics was in the days of Aristotle or Chemistry was in the Middle Ages.
   If I were allowed to name this new millennium, I would call it the millennium of the mind. For the first time in human history we have a real chance to decipher the mechanics of the human psyche. Armed with a knowledge of all the genes that encode and define our brain, and very fast imaging techniques such as MRI to look at the brain in real time as thoughts occur, cognitive neurobiologists are trying to understand the neuronal architecture, and linkages that define mental traits. In the parlance of neuro-biology these thought-related neuronal changes are called the “neural correlates” of a thought. It is the total ensemble of exchanges, all electro-chemical, that occur in the brain when we have a simple feeling like wanting a glass of water, or when we see a rose. So for the first time there will be an opportunity to know in physiological terms how the process of a thought works.
   Will this knowledge make us wiser, nobler, or more loveable? Will it end in wars, starvation, aggressive zest for domination? Or will it lead to a flowering of a new renaissance, a renewed affirmation of creative humanity?
   It is too early to tell. But I think it should make us more respectful of our spectacular but ultimately fragile human condition. When we realise how thoughts, ideas, dreams, and poetry are created from neuronal firings of globules of cerebral fat, when we appreciate how amazing it is that one hundred billion neurons with their thousands of linkages create a world of connections whose number is greater than the number of all the particles in the universe, surely then we will learn how precious a human being is. Surely we will understand the absurdity of killing people for the sake of a thought, a belief, a world view, a global scheme, no matter how intensely felt or cherished it is by us. Seen from the theatre where thoughts are made out of fat and neurons, it just might dawn on us that killing others is not homicide but autocide, a criminal killing of our own self. It is possible that out of the explicit study of the neural processes a new non-violent way of thinking might emerge.
   As our Sufis and Bauls said long ago, a human being is like a universe. A universe is manifested in her mind through the neuronal processes, the body. Thus what she knows, what she perceives, what she yearns to become, is ultimately vested in her body. That realisation, so modern in the annals of developing neuro-science through work of people like Damasio, is also strangely similar to the Baul songs of Deho-totto, where the body is described as the repository of all knowledge.
   Whether we are inspired by Baul metaphysics, or whether we derive our inspirations from cognitive neuro-sciences, a time has now come for a grand synthesis of ideas. It will be part science, part arts and totally and grandly human. It will be at once analytical and spiritual. It is the deep spirituality of the biological cognition with the realization of how time’s unswerving arrow has finally created self-knowledge out of the wanton nihilism of colliding molecules. If we are lucky, this syncretic amalgamation of the mind and the heart might occur through the understanding of the brain. If it does, it will become the mother of all renaissances. Just the sort of thing one expects to happen in a new millennium.

Pure science must be prioritized
Arts and sciences are two different pathways to truth. The first is subjective and belongs to the realm of the mind and of aesthetics. The second, often thought to be the preserve of the few, deals with the objective reality which is terrestrial and celestial at once.
   In making a choice between these two different intellectual enterprises, we in Bangladesh have somehow neglected the study or pursuit of science and mathematics — the latter being the pivot of any scientific inquiry.
   It is curious that it has turned out like this. Two civilisational and intellectual heritages of the world — those of the greater Indian and the Islamic — have had glorious traditions in the development of science and mathematics. Greater India’s emphasis on mathematics led to the discovery of the zero, one of the most important contributions to the basic discipline of mathematics. The Indian and the Arab Muslim scholars together created the modern numbering system. In more recent times, India has produced mathematicians of great genius like Ramanujam. Several scientists like C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhar, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Meghnad Saha, Abdus Salam also are from South Asia.
   Islamic civilisation at its height in the Middle Ages or even before produced great scientists and mathematicians. In fact much of early contributions to astronomy, chemistry and mathematics were made, and scientific pursuits flourished, when the Islamic civilisation and the society were syncretic. But the contemporary Islamic world, despite its economic riches, particularly the oil-rich West Asia, has demonstrated little inclination towards scientific pursuits and attainments. Is the chronic decline of science in Bangladesh stemming from a deep-seated cultural aberration?
   Bengalis, particularly those from Bangladesh, have never valued science and mathematics. And the only local scientist of whom we know in recent times is the late Dr. Qudrat-e-Khuda. This poverty in the study and pursuit of scientific knowledge and mathematics stems from our cultural values, which we need to change urgently. I know of social or cultural groups who value science as much as the arts. It is enshrined in the religio-cultural value system of the Jewish people, for instance. They hold, almost as an article of faith, that learning has to be based on the acquisition of knowledge in science and mathematics on a higher plane of excellence. This cultural attribute has resulted in a disproportionate number of scientists turning out to be Jewish. The Talmudic exhortation for knowledge is something that puts a very high premium on science and mathematics. Other cultural groups who, in my opinion, highly value science and mathematics include the Chinese, the South Indian Tamils and the Hungarians.
   In Bangladesh, the buzzword now is technology and computers. These are not science or mathematics by themselves, but are products of those disciplines. The goal of a cyber society is fine; but it needs to be pointed out that computer literacy or acquisition of technology cannot be a substitute for actual science. The scientific base of knowledge remains as shallow as ever. Even the new private universities have literally jettisoned the core scientific disciplines like physics, chemistry and biology altogether and instead have concentrated on teaching business to produce some glorified managers and an apology for science under the title of ‘natural science’. That branch used to be extant in the universities in the bygone days of Darwin.
   These days the traditional scientific discipline of biology has broken new ground in sub-disciplines like molecular biology, genomics and bio-informatics. Computers and information science or technology can help power bio-informatics research as it does not need a laboratory but high-speed Internet connection and, of course, sound theoretical scientific knowledge. The think-resource can only multiply and grow in vibrant educational environments for result-oriented researches in genetics and genomics. The traditional departments of Botany and Biochemistry in our public universities should take the lead in this regard.
   For undertaking the task of putting science and mathematics on the pedestal and accessing ever newer avenues of scientific knowledge, we urgently need cheerleaders and role models who will show our youth the way to scientific learning. Popular and well-known persons with backgrounds in pure science and other disciplines under it, like Chemistry Professor-turned novelist Humayun Ahmed , pharmacist-turned poet and social activist Farhad Mazhar, physicist-turned Minister Dr. A. Moyeen Khan and, above all, scientist-academic-turned President of the Republic Dr. Iazuddin Ahmed, to name a few in the driving seats, could play the role in this enterprise. Our scientists, who belong to the diaspora, should be invited to contribute in their own country either in matters consistent with their expertise or to do so in any manner they choose. I know of many who are willing or eager to help create a solid scientific knowledge base in the country, but just do not know how to go about it. The government, the NGO community and the private sector should tap into this knowledge potential.

Science and aesthetics: Is it like oil and water?
A recent essay in New Age talks about aesthetics and human creativity as a paradigm incompatible with and completely distinct from the scientific enterprise. In fact, this is a commonplace view among those engaged in both artistic and scientific endeavours. However, as I would argue in this essay, arts and sciences meet each other in a much closer harmony than is commonly conceded by either the scientists or the artists. This view of incompatibility has its root in the lack of understanding of the mechanics of our cognitive processes that mediate creative work .This is due to our unique biological legacy whereby our perceptions are conditioned .and cannot read its own deciphering, a situation that might change due to new knowledge in neurobiology. In this resistance , deep computational attributes of our brain are concealed from our commonplace self of cognition and emotion, causing us to believe that a thing of beauty is not a matter of incisive and computational understanding. The idea that painting, poetry and music, and in fact any creative art begins as a flash of inspiration without any prior analyses is an illusion of our mind. I would argue that the dichotomy between the arts and the sciences, so lamented by scientist-novelist C.P. Snow, also stems from this illusion that we harbour deep in our psyche.
   In reality much of the decisions determining tastes and aesthetics that our brain makes, occur due to computations that are hidden from our conscious brain. Let us just talk about the visual system of our brain through which we see things. The process begins with the eyes through which light carrying information of the external world falls on our retina. This information, which is a two dimensional image on the retina, is then carried to the back of our brain and is interpreted by the neurons of the visual system to create a three dimensional image of the observed objects. The neurons of the visual system take the information of the shape of the object as well as the intensity of light and shadow, and create a virtual replica of the external reality. It is the recreated virtual image of the external world, a creation of our brain, that we perceive as our visual reality. So, for instance, when we lose the ability to respond to blue colour due to a brain lesion , we do not have the subjective imprint of blue any more even though objectively blue is still there in the world.
   This neuronal interpretation of the visual world requires that we have rules embedded in our brain that interpret the information it receives. Because of these embedded rules, and their inherent assumptions, the brain can create for us something much greater than the actual input stimuli it receives. These rules and assumptions are in part our biological attribute and in part traits acquired after we are born. We all have part of these assumptions hard-wired in the brain. For instance, our brain “knows” that light in nature comes from the top. If it didn’t know that it could not interpret whether an image is concave or convex , then we wouldn’t see objects of the visual world in a readily interpretable way.
   Similarly, specialised neurons respond to vertical lines, horizontal lines, and to objects that are in motion such as a galloping horse. It seems that we have a whole separate visual apparatus to recognise human faces that is different from the apparatus used to recognise objects that are not faces.
   All these ideas are results of new research of cognitive neurobiology and not just an opinion or a conjecture.
   How are these facts and ideas of the human visual system relevant to visual creativity?. Semir Zeki, a celebrated neurobiologist of the visual system , has given a brilliant interpretation of how our visual creativity is constructed out of these assumptions and rules inherent in our brain. According to Zeki our visual brain learns about an object by studying it visually from many angles and then constructing in the brain a visual “essence” of that object. So later, no matter from which angle we see that object , we recognise it. We harbour within us an all-encompassing memory of the “essence” of that object. It is precisely because of this knowledge of the essence that we can recognise a face from its cartoon drawings and economical line drawings without any depicted details.
   Zeki then takes a creative leap and suggests that visual artists also search for this essence in their conscious quest of artistic creativity. So what the brain “knows” but hides from most of us, is precisely what the artist searches for and perhaps finds partially. It is that search for the essence of an object that caused Picasso to paint a face from many angles and juxtapose them as one face, thus initiating the search of visual truth of cubism.
   Another cognitive neuorobiologist, Villanur Ramachandaran, has put an eastern spin to this idea. He suggests that what the sages of Indian subcontinent have described as “rasa” of an object (or an idea or indeed of life) is nothing but this process by which the brain computes, analyses and finally memorises the essence of things that it encounters.
   This computation and analyses is done by the awesome power of about one hundred billion neurons linked to each other in one to ten thousand ways. Much of that computation occurs without our conscious knowledge and is an integral part of the physiology of our brain.
   Only rarely, due to some malfunction of the brain, human beings get access to that awesome computational knowledge. Children who get that access often have an impaired functional life. Many of them are described as “idiot savants”. They can paint like Picasso without ever consciously learning how to paint or play Piano like Mozart without ever learning to play piano.The most celebrated case of a child genius of the visual system was a three year old English girl called Nadia who without any lessons on painting could paint horses as though they were sketches made by Picasso himself. Autistic Nadia had this amazing ability at the age of three when she couldn’t even speak a single word. Intriguingly, later as she was taught language and normal social skills, her ability to paint disappeared. There is increasing realization that many geniuses including probably Mozart and Einstein were afflicted by a milder form of autism called Aspergers syndrome.
   This relationship between brain processes and art also holds for completely non-representational abstractions such as juxtaposition and arrangement of lines. Abstract painters such as Mondrian appeals to the part of the brain that interprets horizontal and vertical lines. We like those abstract arrangements of sparse lines because it pleases the sense of symmetry etched in the logic of the brain. That symmetry was created in the brain so that we could interpret the natural world to our advantage but the artistic process can now use it to provide us pleasure that does not have any obvious survival value any more. This is in fact the unique attribute of the creative process; it uses a utilitarian machine within us and by stimulating it, can create a feeling of the sublime.
   All painters, as a part of their craft, have some conscious access to the intricacy of the visual system. The really gifted ones have it as a genetic endowment while others learn it through apprenticeship of the craft. In the human society when this knowledge reached a peak , we had renaissance and Leonardo. A renaissance man thus had some access to both the processes and the content of the knowledge of the creative process without having to realise it explicitly , perhaps .. ..
   When a painter creates a piece of art , he applies this implicit knowledge to create a painting that satisfies him. What comes out of this creative process contains in it motifs, icons, and visual clues that the brain analyses and deems to be satisfactory based on rules embedded in the logic of the artist’s brain. We the observer then relate to the the visual splash, the symmetry, and the contrast, precisely because of the way our own visual system, mirrors the attributes of the visual system of the artist.By playing out these organic rules of neuronal computations we, the artist and the spectator, get connected to each other through a sense of this “precise-yet-intangible” the essence, the “rasa”.
   And through this connection, in a way not yet widely appreciated among the literati of the world, the science integral to our body’s cognitive-emotional system creates for us something that is truly beyond science and body. That is the subjective feeling of the sublime that we call art.

Synaesthesia: Synthesis of the senses
Aesthetics is derived from the word aesthesia, literally meaning consciousness. Aesthetics is thus formally related to consciousness although it has acquired a more popular but restricted meaning in the artistic sense and sensibility.
   The other meaning of aesthesia is also in use though not so popular anymore. For instance, before an invasive surgery in the body, one needs to be made unconscious, that is, an-aesthesized. Similarly, when our sensory pathways are linked together, we experience syn-aesthesia, or linking of our senses, a neurological term mostly used by psychologists. In about one in five thousand people of the world, such linking of senses occurs in a physiological and clearly identifiable way. They report actually hearing colours, tasting shapes, and seeing coloured words, as if, dancing right in front of their eyes, when they hear someone utter a sentence. While synaesthesia is a medical condition indicating a benign brain phenotype, its properties bring up important questions about creativity and how our senses are linked during hearing, seeing, learning and thinking.
   Many creative people, both artists and scientists, are sy-naesthetic. Of the most famous among them is Vladimir Nabokov, the famous novelist and a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. He comes from a family of synaesthetics, including his mother and aunts. Painter Kandinsky, poet Baudelaire, physicist Feynmann, film-maker Sergei Eisenstein were all synaesthetics.
   For many others, and particularly the poets, such an attribution is more difficult as their creative use of metaphors automatically transgresses senses. Take for instance Rabindranath Tagore, one of the greatest poets of the recent epoch. The lyric of one of his famous compositions says: “When I see the world through a song, it is only then that I recognize you” (my translation and italics).
   This idea of seeing through a song; is it just a poetic metaphor; or did he actually see things as he wrote lyric? And if he did have vivid images flashing before his mind’s eye as he wrote this song; would it be considered just creativity of imagination or actual physiological synaesthesia? To my knowledge Rabindranath was never reported as being a synaesthetic in a clinical sense like Kandinsky or Nabokov but his writing is full of syn-aesthetic references making one wonder if his senses were physiologically linked in a way more profound than just through trans-sensual metaphors. Poems of Jibananda Das are also replete with synaesthetic metaphors. Neurobiologists explain synaesthesia by postulating real neuronal links that connect one sense organ such as the eye with a brain region normally designated for another sense organ such as the ear. In that model, actual neuronal link connects the regions of the brain, so that the synaesthetic has the subjective feeling of experiencing one sense when in reality he is receiving sensory stimuli from the other. For Kandisnky, this feeling of linked senses influenced his art. For a long period of his career, he attempted to depict music through painting. Many critics say that in that venture he was not greatly successful. His canvas is full of musical motifs, as though he was trying to make the canvas express the musical notes. Many other artists, perhaps more metaphorically than synaesthetically, make their paintings speak, or make their words come alive.
   When we ask someone, if s/he understands something, we habitually ask “do you see what I mean?” Is this wish to make people ‘see’, just verbal mannerism or our subconscious attempt to link our verbal sense with a visual one, which has been enshrined in our language?
   I would like to argue that all education and learning is also an inner quest for synaesthesia. Take for instance, the process of learning music through musical notations and symbols. To someone who cannot read music, the symbols are mere gibberish and evoke no sensory response. However for someone who learns how to read music, the symbols excite the centers of hearing and as s/he reads the notations s/he can actually “hear” the notes. Similarly the symbolic stimuli of reading a book are instantly translated into a sense of touch, smell and sound. This idea can be extended to all learning, including learning of new languages, whereby unknown phonetic “noise” is suddenly made evocative through words creating stimuli of vision, pleasure and pain. In fact, language has the complex ability of marshalling and conjoining senses by uttering only little bytes of sound, a uniquely human gift, often linked to human consciousness. It is this ability of language to link the concrete with the abstract and also to connect various senses together makes it such a powerful vehicle of communication.
   Why is it that so many creative people are synaesthetic? Do the novel and accidental physiological trans-linkages of sensory centers give them a unique ability of encountering the universal, the essence of all creativity? Or is it their quest for metaphoric and abstract thinking since the early childhood that creates novel physical linkages in their brain.
   Linking of senses also have great usefulness for stimulating memory and thus could play an important role in teaching. There are two powerful avenues by which we can consolidate our learning so that it becomes an integral part of our usable memory. One of them is learning through emotion and the other is learning through sensory linkages. Learning through emotion is a broad topic that I will discuss elsewhere. Learning through linked senses is something that is entrenched in our traditional learning system. In rural Bangladesh and in small towns, in the evenings one can hear students reading aloud memorizing their lines. It is thought that memory works when one reads and also hears at the same time. It is better to see, touch, smell and taste a mango in order to really know about a mango. When children learn how to write it is better if they use real objects to make the words, be they plastic blocks or be they dried tamarind seeds that I used to use in my childhood. And when a work-dictum practiced by musical rhyme, it is lives on in memory for a life time.
   It is clear that traditional societies have tried to link senses through formal procedures of learning. With time we have anaesthesized ourselves to many of these practices. For many children, writing and reading have become a silent, colourless exercise. Mathematics is often much too sterile and abstract because it only involves a mind engaged with pen and paper, desensitised and silent. And listening to rain-drops fall on corrugated iron roof, or later to listen to crickets and frogs as they break the silence of the rainy night, well, is kind of reliving synaesthetically the nights of our distant past. Real, concrete, conscious senses, our aesthesia, are disappearing from our education, our lives, our thinking. We must reclaim them and consolidate them in our psyche through enriching linkages.

Science and Poetry: Brain matters
One of the most flattering compliments I have ever received during my science studies linked me to poetry. I was a Ph.D. student in the US and was invited to speak at a scientific conference. Having been allotted only a 10-minute slot to tell my story, I used a very unconventional methodology in giving a seminar. Instead of starting with the preamble and the premise and then arrive at the inference or the conclusion, I chose to work backward.
   It was difficult on my part to convey my message within the allotted time. I delivered the talk in the unconventional inverse order and did not think much about it any more. Later in the evening, when we were all relaxing by a lake-side restaurant after a grueling day of talk-fest, an elderly person approached me. He happened to be a luminary in the scientific field of my work. Once I recognized him, I was petrified because he was known to possess a notorious streak of shredding to pieces the novitiates unmercifully. But in the mellow and the fleeting light and shade of the night, he did not seem to be severe. Shaking my hands with genuine warmth, he congratulated me on my talk. It was, he said “short, sweet and poetic”.
   We all like compliments, although I suspected that my senior colleague was just being kind to a younger colleague. Later, I often thought of the episode and the special significance it carried for me. Because I did like to think of myself as a poet. Since my childhood, I have always fancied rhyming words and have felt the exultations and despair in crafting the lines. Maybe, I thought to myself, the way I inverted the talk and juxtaposed the logic struck him as highly imaginative and refreshing. Maybe, I day-dreamed that there was a special way to be poetic in science after all. I kept thinking like that for a while, dreaming up scientific ideas along the lines of the minimalism of a haiku, the dark imageries of Baudelaire, the naturalism of Wordsworth, or the eccentricities of E.E. Cummings. It was a naïve and wishful thought. And of course I had to soon revert to more prosaic demands of writing a thesis so that I could get a job.
   So my understanding of science in terms of poetry was put behind and perhaps was gathering neural dust somewhere in the sub-conscious. More recently I have become aware of it again, and this time through my increasing interest and fascination for neurobiology. For it is in the brain and the cognitive process that both scientific ideas and poetry reside.
   Poetry has two meanings, one literal and verbal and the other more philosophical and inspirational. The literal process of stringing words belongs to the realm of form and prosody. A flight of birds framed against the crimson halo of the evening sky is poetic, The murmur of the leaves sounding whispers in the wind in the silence of the night is poetic. Also is poetic the forlorn pathos of a flute, the visual serenity of a river, and perhaps also the juxtaposition of ideas finally coming to a novel and startling conclusion. And it is in that final sense, through a catholic journey on the path of poetry, science can also be poetic.
   It is in that sense of poetry that the deciphering of the structure of benzene by the Chemist Kekule was made from the poetic imagery of a snake biting its own tail; with a similar poetic analogy Einstein arrived at an elegant mathematical solution that linked mass and energy. In that grand sense poetry is a description of nature, be it in strings of words and be it through an understanding of a new arena of science. And ultimately both of these enterprises, science and poetry, reside in our body, more specifically in our brain.
   Emily Dickinson, an icon among poets knew of this connection between brain and the splendours world of poetry. In a poignant poem, long before the study of the brain became a modern science, she wrote:
   
   THE brain is wider than the sky,
    For, put them side by side,
   The one the other will include
    With ease, and you beside.
   The brain is deeper than the sea,
    For, hold them, blue to blue,
   The one the other will absorb,
    As sponges, buckets do.
   The brain is just the weight of God,
    For, lift them, pound for pound,
   And they will differ, if they do,
    As syllable from sound.
   I say Amen to that.

A letter from America
For resuscitating the memory of long-forgotten faces, there is nothing like stratospheric heights. Every time I am in a plane I find myself remembering faces that I had long since forgotten. The vantage point of an all-encompassing physical vision somehow opens up the floodgates of lost water that we call memory. As the plane, poised for descent, circled over the US city of San Francisco, I suddenly remembered in vivid detail the face of my friend Paul Samoza, a Nicaraguan-American, who for me defined much that was good about America. The surname-sake of the despised dictator, and happily not related to him, Paul befriended me on the basis of what I looked like, a reassuring link in a foreign country for a newcomer. This liking in a way was like the comfort of looking at the mirror. For Paul and I, in spite of our dissimilar backgrounds, shared a visual resemblance. And this resemblance, in a funny sort of way, brings Latinos and South Asians together. For the two years that I knew him well he called me “amigo” rather than by my name.
   As my plane swooped down and I could see the Golden Gate bridge and imagined the frothy blue water out in the horizon crashing against Highway 1, an area that Paul and I often visited together. I remembered Paul’s last words to me as we parted, “This land,” he had said, meaning northern California, “is God’s country. Let’s hope, amigo, we’ll meet again here.”
   Needless to say I seem to have lost touch with Paul forever. I knew him during my student days in Oregon and we often made trips to northern California together, visiting small farming communities along the California coast and inland. We saw towns called Chico, Mount Shasta. We also toured an area known worldwide for its wine, the Napa Valley.
   Driving with Paul’s Latin friends used to be a genuine pleasure. Quick-witted, warm and hedonistic, they personified the charm of simple affection-drenched living and what they described as the “true spirit of America”. They say that Americans have derived inspiration from their ancient roots —the Mayans and the Aztecs — and mixed with it the easy gaiety of Spain and her dances and music. Gaiety that was part Moorish via Andalusia and part African via the Caribbean immigrants. The festive peasant songs sung with the dazzling crescendo of the guitar reverberated through the pick-up truck as we meandered through the valley, sometimes cherry-picking in a farm, sometimes stopping by a hot-spring for a bath, but always in the end talking about history. The history of Paul’s America, of the arid valleys of Texas merging into Mexico, of how the Latino people lost Texas to the gringos, and finally about the recent deprivations of the whole of south and Central America. And, as if to exemplify all this with appropriate metaphor, Paul’s own sister was called America, a fifteen-year-old girl who lived in a village near Managua and whose Polaroid picture Paul always carried with him.
   As I stood in the long queue for immigration in the San Francisco airport, I momentarily forgot about Paul. A sunny but hazy day showed swaying palms in the adjoining hills. Beyond the bluish haze lay the bay area, an affluent city of sprawling homes and world-famous universities. The atmosphere in the queue was tense, passengers made rude by sleeplessness and the tension of having to fill up long immigration forms with questions including gems like “Have you ever participated, and have contemplated in participating, in genocide?” Unbelievable but true that one has to answer questions like that to enter the USA. Beyond the queue, the circular belt carrying the incoming luggage was being searched by a motley collection of sniffing dogs, blue-uniformed customs officials with sparkling insignia and other assorted security types. Tenseness hung in the air, making people listless and silent. This is the new America of obsessive security and impatient curtness, where the veneer of loud and vibrant bonhomie has been chipped away, removing the familiar jovial façade to reveal a tense interior of fear and distrust of foreigners.
   Strangely, that is also the distrust that Paul used to talk about. Distrust meted out to him and his folks even though they, through their mothers, were linked to the American continent for thousands of years. America was the mother country for Paul. And yet he had encountered only mistrust and fear from the population that came much later, a population that was sometimes of Spanish extraction as in central and south America and sometimes of Anglo-Celtic heritage as was the case for the land that later became known as the USA.
   The latest fear, instilled by the events in New York in 11 September, 2001, and the old chronic fear faced by people like Paul and his compatriots, are different in many ways and yet they are linked in ways that define the human condition. For this palpable nervousness of the “other”, the non-self, is rooted in the concept of conquest and domination and chronic and relentless subjugation of one group of humanity by another. Paul’s family, by their example of sharing, easy music, and materially deprived but ultimately enriched life, had taught me about the other America, the America of the defeated, the soulful, and the inspired.
   And standing besides Paul and his friends many years ago under the giant sequoia trees as blue billows crashed against Highway One, I had truly believed that the land around was indeed God’s country. To me in those days few other places in the world displayed such vital and organic vigour, such a luxuriant mixture of fecund land and human aspiration, such overt display of self-conscious dreaming and let-live freedom. But as the cynics say, “That was then and this is now.”
   Later, arriving in New York after twilight, I observed the gaping absence in the skyline as the plane landed. Looking at the adjoining scintillating buildings and the space where the Twin Towers used to be, it looked as though two shining pieces of dream have been plucked out and extinguished. The resultant towers of darkness have now crossed this skyline and spread to the rest of the world.
   After landing from the plane my memory also relented and left me wondering why I was getting so emotional. Paul for me is now as much distant history as all the sorrows of world’s indigenous people. I have now moved to yet another continent and am here only for a week. I had urgent matters to look forward to, like finding a bed to sleep my jet-lag away.
   I stepped out into the night with trepidation. Happily, I was soon amongst friends.

Bioinformatics: When life becomes information
When we look around and see the living organisms around us, what we get to see is only the form or the exterior. Of animals, we see the colour of their skin, their recognizable shape, their movement. Plants are recognizable by a plethora of colour of the flowers, diverse patterns of the leaves, and a million shapes that define our landscape. For the humans, the intelligent recognition system or what is called cognition is also coloured by their preferences in terms of their instant emotive responses. We look around us and we find people whom we may like or may not like; we see faces that create diverse impressions in our mind .This impressionistic imprint of the facade of living things does not provide us with the insight of what lies beneath the surface of the living entities. All living organisms have structures which are uniquely designed to support their life-system .Plants have an elaborate system of harnessing the energy of light, a feature that translates into the green colour of plants. Animals, creatures of billions of years of evolution, have their own internal mechanisms for survival and life-support .Their bodies are also formed by hidden forces of evolution and natural selection whereby the fittest structures survive to the exclusion of the unfit. The external morphology often hides an inner structure that become visible only through the lenses of biology and evolution.
   And at its depth, the inner structure contains information. The information is encoded in the form of a chemical also known as bases .Like little flags attached to a string in a linear array, each base or flag is identifiable by a specific shape. The string is the backbone carrying these flags. This analogy describes the macromolecule of life, DNA, which contains a sugar phosphate backbone that holds in a linear array the four bases of DNA, A, T, G, and C. The backbone contains no information. Information inheres in the specific order of the flags, the chemical bases. The bases need to be read in threes, the triplets of life’s chemical code. So, the triplet ATG encodes an amino acid called methionine. As a stretch of DNA is read in threes and by a two-step process transcribed and then translated into a linear array of amino acids what is slowly formed is called protein, the actual functional macromolecule of life. A discrete stretch of code, about ten thousand bases long, defines a particular protein, and the stretch of code defining that protein is called a gene. Largely it is proteins that form an eye, a hand, a mouth, a leaf, a cat, and a fly. Proteins and other chemicals, that proteins catalyse into being, are the constituents of life-form .They are made according to the very particular information contained in the DNA sequence, the genome, of an organism.
   The manner in which this awesome linear array of genomic code is saved, archived, retrieved, compared and manipulated is called Bioinformatics. It is a brand new area of Science, at most ten years old. It literally came into existence as the genomic code of different organisms were sequenced .Bioinformatics inquiry started during the last decade and attained a frenetic pace as the human genome was sequenced three years ago. The sequence produced a big surprise. Although containing three billion bases, the total number of genes in the human genome is only 40 thousand, a very low number given the complexity of human life and mind. Also it seems that the vast tract of human genome contains non-coding or “junk” DNA, i.e., DNA that does not do the coding for the genes .The functions of these non-coding DNA , not to speak of how 40 thousand genes produce something as complex as the human being are still a mystery . To put things in perspective, a little weed called cress contains only 25 thousand genes. So it seems that our sophistication and complexity are not related to the number of genes we have in our genome.
   The practitioners in the emerging discipline of Bioinformatics have to solve this mystery. In the coming decades, they, together with their colleagues from the fields of molecular biology, genetics, human physiology and medicine, will need to answer these vexing questions. In these queries they have at their disposal the huge computing power that has become available due the development of powerful microchips. To bring this discipline even closer to microchip technology , genome expression analyses are also done in biochips, whereby the expression of the whole genome can be profiled readily, a prospect that was unthinkable even ten years ago.
   There is a huge opportunity for Bangladesh in Bioinformatics. In recent years, both the government and the private sector have been trumpeting the advantage of information science for Bangladesh. We are poised to have a cyber society with e-government and other internet-based facilities. Certainly in the country there is great enthusiasm centring computer and Internet. Using this advantage and the latest development in modern molecular biology, Bangladesh could become a significant player in Bioinformatics if she combines judicious strategic planning and resource allocation. Our programmers, after being trained in molecular genetics and programming languages such as PERL and PYTHON, could become involved in analysing DNA sequences to find creative answers to problems important for human disease. The specific questions to ask of course will require collaborations and strategic partnerships with scientists from more developed nations as well as scientists from regional countries. Given our ability and enthusiasm for computing we will be ill advised to let this huge opportunity slip away.
   I appeal to the Minister of Science and Technology to look into Bioinformatics seriously. There are a lot of scientists in Bangladesh as well as scientists of Bangladeshi origin, now living overseas, who could play an important role in facilitating this enterprise.

Heredity: What has blood got to do with it?
A prevalent notion that permeates our thinking, and implicit assumptions regarding human heredity is that it has something to do with blood, and that male lineage as opposed to female lineage is the dominant carrier of heredity. Ancient Greeks, including Aristotle, believed that male blood was the carrier of heredity. This belief finds reflection in such words as blood-line, blood relative, blue blood; blood is thicker than water, etc. I don’t know if this blood-centered view of heredity was ever articulated with any precision anywhere; but ideas emanating from it slowly took over people’s thinking, assumptions about the inferior role of women vis-a-vis men, and the preference for a boy child over a girl child.
   The social implications of this mistaken idea has been damaging for women through centuries. For if heredity is indeed transmitted in some manner through male blood then a woman is a mere conduit or carrier. This notion of heredity gives rise to the discrimination in property inheritance between a boy child and a girl child and hence between the genders. In property distribution a son gets more than the daughter .The paternal heritage and property are thus transmitted through the male line and the children of the daughter are not considered a part of the heritage or property. In the case of the nobility, the male child carries the forefather’s noble blood and passes it on to his male child and so continues the blood line ever after. This notion of hereditary transmission, including that of the nobility, associated with it, is the reason why people feel so dejected when they do not have a male child, often lamenting that their hereditary lineage is coming to an end. Because in the blood-derived sense of heredity, there is no role for a woman to pass on the family line.
   In reality, a woman plays a more important role in the hereditary transmission leading to a child, male or female, than a man does. There are at two major genetic elements of transmission, and one very important physiological environment that is crucial for conception and subsequent uterine development of a human baby. The major genetic factors are the twenty three pairs of human chromosomes. One from each pair is contributed by the father and the mother. In this genetic contribution, both parent’s genes play equally important role and segregate and assort in a random way. The only paternal specific chromosome is the Y chromosome, turning a male child XY and a female child XX for that chromosome. So, the commonly-held notion is that the paternal genetic heritage is transmitted via the Y chromosome via the male son through eternity. However to my knowledge, Y chromosome has nothing to do with human blood. Nor do I believe that any degree of nobility and hereditary attributions can be associated with Y chromosome or any other chromosome.
   But the 23 pairs of chromosome are not the final determinant in human heredity. There is an additional genome, the mitochondrial genome, that is totally maternal and is transmitted via the female line. A mother contributes her mitochondrial genome to the baby and it is transmitted through the daughter. Thus in this genome the woman has an advantage over man. No such genome can be transmitted by the male. Indeed just like Y chromosome defines molecular male-lineage via males, the mitochondrial genome links the women with the lineage. Current molecular analyses of mitochondrial sequences and dating indicate that the first woman, the mitochondrial Eve, lived in Africa about 150 thousand years ago.
   Apart from the twenty three chromosome pairs and the mitochondrial genome, women play another crucial role in heredity, and that is the development of human foetus in mother’s womb. In the matter of conception, female body plays an active role in nourishing the baby and there is a continuous molecular interaction between the developing baby and the maternal factors such as placenta. Indeed, this connection is determined by genetic factors of the mother. Some women have a hereditary propensity to produce bigger babies than others, some women are more prone to diabetes during gestation than others, resulting in altered physiology of the developing child. I think we have simply seen the tip if the ice-berg regarding maternal contribution while the child is in the womb. It is a far cry from the ancient notion that a woman simply provides the uterus for the male blood to metamorphose into a child. Rather it is a sustained complex interaction resulting into much that the child becomes in his/her life. For instance it is now thought that a significant part of non-genetic component of human behaviour and intelligence is due to the environment that the child encounters in the mother’s womb.
   So the role of the woman in producing a child, male or female is indeed more important than that of a man on purely physiological grounds. The hereditary transmission, mediated by genes, is shared equally by a man and a woman. I fail to comprehend what possible biological mechanism is there through which genetic heritage can be transmitted better by a male member than a female member.
   Our traditional ideas, notions and the resultant pride or prejudice regarding heredity haves often remained in the era of the ancient Greeks. While science has progressed, often leading to views more consistent with modern ideas of gender equality, and other progressive views, the old notions remain entrenched in people’s psyche. Social scientists and other thinkers, not trained in biological sciences, need to integrate scientific ideas into their writings and formulate a more physiologically based view regarding the role of women in human reproduction. In this journey they have still a long way to go.

ICDDR,B and technology transfer in Genomics and Bioinformatics
I first heard of the scientific work of ICDDR,B, known colloquially as the “Cholera Hospital”, from Professor Stanley Falkow, one of the most eminent microbiologists of modern era. I was a Ph.D. student of Bacterial Genetics in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in the early 1980’s and Professor Falkow used to be a Professor of Microbiology in the University of Washington in Seattle. During a chitchat after one of his seminars, Dr Falkow, knowing that I am from Bangladesh, told me of the International Centre in Dhaka and urged me to make contacts with that organisation. It was not till 1986, long after Falkow had moved to Stanford, that I was able to go to Dhaka and make some contact at the ICDDR,B.
    During that summer, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr David Sack and his colleague Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed. I was excited to compare my own work using the bacteria E.coli as a model organism, and using such techniques as gene cloning and transposon-based methodologies with the important but technically challenging problems caused by enteric bacteria such as Shigella, and Vibrio. Cholera and other enteric aetiology still remain a formidable public health problem worldwide, including Bangladesh. Although my subsequent molecular biological work took me in a direction other than microbiology, I have over the years noticed with pride and optimism the transformation of ICDDR,B into an International Centre of Research of high distinction. More recently the organization has been in the news for organizing a very important course in collaboration with two other important organizations involved in health and public health research, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of USA and the Welcome Trust of UK. And I was happy to see that Dr. Sack, who impressed me greatly with his informality and enthusiasm in 1986, is now the Director of the Centre. ICDDR,B is one of the major success stories of in Bangladesh. Although it is not strictly a part of Bangladesh’s scientific establishment, it could play an important role in transferring important technologies to the nation.
   In our public health area, the challenges that we face are stark indeed. Problems such as diarrhoea and other enteric infe