Periscope, November 2013 by The Caravan, Delhi Press

Refractions

26 TOTALLY WIRED

Addiction and the Internet BY VENKAT SRINIVASAN

WAVES AND PARTICLES

FRICTIONS

PSY VS. PSY

Fault lines in the debate over mental illness BY USHA RAMAN

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MENAGERIE

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Excerpts from the works of Stephen J Gould, John Ruskin, and Sir Ronald Ross

Cover: Chinese Internet addicts undergo treatment in the Nanometer Wave Treatment Room in the Baiyun Mental Health Hospital, Guangzhou, China. Fritz Hoffmann/In Pictures/Corbis

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november 2013

PERISCOPE

waves& particles

Keystone/Getty Images

A remade Kon-Tiki

he Kon-Tiki voyage and Thor Heyerdahl were celebrated onscreen in 1947 and inspired numerous recreations by adventurers. A Norwegian film released in 2012 and nominated for an Oscar earlier this year brought the journey back to popular imagination, but did cinematic license result in a loss of soul? Jeremy Thomas, one of the producers, said that the crew realized that the story of the original voyage was compelling, but an adventure film needed more than just fishing and sunbathing. The protagonists had to be tall, slim, and valiant (like Norse gods), and, in keeping with the adventure theme, someone would have to die. It couldn’t be one of the raft’s crew, so Lorita, a pet macaw was sacrificed for art. She was blown overboard and became shark bait. A crewman consumed with rage, hauled the shark on board and gutted it on deck in revenge. The shark’s blood seeped through the raft floor and incited a feeding frenzy below. Another crewmember slipped off the raft into the water teeming with sharks. He was short, plump, and craven, a foil to the Norse Gods. One of them had to jump into the sea and rescue him. On the actual voyage, there was never a fat crew member, and the macaw was actually a parrot that simply flew away one day during the journey. The exploits of the crew and the journey alone had seemed mythic and adventurous enough for legend.

Onscreen Dreams Our brains follow set patterns as they react to different visuals, and a team of scientists in Kyoto, Japan, have prepared an algorithm to help understand these patterns. They created a dream-reading machine composed of an MRI scanner, stock images from the Internet, and an algorithm that over time figured out patterns and predicted the dreams of three research participants with an accuracy of 60 percent. In a process repeated about 200 times per participant, scientists monitored them as they drifted to sleep. At different stages of sleep the participants were woken up and asked to describe what they saw when they were dreaming. The common items mentioned were matched with stock images. The same images were shown to the participants when they were awake and alert under the MRI scanner. The patterns picked up were then matched with the patterns displayed while the subjects were dreaming. An algorithm of the brain patterns and stock images generated a video that was likely close to what the subject was seeing in their dream. When the subjects were asked about their dreams, the machine’s predictions were consistent with most of the visuals reported.

REMEMBER ARMAGEDDON?

Christophe Simon/Afp/Getty Images

Grant Turner/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Play Dirty Children today are too clean for their own good. Over the last few decades, the industrialized world has fallen victim to a proliferation of once-rare diseases such as Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and celiac disease. These afflictions, however, are still relatively rare in under-developed countries. A study from a town on the border of Finland and Russia corroborates this. Finnish children have the highest rate of Type 1 diabetes in the world. In the Russian town of Karelia across the border, the diabetes rate is one-sixth of that in Finland, though the two populations are genetically similar and they both live in the same environment of pine forests, bitter winters, and long summers. The difference is that Finns are seven times richer than the Karelians and their children are too clean. The more microbial agents we are exposed to early in life, the less likely are we to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases later. When our immune systems don’t have infections to target, they look for other things they should generally ignore such as animal dander, certain foods, and pollen.

In the year 2022, a spacecraft is

The spaceship, being con-

going to be crashed into an as-

structed at Johns Hopkins’s

teroid to save the earth.

applied physics Laboratory, will

Didymos is a binary asteroid

be called DART (i.e., Double

system in which two space rocks

Asteroid Redirection Test),

are bound together by the larger

and it will be crashed into the

rock’s gravity, and in 2022, the

smaller asteroid to create a cra-

Didymos asteroids will be 11

ter whose impact will send the

million kilometres from the

rock slightly off its course. The

earth, the closest they will ever

goal is to use the DART as a test

be to our planet. The European

for asteroid deflection, prepar-

and United States science com-

ing for the future deflection of

munity, in a mission named the

larger asteroids on a collision

Asteroid Impact and Deflection

course with the earth. In addi-

Assessment (AIDA), will send a

tion to this, DART will also help

spacecraft built by the European

scientists determine Didymos’

Space Agency and another built

surface composition and how

in the US on a three-year voyage

debris float outward from the

to these asteroids.

impact site.

november 2013

PERISCOPE

David Silverman/Getty Images

Gerry Shih/Reuters

When you read the headlines earlier this year that the Internet had slowed down all over the world and that it was the biggest cyber attack ever experienced, did you wonder what the fuss was about? Your connection was working just fine—maybe there was a slight lag of a few extra seconds, but it wasn’t more than a mild inconvenience. According to some tech websites the buzz was drummed up by a company called Cloudflare who brought to everyone’s attention an assault on an anti-spam organization named Spamhaus by a web-hosting company called Cyberbunker. Cloudflare is a company that helps websites minimize the damage of online junk data attacks by creating more targets and spreading the burden of the junk attack between them. It was reported that this “major” attack affected the website it was directed at, but definitely not the rest of the Internet. It could have been a bid from Cloudflare to drum up more business the same way a press release from a pharmaceutical company tells you how bad a disease can be and that they have a pill for it. Their plan may have been more effective had they just cut a few cables.

What We Now Know About Food

A glut of recent studies have been turning on their head perceptions we’ve long held about food. Here’s a list of what they found: 1. If you want to eat less, sniff an olive. The German Research Center for Food Chemistry found that olive scented food made people feel fuller faster. 2. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who ate breakfasts high in protein were considerably less likely to snack on food high in sugar or fat later that night. 3. Researchers at Penn State University found that eating junk food sunk a person’s mood, especially if they were already worried about what they ate. Most people in the study almost always felt worse after eating junk food. 4. Chewing gum does you no good: The minty fresh flavor discourages you from eating fruit and vegetables because it makes them taste bad. Researchers at Ohio State University found that people who chew gum end up eating highcalorie sweet foods instead of healthier options. 5. Scientists at Johns Hopkins have found

Christie s Images/Corbis

PR Attack

INVISIBLE PEOPLE “Metascreen” is a material made up of strips of copper tape attached to flexible polycarbonate film when the two are combined in a fishnet pattern and is used to make invisibility cloaks. Previous attempts at invisibility have tried to bend light around an object, but the metascreen cloaks cancel out light waves that bounce off the object in a process called ‘mantel cloaking’. Those light waves never reach the observer’s eyes. For now, this only works in microwave light and for small objects, though the practical applications of this technology can later be used in noninvasive sensors and biomedical instruments. Ç Rene Magritte The Road to Damascus

that coffee, black and green tea, and ‘liquid smoke’ can damage DNA by awakening a ‘repair’ gene. This gene is usually only activated when a person’s DNA sends out distress signals. 6. In the course of eight studies conducted at the University of Leeds, it was found that the risk of having a stroke was reduced by 7 percent if 7 additional grams of fibre were added to one’s diet. The recommended daily amount was 20 to 35 grams of fibre, so, here’s yet another reason to eat more vegetables. 7. Researchers at the University of North Carolina studied 66 pairs of identical twins and found that they avoided the same kinds of food. This shows that if your child is being picky, it’s probably because of his or her genes. 8. Fruit flies seem to really like organic food, and researchers at Southern Methodist University have said that flies that tend to eat organic live longer and had a higher fertility than others that did not. 9. A Cornell University researcher found that if a calorie label on a food package is green, people tended to think that the food contained within it was healthy.

Waves & Particles

Mammalian brain cells could outlive the animal to which they originally belonged—if they’re transplanted into a different body. This raises the hope that if science can increase the human lifespan, brain cells may cooperate by working longer. Scientists at the University of Pavia in Italy transplanted precursor neurons from a mouse into the cerebellum of rat embryos. The cells developed into normal neurons, and though they retained their mouselike shape and size, they made themselves at home in the rat brains. The cells also survived for as long as their rat hosts did, twice as long as the lifespan of the donor mouse. These findings suggest that the lifespan of these neurons are not genetically fixed and instead were determined by the microenvironment in the rat’s brain, that neuron survival and aging are coincident but separate processes. This increases the hope that the life of an organism can be extend by dietary, behavioural, and pharmacological interventions.

Thomas Deerinck/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

How To Outlive The Body

Children of the future may not have to suffer the degenerative effects of genetic diseases. Scientists at Newcastle University have found that the introduction of a third parent into the mix could save children at risk. Human eggs contain mitochondria. While chromosomes are the main transporters of DNA, mitochondria also contain their own. It is when this DNA is defective that problems set in the growing foetus. However, scientists believe that they can take the nucleus of the egg from a woman with compromised DNA and insert it into the egg of a healthy donor, thus preventing the damaged genes from the mitochondria taking hold. While permission has been requested to experiment with and test this theory, it has its detractors who in addition to being skeptical of its safety are also worried that it plays with the natural order.

CC BY 2.0/KOMUnews

The Third Parent

LETHAL AGENT It’s made its way into everyday products such as handsoap, toothpaste, kitchen utensils, toys, and bedding. It tends to easily enter the bloodstream through skin, has been detected in human breastmilk. and has also been found in aquatic environments. It’s Triclosan, a substance that was developed in the 1960s to be used in hospitals as an antibacterial agent, but then started being marketed for that very property. Recent studies have revealed that this product poses significant problems. It’s been found to affect thyroid function in animals and also affects muscle contraction in both animals and reduced by 25% and grip strength was reduced by 18% after exposure to just one dose of triclosan. When human heart cells in a test tube were exposed to the chemical, it acted as a potent cardiac depressive and therefore could exacerbate underlying heart problems in humans. The addition of triclosan, in fact, confers no additional benefits to conventional soap.

Frank Siteman/Science Faction/Corbis

humans. The heart function of mice and minnows was

november 2013

Frictions

PSY vs.PSY

Fault lines in the debate over mental illness

Jerry Cooke/Corbis

BY USHA RAMAN

PERISCOPE

rinivas* was referred to the psychiatric ward of Gandhi Hospital in Secunderabad after a failed suicide attempt—the third time in three years that he had tried to take his life. He was diagnosed with clinical depression and put on therapeutic medication, drugs that would work on the delicate network of synapses in his brain to stimulate the production of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine—chemicals that help transmit impulses between neurons and play a role in the regulation of the body’s many mechanisms. The psychiatrist asked him to return for a consultation three weeks from then. The three weeks were a trial, both physically and mentally. Srinivas felt queasy much of the time; he couldn’t sleep, and he had a constant dull headache. The doctor had warned him in passing of some side effects, but he didn’t know how long they would last. The anxious atmosphere at home and the increasing sense of distance from his parents didn’t help much. He showed up at the hospital a few days into the medication and asked to see his doctor. Instead, he was referred to a part-time counsellor. Over several sessions with the counseling psychologist, he came to understand that the medication was necessary, that the side effects would abate over time, and that there were ways in which to move his life forward. His story wasn’t unusual: a broken romantic relationship, low self-esteem, and difficulties in articulating his needs and problems to his parents. These problems, the counsellor felt, had to do with those relational dynamics and his inability to handle them. This was one of the rare cases where psychiatry and psychology were applied in a complementary manner to deal with a mental health issue, bringing together the science and art of dealing with the demons of the mind. While the medication was necessary to activate the production of what some call “happy hormones”, the counseling helped him gain perspective and build in him the inner strength to look at his life more positively. But where exactly does the locus of mental illness lie? In that vague, unfix-

* Name changed. Case reconstructed based on documentation from Seva, a free counseling centre in Hyderabad.

able entity called the mind? Or in the cellular composition of brain tissue? Can it be better addressed by considering the biochemical basis of life and its constituents or by understanding the social and cultural dynamics that construct and constrict an individual’s life? Does one electronically prod and diagram the convolutions of that intricate tissue, one of the last frontiers of medical science, or listen and watch as an individual life unfolds through narration and description? Are the causes understood within the chapters of biology, by reading personal history, or by examining the existential reticulum of society, polity and culture? Historians would point to René Descartes and the acceptance of the mindbody duality as the point of separation between these two applied sciences of the mind—psychiatry and psychology. The first is born out of biology and medicine, a belief system that holds that disease has a physical basis, one that can be identified, isolated and observed, given the right tools. The second is born out of a philosophical tradition of enquiry, of a focus on the invisible and the immaterial side of being, the idea of self, the soul and its struggles to find balance in a material world. To which of these disciplines does the health of the mind belong, then? If the mind is merely an extension of the body—a function of the brain, so to speak—then it may be treated with the tools of biological medicine. But if it is beyond the body, then what might the tools of healing be? It is in the application of these sciences to the heal-

ing of mental illness that a variety of confusions become apparent—regarding the locus and cause of disease, the path and form of treatment. psychiatry as a branch of medical practice has had a long journey from the restraint-based mental asylums of the pre-Victorian era to the sanatoria informed by psychoanalytic theory to the early twentieth century clinics where electroconvulsive therapy became one of the infamous means of taming the rebellious brain. This was followed by the discovery of a range of antipsychotic drugs, heralding a new era of treatment based on pharmacotherapy. In a pithy history of the discipline in The Lancet (10 April 2010), Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego notes that these drugs gave psychiatrists a “therapeutic modality that was easy to dispense and closely resembled the magic potions that increasingly underpinned the cultural authority of medicine at large”. The availability of medications allowed psychiatric treatment to move outside institutions and in a way gave more autonomy to patients and their families. At the same time, it also resulted in reducing mental illness to something that was a biochemical problem, one which could be easily addressed with the support (and, some would say, collusion) of the pharmaceutical industry. È Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) can be used to diagnose mental disorders. Haxby et al (2001)/CC BY SA 3 0

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The forcing of mental health practice into a medical model creates a need among clinical psychologists to “appear equivalent” to psychiatrists. “There’s a tendency for both professions to look down on the other side, with a reluctance to refer patients to each other.” These developments in psychiatry— first institutionalization as a mechanism and then the excessive dependence on drugs—led to considerable social criticism in the early part of the 20th century, dubbed the “anti-psychiatry” movement, fuelled by intellectuals like Michel Foucault and R D Laing in Europe and Thomas Szasz in the United States. The unquestioned assumption that ‘reason’ underlay ‘normalcy’ in thought and behavior—an outcome of the Enlightenment—was attacked. This served to bring back some credibility to the role of the “talking cure” which had been discredited following the rise of the “biomedical” model and which now became the preserve of the newer science of psychology. sigmund freud might be the father of psychoanalysis and widely credited with the introduction of the “talking cure” but the discipline of psychology is thought to have been formalized with the setting up of a laboratory by German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig in 1879, to study human behavior. Wundt used a method called “introspection” to break down thoughts and reactions into units that could be related to the most basic sensations and perceptions. Taken further and formalized by Edward Tichener, one of his students, this came to be known as the structuralist school of psychology. Psychology then travelled to North America where the understanding of behavior was placed within the context of the social environment, growing into the functionalist school. Human consciousness was conceptualized as something that existed as a continuous flow, which could not be broken down according to a structuralist formula. This approach to understanding the mind influenced studies on memory and behavior, and informed the experimental work that began to characterize the psychology of the early 1900s. The first half of the twentieth century was dominated first by Freud and Carl Jung and their work on the un-

conscious, while the middle years of the 1900s gave themselves over to the study of developmental psychology and cognition, marked by thinkers such as Jean Piaget and Abraham Maslow. Psychology was attempting to integrate ideas about intelligence, behavior and the brain in ways that raised complex questions about nature and nurture, biology and spirituality, mind and matter. By the 1950s, the discipline already has several subfields and many divergent schools of thought, from the heavily positivist ideas of the behaviourists and those who believed that the workings of the mind could be tested and coded in a scientific manner, to those who, like Maslow, believed the understanding of the mind as an art required a more philosophical and humanistic approach. The latter half of the twentieth century saw psychology subjected to similar criticisms as psychiatry in its reductionist view of the human mind, in its trying to fit the mind into the structure of the brain, and place responsibility—and blame—on the illness on individual factors. This fueled the move towards a more open, socially and culturally sensitive approach to understanding and dealing with human thought and behavior. Positive psychology, for instance, is a direct outcome of this move, with its focus on building the capacity in people to better respond to their life contexts. srinivas’ drug therapy was a direct consequence of the biochemical basis of psychiatry, while the counsellor’s approach was almost classical cognitivebehavior therapy, or CBT, on which much of today’s psychology is based. The boundary between psychology and psychiatry is neither clean nor clear, but messy and blurred, rent in places by knowledge from contributing fields of knowledge, bridged by technology in others. Neurobiology, cognitive science, genetics, as well as sociology, theology and (once again) philosophy make connections with both the medical and the social science and render the divide debatable.

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In the world of ideas, of journals and academic conferences, there is considerable comingling and sharing of knowledge. Take, for instance, the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry (published by Johns Hopkins University), which encourages crossover thinking. But as Philip John, a senior psychiatric consultant from Kerala notes, in an article in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2010, vol. 52), “professional contest and personal vanity” still mark the boundary debates between the two professions. While John recognizes the importance of developing an approach to mental health that allows a melding of ideas and approaches across the spectrum, from chronic insanity to the ‘worried well’, in the real world, most practitioners of the two sciences to a large extent still work in different worlds, and with different world views. Diana Monteiro, a Hyderabad-based counseling psychologist, adds that the forcing of mental health practice into a medical model creates a need among clinical psychologists to “appear equivalent” to psychiatrists. “There’s a tendency for both professions to look down on the other side, with a reluctance to refer patients to each other,” she says. The resistance to the biomedical understanding of mental health resurfaced last month with the publication of the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5) in the United States. Ashok Mysore, professor of psychiatry at St John’s Medical College in Bangalore, calls this an “extension” of the process of operationalisation of definitions of disorders that began with DSM 3 in 1980 that was “predicated on the philosophy of logical positivism”, as it focused on “empirical evidence” as the basis for categorizing disease. DSM 3 for the first time had introduced a system of classification and identification of mental illnesses that drew upon explicit diagnostic criteria without reference to the ‘cause’ or in medical terms, ‘aetiology’ of disease. The DSM 5 further systematizes the classification. The British Psychological Association, in response to DSM 5, has called for a rethinking of the approach to defining mental illness, moving away from relating it to biological— even genetic—causes and taking into account social and cultural contexts within which people live their lives.

Carl Purcell/Three Lions/Getty Images

Frictions

Ç A patient undergoes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in 1955.

“The psychiatrist is usually the ﬁrst stop when someone has a mental health problem,”... This could be even something as simple as stress and anxiety leading to sleep deprivation. The truth is, both professions are crucial to the management of mental illness and mental health. In India, mental health disorders account for close to one-sixth of all health problems. There are 0.4 psychiatrists and 0.2 psychologists per 100,000 Indians, a grossly inadequate number, given the scale and scope of mental health problems in the population. Policy makers call for a “therapeutic alliance” in the field of mental health, comprising a range of professions and representing a variety of approaches. S N Chaudhry, neurosurgeon and member of the governing body of the Delhi-based Vidyasagar Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (VIMHANS), says that psychiatry is one of the most poorly treated specialisations

in early medical training across India. “Very little attention is paid to mental health in the basic MBBS programme, with those who go into it later receiving an education focusing almost entirely on diagnosis and pharmacotherapy,” he says. “Training in psychology, on the other hand, happens through the Arts or Social Sciences Faculty in most universities, and there is limited and widely varying exposure to the clinical aspects of mental health until the MPhil level.” This divergent approach to education has deepened the schism between practitioners. “The average MA in psychology has no ability to deal with mental illness,” observes Chaudhry. On the other hand, the average psychiatric practitioner in India approaches all mental health problems as psychosis.

Chaudhry emphasizes that it is extremely important to distinguish between psychosis, which has a physiological basis and mental health issues. “Only 1 per cent of patients actually have psychosis—which requires medical treatment.” This would include conditions such as mood disorders, schizophrenia and clinical depression. For the rest, it is the psychologist who holds the key to treatment, through a combination of counseling and psychotherapy. Chaudhry also indicates that the biggest growth for services is in areas such as child/adolescent issues, lifestyle management, family and relationship counseling, and substance abuse rehabilitation—all of which are more appropriately handled by psychology than psychiatry. Monteiro points out that despite this, one is more likely to find a larger crowd in a psychiatric clinic than in a counsellor’s office. “The psychiatrist is usually the first stop when someone has a mental health problem,” she says. This could be even something as simple as stress and anxiety leading to sleep deprivation. “And very, very few psychiatrists will refer them to a psychologist.” “I’d say that 75 per cent of my patients see a psychiatrist, and in most cases that has been their first stop,” says Monteiro. “But in fact, 95 per cent need to see a psychologist first and perhaps only 5 per cent—the severe cases—need a psychiatrist.” There’s another catalyst for the medicalization of mental health, according to Ashok Mysore. “The more legalities are associated with the practice of healthcare, the more it forces us into a medical model.” The legal system demands clear definitions of mental disorder, thus forcing practitioners to look for symptoms in a manner akin to a checklist. “After all, you can [legally] hold medical practice accountable for errors with defining or managing the change in a person’s mental state. One cannot be reliably faulted for pinning responsibility for altered mental states on contexts such as society or culture.” Most people seeking medical care want quick treatment, and, so the doctor who can prescribe a pill to make the illness go away is always preferred— hence the preference for the psychiatrist. With extremely effective drugs becoming available, pharmacotherapy is the first line of treatment. “But

november 2013

Lynn Johnson/National Geographic Society/Corbis

Ç A woman cares for mentally disabled residents at Bethlehem Abhaya Bhavan, House of Care, Koovappaddy, Kerala.

Mapping all 100 trillion neural connections in the brain may not quite lead us to “seeing” the workings of the mind. … [T]here is no way to understand how the brain converts the electrochemical impulses into subjective experience. hardly ever does a doctor tell the patient what the drug is for, and how long they will need to use it,” she adds. Chaudhry’s approach at VIMHANS has been to ramp up the presence of psychologists. “It’s also a question of economics,” he says. “A psychiatrist sees 3-4 patients in an hour, while a psychologist can see one patient an hour, just because of the nature of the interaction.” This naturally translates into psychological counseling being the more expensive service, and therefore is more difficult to sustain. At VIMHANS, involving this group in education and research has helped mitigate the financial challenge. On the other side, psychiatric practice and training in most parts of the world has expanded to include psychotherapy and counseling—in a way, going back to its origins. “One has to remember that the chemicals now available to

treat psychoses are no more than three or four decades old,” says Chaudhry. “It was because there were no medicines to treat these disorders that Freud tapped into the subconscious as a method of addressing them.” It has taken a new generation of psychiatrists to recognize the importance and complementary value of psychology and therefore adjust their own approaches to treatment to make the most of this potential synergy. Combined clinical meetings and case discussions have helped overcome some of the disciplinary distrust. “It’s been a gradual evolution,” says Chaudhry. “Our psychiatrists are now better able to demarcate those patients who would benefit from a psychologist’s intervention.” The clinical psychologists at VIMHANS now have close to 40 per cent referrals (with the remaining walk-ins), a four-fold jump from 8 years ago, when barely 10

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per cent of the patients were referred for psychological counseling. It’s also important to acknowledge the role of public perceptions in granting status to one discipline over another. Chaudhry cites the examples of complementary fields like cardiology and cardiac surgery, neurology and neuro surgery. It’s the surgical disciplines that seem to provide the miracle solutions, and therefore acquire greater cachet in the public mind. “The social workers and psychologists actually handle the bulk of mental health issues but psychiatrists receive the greater credit,” he says. This is because they come in at a point when disease becomes severe, and therefore calls for more drastic—and more visible—measures. The therapeutic alliance is particularly important in such cases. As Monteiro explains, “I have seen a fair number of people who got put on anti depressant or anti mania drugs who I thought were quite normal and experiencing a normal reaction to a life stressors.” “I think the relationship between the psychiatrist and psychologist is very important, to keep communication open about what each thinks is normal or not,” continues Monteiro. “When the psychiatrist has explained his thinking to me I was able to understand why he thought it was abnormal and vice versa. This takes of course a good relationship between the two.” Places like VIMHANS and the Bangalore-based NIMHANS / St John’s where such an approach exists, are still the exception rather than the rule in India, and the professions still do not occupy a common service delivery platform. The situation is compounded by the divisions within the field of psychology, which has a variety of overlapping subspecializations, ranging from abnormal to developmental to organizational to social to counseling psychology. “I’d say the boundary tensions within psychology are more pronounced than that between psychology and psychiatry,” says Mahati Chittem, associate professor of health psychologist at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. She points to the overlaps between health psychology, counseling psychology and positive psychology, all subspecialties that focus on enabling individuals to handle mental and emotional stress, but arising from different sources or contexts. Clinical psychologists, whose

Frictions

purview has been abnormal behavior, sometimes stray into providing counseling for instance. back in the laboratories and hallways of research there are exciting realignments and crossovers that are creating new knowledge, understandings that do not fit easily into any one box yet have implications for a variety of areas. Work on neurotransmitters and chemical receptors in neurobiology holds promise for the development of new psychotherapeutic drugs, something that the field has been waiting over three decades for. Illnesses such as depression have benefited from pharmacological intervention—ipronazid, for instance, has helped many people who struggle with chronic depression. Other illnesses continue to challenge researchers, particularly since testing psychotropic drugs cannot follow the same animal model trajectory that other drug testing does. Symptoms such as despondency may not quite manifest in similar ways in mice! Scientists are also beginning to look at different approaches to drug discovery that bypass animal testing, instead going back to directly observable effects on humans in what are called “fast-fail” trials. In these experiments, the attempt is to link specific symptoms (observable behaviours) to particular regions of the brain. Inputs from other fields such as neuroimaging and cognitive sciences are also helping build pictures of how the brain works in conditions like autism spectrum disorder. Such pictures are beginning to show, for instance, that differences in patterns of neural connections may indicate some forms of schizophrenia. The University of Hyderabad’s Centre for Neural and Cognitive Sciences brings together linguists, philosophers, developmental psychologists and computer scientists to understand the process of cognition. Combined with neuroimaging, these disciplines help map brain activity and impulse transmission during acts such as reading, speaking or taking in visual stimuli. Studies on adolescents, among others, has provided interesting insights into key emotional, cognitive and social changes taking place at this phase of development. In fact, much of the “new research” in this shifting field is now under the large umbrella of neurotechnology—an interdisciplinary space that combines health sciences, bioen-

gineering, cognitive science, genetics and biotechnology. Prof Bapi Raju of the University of Hyderabad notes that until recently, the debates at the cognitive science-philosophy interface concerning the nature of the mind and consciousness had not had any direct impact on the practice of either psychiatry or psychology. “Neuroimaging perhaps offers us a way to facilitate that dialogue,” he says. “We are in a position to study brain activity ‘in vivo’ so to speak, in conditions as varied as dyslexia and schizophrenia,” he continues, noting that in doing so, “we are mindful of the fact that we are making the big assumption that consciousness has a neural manifestation.” His excitement is visible as he speaks of the opportunity afforded by such technologically-aided collaborations to gain a better understanding of how (for instance) talk (as in psychotherapy) can actually have an impact on brain chemistry. Barack Obama, in his 2013 State of the Union address, flagged a new research initiative called BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain. This initiative hopes to build “dynamic pictures of the brain” that will ultimately “shed light on the complex link between brain function and behavior”. There is a danger, however, that the application of technologically-driven science could push the study of the mind—that opaque entity that is lodged in the brain—back into the realm of that which is physically visible, its processes subject to modeling and mapping using an algorithmic approach, that one kind of reductionism is replaced by another. Mapping all 100 trillion neural connections in the brain may not quite lead us to ‘seeing’ the workings of the mind. As Robert Burton, author of A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind says, there is no way to understand how the brain converts the electrochemical impulses into subjective experience. But one might say that attempting to understand the workings of intelligence is only a few steps away from drawing the boundaries of normal and abnormal cognition. The use of advanced imaging to note the patterns of brainwaves might tell us that something is happening within the innermost reaches of our brains but its interpretation is still embedded within a cultural and social con-

text. Similarly, genetics and neurobiology are producing new knowledge that feed into the epidemiology of disease, but this again returns us to the basic rift in disciplines, one of interpretation of physical/biological phenomena and how one defines the pathology of mental illness. However, it is interesting that the focus of this understanding is aimed at understanding “brain disorders” rather than “mental illness”, and perhaps this is where the disciplinary divide will ultimately come to rest. Will understanding how the brain works also provide insights into how the mind reacts to situations? What tips the balance between health and illness when it comes to the mind? Is it “thinking” as mapped via neuroimaging or “feeling” tracked through neurotransmitters? How does one interact with the other? And at what point does something move from minor aberration to pathology? One of the major criticisms against the newest DSM is the expanded range of mental states to be classified as disorders, including temper, grief and worrying. It would seem that psychiatry has narrowed the range of the normal and expanded its own playing field, in labeling as pathologies states that most people experience at one time or another in the course of a lifetime. At the same time, critical scholars have suggested through systematic meta-analyses that such conditions as ‘premenstrual syndrome’ have no biological basis and may instead be products of a process of socialization. srinivas’ story ended happily enough. The antidepressants, despite their side-effects, did help restore a biochemical balance in due course. And while the chemicals were doing their job, the psychological counseling helped him map out the things that were causing him distress, building within him the coping skills that would help him handle the challenges without breaking down. So, has his body been healed, or has his mind? The truth about mental illness or mental health, most likely, lies somewhere in the space between the biological and the socio-cultural. As Simon Wessely, Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists notes in The Guardian, it is “about biology, but it [is] also about psychology, and sociology, ethics, politics and much else.” a

Adventures

FORBIDDEN SYMMETRY The quest for a radically new form of matter

aul Steinhardt sat riveted to his seat as the driver, Victor, steered the double-track vehicle from side to side, dodging hazards every few feet. It was July 2011, and the 58-year-old physicist found himself in Chukotka, a region in Far Eastern Russia where the moon rises to white midnights framed against the smoky Koryak Mountains. He had never been camping, but was now leading a geological expedition deep into the Russian tundra, a land fractured from the Alaskan mass and inhabited by bears, against which the expedition team carried modified Kalashnikovs to defend themselves. There were no roads, and on occasion the vehicles, called snowcats—rectangular boxes painted bright orange and blue-grey that trundled along at a top speed of 15 km per hour— would have to cross entire water bodies on a hope and a prayer. Steinhardt was headed to a stream 230 km to the south-west of Anadyr, the capital of Chukotka, searching for fragments of a meteorite unlike any known before. Embedded in the rock could be a form of matter called quasicrystals that had never before been found in nature. Quasicrystals riff on something as basic as the way atoms (or molecules, or ions) are arranged in materials. When they were first synthesised in a lab in 1982, they overthrew 200 years of scientific dogma about the laws of matter.

They form a bridge between ‘true’ crystals like salt and gold, and amorphous, disordered materials like glass, which were the only categories of solid material previously thought to exist. Quasicrystals changed the very definition of crystals and the assumptions of crystallography—the science used to study the arrangement of atoms in solids. Their discovery allowed materials researchers to play with an infinite new range of atomic structures. The internal structure, in turn, creates the solid’s unique properties. Practical applications for quasicrystals have already been found, such as in the strengthening of steel, and the unique way they interact with light has led to several patents. Steinhardt had been at the forefront of quasicrystal research—the word ‘quasicrystal’ itself came from a paper he co-authored in 1984. Initially met with scepticism and ridicule, hundreds of quasicrystals had since been found. (They are rather common in certain aluminium metallic phases.) But quasicrystals had only been artificially made in the laboratory, and were therefore thought not to be an important building blocks of the material universe. The primary goal of the Russian expedition was to show beyond a shred of doubt that quasicrystals could form in nature. This would move science one step closer to showing that quasicrystals were as robust (and perhaps as universal) a form of matter as crystals.

Courtesy Luca Bindi

BY VIRAT MARKANDEYA

After a “four-day rollercoaster ride”, as Steinhardt would later call it, the expedition arrived at the Listvenitovyi stream. The excavation team began panning for quasicrystal candidates, separating rock and other minerals from clay for a kilometre along the stream. An analysis team then sifted through the panned material, looking for minute grains in what had originally been a tonne of sediment. If indeed they found natural quasicrystals, it would rewrite mineralogy textbooks and open new directions for material science. blame the omnivorous reading habits of an Italian geologist for starting it all. In 2007, Luca Bindi was a curator at the Università degli Studi di Firenze who was interested in incommensurate structures—in which, like quasicrys-

tals, atomic clusters don’t repeat regularly or are aperiodic—in minerals. His curiosity led him to a 2001 paper in Physical Review Letters—not a staple journal for the earth sciences—by Peter J Lu at Harvard and Paul Steinhardt and Nan Yao at Princeton. It discussed a method to find and index new solids called “quasicrystals” based on their X-ray diffraction patterns. The analysis had found 50 promising mineral candidates, but no clincher. Bindi had never worked with this form of aperiodic structure before. Nevertheless, as he scanned the list of candidates, he saw three minerals he was familiar with: aktashite, gratonite, and tantalite. “I was shocked to see them in this list,” he recalled. “Could they exhibit a quasicrystalline structure?”

Bindi knew quasicrystals were important. Finding a natural quasicrystal, for one, would revolutionize the way minerals were conventionally classified— because all known minerals were either crystalline or amorphous, rather than quasicrystalline in structure.At the end of the paper, a line caught his eye: “We are interested in collaborating in exploring the leading candidates, only some of which have been given in Table I. Those interested are encouraged to contact P. J. L. and P. J. S.” Bindi had a hunch that the minerals were among the collections of the Natural History Museum of the Università degli Studi di Firenze that he knew so well. Bindi ran to check out the database for the 50,000-specimen mineralogical collection at the museum. “They were there!” he later wrote to me in an e-mail. So he decided to contact Lu and Steinhardt.

In October 2007, when Steinhardt received an e-mail from Bindi offering collaboration, the search for natural quasicrystals was in a slow phase. Steinhardt, who was known as a cosmologist for his work on inflationary models of the universe, tinkered around with several projects at once, including solid-state physics of which the quasicrystal hunt was a part. He had then been toying with the idea of compiling a catalogue for meteorites similar to the catalogue for terrestrial minerals compiled by the International Centre for Diffraction Data, which he had unsuccessfully used in the 2001 paper. Steinhardt had a hunch quasicrystals could be found in meteorites and a database would facilitate the search. Steinhardt didn’t know much about the Italian museum, but Bindi seemed enthusiastic, so the Princeton collabo-

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Bindi looked up mineralogical databases for natural aluminium-copper alloys. He found two—khatyrkite and cupalite. And then he made a second discovery: he had one of the minerals right under his nose. rators gave him a list of minerals that seemed promising but hadn’t yet been checked. Out of this list, Bindi thought he could procure about half a dozen. The laborious process of slicing the mineral, preparing the sample, and observing its powder pattern to check whether it was a good candidate or not took about a month. The researchers tested six samples in all. Nothing worked. “It was failure after failure after failure,” Steinhardt recalled. “We thought we’ll write a paper saying that we tried six more and they failed.” The idea was to update the 2001 paper, create some noise, and get more people interested. “Luca was pressing to writewrite-write,” Steinhardt told me. “I was like, hmmnn, I don’t know.” The lull might have been fortuitous. Bindi decided to take a fresh approach to the problem. Rather than simply cross off the minerals he had been sent by Steinhardt, he put down a list of known synthetic quasicrystals and stared hard. Did these compounds show anything in common? The answer soon popped up: all the quasicrystals had metallic aluminium, and often copper, in their formula. Bindi looked up mineralogical databases for natural aluminium-copper alloys. He found two—khatyrkite and cupalite. And then he made a second discovery: he had one of the minerals right under his nose. In a minor, but important, collection housed in the Florence Museum, he found a sample with the catalogue number “46407/G” labelled “Khatyrkite” and catalogued as sourced from the “Koryak Mts., Russia”. Bindi began careful single-ray X-ray diffraction and chemical analysis to see what the khatyrkite sample revealed. Soon, he was sure he had something. Excited, he emailed Steinhardt in early November 2008. Steinhardt was, in fact, in Genoa to give a talk at the Festival della Scienz on cosmology. (‘Beyond the Big Bang, The Universe Without End,’ it was titled.) Before the beginning of his presentation, Steinhardt responded on his BlackBerry: “I look

forward to seeing the pptfile—it sounds much more exciting than what we had before (a null result).” After looking at the file, Steinhardt sent an effusive note saying that he agreed they actually might have a natural quasicrystal. The last overwhelming evidence would be a diffraction pattern taken with a transmission electron microscope. As Bindi did not have the equipment in Italy, he decided to send the samples to Princeton. Two 60-micron-sized grains were couriered there on November 11. The sample came FedEx-ed in a tiny plastic box labelled “khatyrkite”. The box contained two brass holders out of which glass rods stuck out, and on the glass rods were specks of matter. “If this turns out to be the quasicrystal, I’m going to be frustrated, because I can barely see this thing,” Steinhardt had joked. “I thought it would be something I could hold in my hand, like a rock.” Worse still, after waiting for close to a decade since his 2001 paper to find a sample of a natural quasicrystal, Steinhardt would have had to wait another few months to confirm that the sample was legitimate. It was going to be Christmas break in Princeton, and the only lab where a physicist could test the sample would be closed. Steinhardt was told he couldn’t have the lab for another three months because it was already booked. He decided he would slip in earlier. On New Year’s morning in 2009, when they knew no one would be there, Steinhardt and Nan Yao, head of the Princeton Institute for Science and Technology of Materials’ (PRISM) Imaging and Analysis Center, slinked into his lab at Princeton. Despite Bindi’s enthusiasm, Steinhardt thought they would spend a few minutes checking and failing—and then he could sleep again. Then, a small disaster almost struck. Before the scientists could proceed with their electron diffraction experiment, they had to take the samples off a needle. The sample had been described to them as being a grain: a single, solid thing. It actually was a tiny, micron-

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size powder of grains. “The moment the first drop of acetone fell on it, the whole thing fell off,” Steinhardt recalled. “If you had sneezed at that point, the entire sample would have been lost. Fortunately, just below the needle, we had a crucible where all the powder collected.” When they put the sample under the microscope, what they found was breathtaking. The grains yielded a beautiful pattern like the mosaic tiling on the ceiling of the Alhambra, but infused with light—the signature diffraction pattern of a quasicrystal. “That was just an incredible, incredible feeling,” Steinhardt told me. “I never believed that when I was looking at something in nature that it would be anything as good as that. I thought it might be something quite deceptive and poor, and that if you squint at it you might recognise it. Here it was, magnificent and perfect.” The next day, Bindi received an email from Steinhardt. It was titled “Quasi-Happy New Year”. Bindi knew they had their sample. Less than two years later, in 2011, the Israeli researcher who discovered the first synthetic quasicrystal would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “10 fold???” Dan Shechtman scribbled in his notebook. It was April 1982 and Shechtman, a researcher who was visiting the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (then called the National Bureau of Standards), had peered into his microscope and seen a pattern not unlike the one Steinhardt would later glimpse. What he saw were circles made of ten dots, each the same distance from one another. If what Shechtman was seeing was correct, then the crystal in front of him had a ten-fold symmetry. Turning the image by one-tenth—36 degrees— would yield the same picture. But this meant that the atoms inside the crystal were packed together in a way thought to be impossible. Further analysis by him showed that the crystal was actually based on 5-fold symmetry—a “forbidden symmetry.”. Indeed, when he explained his experimental results, the head of his laboratory, Linus Pauling, handed him a textbook of crystallography to read. When Shechtman stubbornly persisted, he was asked to leave the group. There are

JINI/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Adventures

Ç Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman discovered the 5-fold symmetry (or ‘forbidden symmetry’) of crystal structures in 1982.

no quasicrystals, just quasi-scientists—Pauling, probably the most famous chemist of the 20th century, would go to conference after conference uttering those words, Shechtman recalled in his Nobel lecture. The tension between the younger and the older researcher arose because the arrangement of atoms in crystals, based on results since 1912, had always been found to be periodic—a regularly repeating arrangement. The very definition of a crystal furnished by the International Union of Crystallography in the 1980s was “a substance in which the constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are packed in a regularly ordered, repeating three-dimensional pattern”. Shechtman’s work went against 70 years of experimental evidence but that wasn’t the worst of it. There was a reason why Pauling was more than sceptical, and that deeper argument had to do with mathematics—the way atoms can theoretically be packed together. Building the general argument up from a concrete example, consider the problem of tiling a two-dimensional

surface—like a kitchen or bathroom floor—leaving no gaps, where different tile orientations are allowed. A quick examination will show that it is possible to do so with a triangular tile, a square tile, and a hexagonal tile. The general property underlying those specific shapes is rotational symmetry. Rotational symmetry refers to how an object or shape is indistinguishable from its original state when turning it to a certain degree. A triangular tile has a three-fold symmetry because if you turn it 120 degrees, the same pattern will appear. A square has four-fold symmetry because turning it 90 degrees gets you back to the same shape and so on. In fact, there are any number of shapes beyond the simple triangles and squares that can tile a floor without leaving gaps because they have this intrinsic property of threefold or four-fold symmetry. But try tiling a floor with a five-fold symmetrical shape like a pentagon without leaving gaps, and the task is quite impossible. It is impossible for symmetries beyond six as well.

The same principle that applies to two dimensions applies to three-dimensional structures, including in the packing of atoms. Several proofs have shown that it is mathematically impossible to have regularly repeating structures of five-fold rotational symmetry and symmetries beyond six. But what about instances where the atomic arrangement does not repeat regularly? Here again the answer lies in mathematics. A British mathematician and cosmologist, Roger Penrose, trying to solve a long-standing problem in the field, had created the most elegant and simple form of aperiodic structures in the mid-1970s. Using just two tiles, a fat and a thin rhombus, and enforcing certain rules on how the two could fit together, he created a quasi-periodic mosaic in two dimensions. In 1982, a crystallographer at Birkbeck College in London, Alan Mackay, used the Penrose tiles to represent real-world crystallography. In his model, atoms lie at the intersection of three lines, or vertices, in the Penrose tiling. By this rea-

soning, he showed what kind of diffraction pattern a hypothetical crystal with five-fold symmetry would show. The five-fold symmetric Penrose tiling gives rise to a pattern that repeats at two different intervals—a long and a short interval that has an atomic equivalent. “Instead of atoms repeating throughout the structure at some regular interval, as in ordinary (periodic) crystals, atoms in quasicrystals are spaced at long or short intervals,” Steinhardt wrote in a 1996 PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) paper. One particularly beautiful aspect is that the ratio between frequency of the long and the short intervals tends towards an irrational number—the famous golden ratio, which in turn is connected to the Fibonacci sequence (0, 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13…). The interval that comes next comes of the enforced matching rules—but however much you zoom out to see the global structure, it is impossible to see it as a particular, even if spectacularly complex, repeating pattern. It is a kind of dissonance in space—just as you think a quasi-periodic sequence is settling down, it breaks its rhythm. Quasicrystal patterns often resemble other symmetric tilings, such the Islamic girih at Alhambra. But just as with the Penrose tiles, it is the enforced rules on how the tiles fit together that gives rise to a true quasi-periodic arrangement. Only the Darb-i-Imam in Iran seems to enforce similar rules to create a quasi-periodic tiling that could be extended infinitely, capturing that iterative property which allows quasiperiodicity. Meanwhile, Shechtman still had not found a journal to publish his results. He had been rebuffed by the Journal of Applied Physics in the summer of 1984. The editor had sent his manuscript back unread by return of post. It would be November 1984 before his findings were eventually published in Physical Review Letters. During the peerreview process, Steinhardt got the chance to see it. Steinhardt was approaching the quasicrystal debate from a theoretical point of view. Motivated by work he had done with David Nelson at Harvard on icosahedral bond orientational order in supercooled liquids, he was looking

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Carol & Mike Werner/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

Ç An example of a Penrose tiling.

at forbidden symmetries in crystals with collaborator Dov Levine. By 1984, Steinhardt had shifted from the University of Pennsylvania to IBM in Yorktown Heights, NY, in order to encourage scientists to look for such materials in the laboratory. When Nelson visited him at IBM, Steinhardt saw a preprint of Shechtman’s work. “He did not know that Dov and I had been working on the quasicrystal idea. But when I turned to the page with the diffraction pattern, I jumped up, went over to the desk, and brought David back an image showing the diffraction pattern we had computed for an icosahedral quasicrystal. The two matched,” Steinhardt wrote in an e-mail. Publishing in the same journal as Shechtman that year on Christmas Eve, he and Levine also coined a word that stuck. A quasicrystal is the natural extension of the notion of a crystal to structures with quasiperiodic, rather than periodic, translational order. We classify two- and threedimensional quasicrystals by their symmetry under rotation and show that many disallowed crystal symmetries are allowed quasicrystal symmetries…. Steinhardt has been championing quasicrystals ever since. In these three decades, hundreds of quasicrystals have been reported and confirmed. Researchers reinterpreted their past experimental results to find quasicrystals even before that date. They are no longer considered unique

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and are ubiquitous among certain metal alloys. But there was still one nagging issue: all the quasicrystal structures reported so far had been produced in the laboratory. Thinking in terms of principles, as is the wont of a theorist, Steinhardt could see no reason why quasicrystals would not exist, or even be abundant, in nature. “The theoretical view was that these were as robust as crystals,” he said. “Even being energetically favoured compared to crystals under some circumstances.” But when he put forward this idea, people would say, “Gee, so why hasn’t a natural quasicrystal been found?” and Steinhardt would respond that it hadn’t yet, “but I’m looking.” Therein lay the reason why he was so ecstatic that New Year’s morning in 2009. The elation, though, was short-lived. it was clear that the Florence sample was a quasicrystal, but was it a natural quasicrystal? What was its provenance? It was, after all, just a few micron-sized grains from a collection in Italy. Wasn’t it possible that it was an industrial by-product like slag? In fact, the grains were enveloped in carbonaceous chondrites, rock material that was thought to be from the very old, carbon-rich meteors. Steinhardt and Bindi took the sample to meteor expert Glenn McPherson at the Smithsonian. McPherson, who had been expecting them, met them at his door. He was deeply skeptical, and said if it was a meteorite, it was unlike any other he had seen. Other experts were sceptical as well— it was merely a label that said the Florence sample was from a remote part of Siberia. Even if it had been found in Siberia, it wouldn’t be a clincher for geologists who had seen many false claims in the past. Such scepticism feeds into a shadowy market for meteorites that is both unregulated and rather lucrative. A cursory check on eBay on 29 April this year showed the bidding price for an “Apollo 11 meteorite” at $4.5 million. For fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite that crashed into Siberia in February, classifieds on a Russian website were asking for as much as $10,000, according to news reports. “When I first read this account I thought, wow, maybe this a hoax,”

Arthur ThÈvenart/Corbis

Adventures

Ç The ornate tiling at the Darb-e-Imam mosque in Isfahan, Iran.

said Ebel Denton, curator of the hall of meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, referring to Bindi’s original paper in 2009. “Maybe someone made this material in a lab and put it out in the middle of Siberia.” What Denton did agree with is that it is a strange rock indeed. Not only for the quasicrystal structure, but for the grains’ mineral composition: Al63Cu24Fe13. In other words, it contains 63 parts aluminium to every 24 parts copper and 13 parts iron: icosahedryte Iron is about 2,000 times more abundant than copper, and yet there is more copper in this rock than iron. Copper and aluminium have also never been found combined together in a meteorite before, a fact that’s been explained by the very different geochemical behaviour of the two elements—that aluminium condenses at much higher temperatures than copper. Denton now seems convinced the Florence sample is a natural quasicrystal, but he still doesn’t know what to make of it. “I don’t know what the deal

Iron is about 2,000 times more abundant than copper, and yet there is more copper in this rock than iron. Copper and aluminium have also never been found combined together in a meteorite before. is with this rock,” he said.“It would be nice if there other rocks like it. There are probably in the order of 20,000 meteorites studied by humans over time, and no one has ever found anything like this.” In 2009, when the tests had whittled away the micron-sized quasicrystal grains, the urgency to get more of this material and to discover its provenance was even more palpable. But where would one look? Khatyrkite, the mineral in which the quasicrystal grain was embedded, got its name in 1985 from a paper by LV Razin, NS Rudashevskij, and LN Vyalsov. The American Minerologist has the Russian translation of the long title as, “New natural intermetallic compounds of aluminium, copper and zinc—khatyrkite CuAl, cupalite CuAl and zine alumi-

nides—from hyperbasites of duniteharzburgite formation.” “The minerals occur in black slick washed from greenish-gray cover weathering from serpentinite, Listvenitovij stream, Khatirskij Ultrabasic zone of the Koriakskho-Kamchatskaya fold area, eastern USSR (Koriakskhiye Mts.). They are intimately intergrown, forming small (up to 1.5 mm) irregular, angular, metallic, steel gray-yellow grains, similar to native Pt. Type material is preserved at the Mining Museum of the Leningrad Mining Institute, Leningrad, USSR.” It was confirmation that the mineral associated with the Florence sample was also found in a stream in the Koryaks,

but it was still only circumstantial proof—just as finding a sample of quartz certainly did not imply that it had to be from the same place where another sample of quartz had been discovered. Yet, there was the Koryak label. Steinhardt and Bindi needed to find this man LV Razin. With the help of friends in Russia, they did. Razin was in Israel, but was uncooperative. He asked for $15,000 just to speak to them. People said he had been a KGB agent, smuggling platinum out of the former U.S.S.R. In short, he was a man you couldn’t trust, and phone conversations, as Steinhardt soon found out, were futile. As the scientists looked into the original Razin paper, and followed many false leads, another mysterious figure emerged. His name was VV Krychako, and it seemed he had found the original Khatyrkite sample. In the original paper “it is kind of an obscure sentence,” Steinhardt said. “There is this guy, VV Krychako, and he is washing clay in the stream, and somehow he found this material. And it never mentions him again.” So they asked people in the Russian Academy of Sciences: who was this guy? According to Steinhardt, some thought he was a fictional character created by Razin to cover up his tracks while he was prospecting for platinum. But the team were desperate, so they asked again, and got the encouraging response that he was a real person but that he had died. Another time, the response was even more dramatic: he was a local Chukchi who had wandered off into the wilderness. After some scrounging, the researchers found a paper from the mid-1990s that carried the same name, VV Krychako. On the phone with his co-author from Russia, Steinhardt was told that “Valery” was very much a real person. In fact, he was the doctoral student of the person on the other side of the call, Vadim Dissler. “And furthermore,” the voice on the other end said, “he is coming to town with me. Do you want to talk to him?” on steinhardt’s website there is a photograph of three men in khakhi. To the left is Luca Bindi, rugged and smiling, to the right, Paul Steinhardt, more restrained, and in the middle, a compact man with a white stubble and knotted eyes.

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Courtesy Luca Bindi

Ç From left to right: Luca Bindi, Valery Kyrchako and Paul Steinhardt.

They began to ﬁnd grains with faces apparently the shape of a decahedron, which caused some excitement. The form suggested it was a quasicrystal with ten-fold symmetry, but as Steinhardt tells it, it turned out to be pyrite—Fool’s Gold. Valery Krychako, who might have held the first known natural quasicrystal in his hands three years before Dan Shechtman peered into his microscope to for a glimpse of one, works in the private mining sector in a town south of Moscow. Valery is over sixty and doesn’t speak English, only Russian. Steinhardt described him as warm, keenly interested in science, but not an academic in the usual sense. As Steinhardt exchanged e-mails with Valery, using Google to translate, it seemed to confirm that the sample was indeed natural. Meanwhile, the case against slag was also building. Around the summer of 2010, Bindi found stishovite inside their sample. Stishovite is silicon dioxide—quartz and sand. It needs extreme atmospheric pressure to form. Embedded inside the stishovite was the quasicrystal grain. It would be next to impossible to artificially recreate the conditions necessary to produce such a sample as such atmospheric pressures only exist deep within the Earth’s core or in cataclysmic processes in outer space. By the time of this second confirmation, Valery had already offered to guide a contingent to the source of the quasi-

crystals, which he fortuitously still remembered—a stream in the Koryaks. In October that year, Steinhardt decided to take him up on the offer. Who would fund such a trip? It cost in the order of $150,000. Federal grants were out of the question and organisations like National Geographic and the American Museum of Natural History had their own agenda. To make matters worse, Princeton was in the middle of a fund-raising drive and forbade Steinhardt from approaching any donors associated with it. Steinhardt asked his contacts to ask their contacts and pass it forward. Finally, a donor, who Steinhardt preferred to remain anonymous, agreed to take care of the funding. After assembling a 15-person team including Italian, Russian, and American researchers, organising a meet-up in Princeton to see if the team clicked, wading through a morass of paperwork for a journey to the Autonomous Okrug of Chukotka, they were finally ready to hunt for quasicrystal grains. neither steinhardt nor bindi know where to begin to describe their trip to the stream and back.

Courtesy Luca Bindi

Adventures

Ç Field operations at the Listvenitovyi stream in the Koryak mountains, Siberia, Russia.

They recall eating mushrooms and enormous salmons plucked from the stream, firing Kalashnikovs on vodka bottles, hearing tales of bears (“The claim was if you walked in groups of three or more they wouldn’t bother you”) dealing with regular engine trouble and working in an exotic land. Listening to Steinhardt at 1 a.m. with an undercurrent of thrill in his voice at the recollection, it doesn’t feel right to attempt to parse in data points what this journey meant to him or Bindi. But had they found the quasi crystal sample? When would they know? Bindi, who “has the best eyes” spotted what he thought was a quasicrystal grain the very first day at the stream. A few days later, they began to find grains with faces apparently the shape of a decahedron, which caused some excitement. The form suggested it was a quasicrystal with ten-fold symmetry, but as Steinhardt tells it, it turned out to be pyrite—Fool’s Gold. After gathering enough material, the expedition party moved back to

Anadyr, the easternmost town in Russia and had a closeout scientific meeting to get everyone on the same page. At the end, only Bindi believed that they had more than a one per cent chance of finding something, because he had liked that grain on the first day. As it turns out, they did find grains that were quasicrystalline, but they didn’t know it until Bindi confirmed it in his lab weeks later in August. “That was an amazing moment,” Steinhardt said, “because this was a wild goose chase and suddenly we had the wild goose.” The 120 grains are dispersed among labs in Princeton, Caltech, the Smithsonian, Italy, and Russia. Of these, nine have been confirmed to be quasicrystalline. The story of those grains is both grand and mysterious. The grains were forged in our solar nebula 4.5 billion years ago, around the time the earth itself was new-born, through the process that is yet not known. They were attached to a mete-

orite that crashed to earth some 15,000 years ago. If this mineral with forbidden symmetry was present at the birth of the solar system, what else are we missing? How abundant are quasicrystals in the galaxy? Pulling on one loose end of solid-state physics had led to new geology and minerology, which led to meteorites and the formation of the solar system. It led to the first natural quasicrystal, icosahedrite, and the extra-terrestrial body hosting it—khatyrka. Now, in yetto-be published results, the researchers are looking at other meteorites to understand how to look for related metallic phases (not necessarily quasicrystals) and the formation of planets. steinhardt wouldn’t say more, but Bindi wrote me an email: “I am recently reading a lot about the possible mineralogy of other planets of our Solar System. Who knows? Maybe there could be a planet where quasicrystals are more common than ordinary crystals.” a

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WIRED BY VENKAT SRINIVASAN

Addiction and the Internet t was around three o’clock in the morning in December 2006, and 13-year-old Willy’s family was asleep, deep in the winter darkness of their small Connecticut town. But Nashaal was wide awake, and ready for the raid. His cohort of warriors—their “guild”, they called it—needed Nashaal’s special powers; if the raid was successful, they could loot armour, maybe even the Royal Crest of Lordaeron shield. For Nashaal, the cold night held promise; everything was perfect. Except, that is, for the jarring hum from the desktop computer in the otherwise quiet living room. Nashaal, 13-yearold Willy’s alter ego in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, needed complete focus. Plus, if Willy’s parents found out he was still awake, they would throw a fit. Such interruptions would not do. Willy silently covered the computer with blankets to muffle the internal cooling fan. There, that should do it, he thought. Nashaal and his guild were ready. Nashaal had transformed family dynamics. Developing his powers and plotting game strategies had become Willy’s main activity, as though he lived for and through Nashaal. His mother, Jane, thought she was looking at Willy when she saw her red-eyed son. But now, that figure appeared to be a medium for Nashaal, the new member of the household. To only know Willy, and not Nashaal, was not to know her son at all. Jane agonized. Was Willy hooked on something she and his father, Bill, did not understand? Or was it just a game, Willy just a child, and the whole thing just a phase that would fade away? She couldn’t help but worry, though. She could hardly recognize Willy anymore; he was under the game’s spell. Was there such a thing as an addiction to a game, she wondered.

Is that what she should call it? Would anyone believe her if she said that Willy was addicted? Should anyone? rapped in the net: Will Internet Addiction become a 21st century epidemic?” was the sensational headline of an editorial in the October 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (now known as the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics), the oldest continuously published paediatric journal in the United States. Studies on Internet addiction have featured in about 100 scientific journals. Research spans numerous fields— from psychology to sociology, neuroscience to anthropology, and health policy to human-computer interaction. Cyberpsychology and Behaviour (not to be confused with Computers in Human Behaviour) publishes about a quarter of the research. But, despite a massive number of studies, there is no consensus on what to call the phenomenon. Video-game addiction or excessive use? Internet addiction disorder, Internet use disorder, problematic Internet use, pathological Internet use, or—of course—Internet addiction? Without clear criteria for what constitutes these problems, understanding the scope of Internet addiction has proven to be difficult. Estimates of problematic Internet use vary between less than 1 per cent to over 8 per cent in the United States. In China and South Korea, anywhere from 2 per cent to over 35 per cent of adolescents are considered to have an Internet use problem. South Korea considers excessive Internet use as one of its most serious public health issues, with increasing reports of fatalities. A South Korean gamer collapsed and died in 2005 after playing the game Starcraft for 50 hours at an

“T

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Internet café, and a 2007 paper estimated that over 210,000 South Korean children—about 2 per cent of those between 6 and 19—were afflicted with Internet addiction. There has been no test across India for excessive Internet use; even if one were attempted, it would be difficult to get credible numbers. For one thing, only 11 per cent of Indians have access to the Internet. Moreover, if a researcher sent a survey to a private school in Delhi, how and when a kid logs on (everyday, at home) might be vastly different from a public school in a smaller city (sporadically, at a cafe). This year, a group of researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University in the UK published an extensive analysis of Internet addiction tests. They looked at 63 studies that sampled 58,415 participants in 11 languages. There were 18 different tests, and no two tests were alike. The researchers found that the tests were broadly incompatible with one another, and that various measurement scales could not adequately measure addiction over time. One recent study tried to address such testing inconsistencies. In 2012, a European Union project, Saving and Empowering Young Lives in Europe (SEYLE), conducted a coordinated Internet addiction survey across 10 European countries and Israel. They gave 12,000 adolescents aged between 14 and 16 years a questionnaire designed by Kimberly Young, a psychiatrist and professor of management sciences at St Bonaventure University in New York. Pathological Internet use averaged about 4 per cent across the 11 European countries, with boys notching up higher addiction rates than girls. But there was wide and inexplicable variation from country to country. A nation with more Internet access did not necessarily have more Internet addicts. Italy scored the lowest at a little over 1 per cent; Israel tipped the other end, at 12 per cent. Aviv Weinstein, an Israeli psychologist who studies dependence on alcohol, drugs, and, of late, the Internet, said that he was deeply concerned by such trends. (Weinstein was not part of the SEYLE research group.) “It’s like we are creating a whole new generation of zombies,” he told me. y the early 1990s, the Internet, which began as a wired network of academic and government institutions, had expanded to include residential homes. It soon became a global communication medium, and online chatting, games and browsing developed into everyday habits. Usage exploded, from about two million worldwide Internet users in 1990 to 40 million in 1995. The increase in Internet use inspired discussion forums on Internet addiction. That year, a New York psychiatrist named Ivan Goldberg posted a memo detailing the “Seven Symptoms of Internet Addiction” on psycom.net, an online psychiatry bulletin board. One symptom was if someone accessed the Internet “more often or for longer periods of time than was intended.” Chalk up three or more of these listed symptoms, and you could call yourself an Internet addict. People thronged the site to evaluate their behaviour and self-diagnose, and soon many Internet users began to refer to themselves as addicts. They had fallen for a prank. Goldberg’s post was a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The leading reference for psychiatric research and di-

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New York psychiatrist named Ivan Goldberg posted a memo detailing the “Seven Symptoms of Internet Addiction” on psycom.net, an online psychiatry bulletin board. One symptom was if someone accessed the Internet “more often or for longer periods of time than was intended.” agnosis across the world was also the subject of ridicule for being a boundless Bible of disorder symptoms. He was contemptuous of what he considered a growing trend towards over-diagnosis among psychiatrists and the public. (In a 1997 New Yorker article, he said that having an Internet addiction support group was equivalent to having a support group for coughers.) Using the DSM’s criteria for pathological gambling, Goldberg cooked up a diagnostic protocol for Internet addiction. Around the same time, the psychiatrist and professor of management sciences Kimberly Young began earnestly conducting research into Internet addiction. Adapting the same DSM criteria for pathological gambling that Goldberg had used in his prank, she formulated an eight-item questionnaire to assess Internet addiction among study participants. Cases were positive if they answered yes to five or more questions, including “Do you stay on-line longer than originally intended?” and “Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?” Over 600 subjects responded after viewing college campus flyers, advertisements in local newspapers and postings on online Internet-addiction support groups. Young’s findings, presented at the 1996 American Psychological Association meeting in Toronto, in one of the first detailed papers written on the issue, were startling. Based on her questionnaire, Young determined that over half her study participants were “dependent” on the Internet. The media swarmed her; the research community scorned her, with some critics saying that there was bound to be sampling bias since some of her participants were from online addictionsupport groups. Young’s paper acknowledged that, but she said she was nevertheless reporting what was out there; her conversations with patients had shown her that something about the Internet was addictive. Goldberg’s hoax is history. But the addiction debate lives on, in 18 years of chat-room chatter and research papers, dismissal and advocacy, scepticism and cautious acceptance. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist in Oregon, argued in the March 2008 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry that the American Psychiatric Association should officially recognize the disorder. “Internet addiction is resistant to treatment, entails significant risks, and has high relapse rates,” he wrote. When the American Psychiatric Association published the fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-V) in May 2013, Internet Use Disorder was included in a section of conditions that needed further research; the manual suggested a set of evaluation criteria including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, tolerance for ever higher doses, loss of other interests, attempts to hide the

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Ç A boy sleeps in an Internet cafe in Weifang City in China’s Shandong Province.

behaviour from others, and negative effects on personal and professional relationships. The manual also added a section for behavioural addictions, a radical departure from earlier psychiatric dogma. Before, only substances such as drugs and alcohol had been considered medically addictive. For now, the sole behavioural addiction in the manual is excessive gambling, which used to be classified as an impulse-control disorder (a category also used by Internet-addiction advocates in the past). Wherever gambling goes, however, other behavioural traits, including Internet addiction, could easily follow. What the DSM says matters. A mention in the 992-page tome adds legitimacy to pathologies that might otherwise have been ignored, doubted or considered innocuous. Although it’s not a treatment guide, clinicians—not only psychiatrists, but also general practitioners—often cross-check their patients’ stories with symptoms mentioned in the manual to arrive at diagnoses. These diagnoses help guide treatment, including the prescription of antidepressants. Moreover, in the United States, if you have a ‘DSM-validated’ disease, your health insurance company could subsidize the bill; if not, the burden is likely all yours. Increased awareness could even boost patient visits to mental health clinics. And inclusion in the DSM will unleash psychiatric research funding. Although the DSM is mainly used in the US, it is the global standard for psychiatric research and thus for the development of new approaches to diagnosis, treatment and disease funding. The new edition was the product of a decade of deliberation among 1500 experts across the globe. “Its impact

will be felt far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry and that of the United States of America,” the Indian Psychiatric Society wrote in a review paper earlier this year. “The younger generation of psychiatrists, raised in the DSM tradition, consider the diagnostic system and criteria as authoritative text.” The DSM’s innovations with regard to behavioural addictions and other conditions sparked an outcry, and many psychiatrists believe that new classifications included in the manual will do more harm than good. “This is the saddest moment in my 45 year career of studying, practicing, and teaching psychiatry,” Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University, said in December 2012 on the website of Psychology Today, a popular American mental health magazine. Frances, who chaired the taskforce that drafted the DSM-IV, objected to changes in the fifth edition, such as making excessive grief a Major Depressive Disorder, making excessive eating a Binge Eating Disorder, and adding the section on behavioural addiction. He fears these will create a slippery slope whereby any excessive behaviour will be considered a disorder. “Watch out for careless over-diagnosis of Internet and sex addiction,” he wrote. round the time Kimberly Young released her findings in 1996, Willy’s mother, Jane, was using the family computer for her legal work at home in Brooklyn, New York. Willy, then four years old, was immediately drawn to the machine, and Jane appreciated its potential as an educational tool. She bought “Reader Rabbit”, a software programme, to help Willy learn to read.

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Then, in 1999, Willy developed an interest in Age of Empires, a computer-based strategy game series spanning time from the Stone Age and the Iron Age to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Jane used the series as a disciplinary aid, rewarding Willy with game time in return for cleaning his room or doing his homework. “It was the perfect carrot and the perfect stick,” she said. Since the computer was in his parents’ bedroom, Willy couldn’t play the game for long. Living in Brooklyn also gave the family enough to do outside their home. The computer was a comfortable addition to family life—pleasurable in spurts without being overwhelming. “It was sort of like ice cream,” she said. The family didn’t stay long in Brooklyn. Willy’s grandmother lived with them, and after she died in 1998, Bill wanted to move out of the city and away from cherished but painful memories of his mother. He and Jane were also concerned about school quality and wanted to be closer to their church, in Connecticut. In 2000, they moved with Willy and his siblings to a small town along the New England state’s affluent Gold Coast—a huge change from big and bustling New York City. There, Willy and his 10-year-old brother, Joe, enrolled in Boy Scouts, but it was no substitute for busy Brooklyn and for the pleasures Willy derived from the computer. On a field trip, Willy struck up a friendship with David, another Boy Scout. Soon, David and Willy began hanging out a lot, often playing computer games together. To his parents, this didn’t raise any red flags. Willy was like any other eight-year-old that gets hooked on an activity. What started as an ordinary friendship, however, soon became exclusively centred on computer games. Willy and David camped out in front of the computer during sleepovers. They’d game after school, day after day, and through weekends. They would order junk food, wrap themselves up in blankets and burrow all night into the worlds contained in the computer. “They got big bags of candy and bottles of pop and played it till they fell asleep on the floor,” Jane told me. Once, Willy and David played for 18 hours at a stretch. To keep themselves awake and “caffeinated,” they guzzled 20 cans of diet soda. Jane began to wonder about their behaviour, but wasn’t sure that it was anything to worry about. “So many kids game, what’s the problem?” she asked herself. Still, computer games no longer seemed as harmless as ice cream. Facing high real estate costs, Willy’s family moved again in 2004, this time to a more affordable town about an hour east. Around the same time, Jane, concerned about giving her children a rounded education, decided that they would be better off learning at home. “We could have more freedom,” Jane said. “Learn more stuff.”

Paul Sakuma/AP Photo

Ç Vint Cerf, father of the Internet. Å Gin Lane by William Hogarth. When addiction first entered the English vernacular, it was seen as a matter of choice with the physical environment thought to be a factor in its cultivation.

The changes seemed to have a significant impact on Willy, who was now 12. “Willy was Mr Social before we moved,” Katie, his younger sister, told me. But with the new distance from a past social life and an increasing pull online, David, his fellow gamer, became his only real-life friend, and their game-based friendship blossomed. Willy and David’s bond reached a peak when World of Warcraft came out in November 2004. It was a hook unlike anything Willy had encountered before—and nothing like his relatively isolated surroundings in small-town Connecticut. Nobody in his new surroundings knew much of Willy except David and Willy’s family. But in the World of Warcraft, Willy’s avatar, Nashaal, was popular. Nashaal shone. Willy asked his parents to pay for the game’s $15 monthly subscription fee instead of giving him an allowance. “He would talk to us about it all the time,” Joe said. “As an older brother, I thought my younger brother was just being a little pathetic.” By 2005, when he was 13, Willy’s life revolved around World of Warcraft strategy books, guild meetings at designated times, and the nurturing of Nashaal. Never one to participate in outdoor sports, Willy now stopped going to movies and parties. Vacations were spent at home. Schoolwork ground to a minimum. David and his family weren’t as affected by the game. His mom never saw much of it since David used Willy’s subscription to play, and often at Willy’s place. David also went to a local public school, where he could interact with other kids. But all Willy did was game, Jane said, or fight with her about playing. She remembered the part in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which the Cheshire Cat fades away to nothingness except for its grin. “I watched him disappear in front of my eyes,” she said. ddiction entered the English vernacular more than 400 years ago. Back then, the word merely indicated a strong inclination. In Shakespeare’s play Henry V, written around 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury mentioned the king’s “addiction” to activities of little importance, ‘his hours fill’d up with riots, banquets, sports.’

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Ç Brain scans of Internet addicts at the Save Brain Clinic in South Korea.

Through much of the 17th century, to be addicted usually meant that you were in the habit of doing something, and that habit was seen as a product of choice; an individual got drunk on alcohol because he wanted to drink, not because he had some underlying pathology driving him to the bottle. Even when psychiatry started as a clinical field in the 18th century, addiction was still considered a matter of habituation and choice. At the same time, physicians associated individuals’ personality traits with local factors, such as the physical environment. For instance, in his book The English Malady, published in 1734, George Cheyne described England as a country ‘particularly liable to the morbus anglicus (despair and suicide)’ due to climate, diet and the pace of life. By the latter half of the 18th century, some writers started using the word “addiction” for severe inclinations that didn’t seem like a matter of choice. People began describing alcoholics as individuals who lacked control over irresistible urges. What these addicts needed was not to make different choices, but to be reformed. This new view of addiction coexisted with the choice model, and, in the 19th century, with the rise of the opium trade, became dominant. More and more, it was thought that alcohol and drugs stripped from addicts the willpower to control their habits. At the same time, these external forces were increasingly thought of as being independent of local environment or culture. Addiction was no longer

a way to describe behaviours; it became a state—a disease— that needed to be fixed. This disease model of addiction was predominant well into the 20th century. In the 1960s, however, an influential antipsychiatry movement evolved in academic and intellectual circles, and issued a compelling set of protests against this approach to addiction, and mental illness in general. The philosopher Michel Foucault in many ways articulated the core position of this movement when he wrote, in his 1961 book The History of Madness in the Classical Age, that psychiatric dogma might be as much a reflection of the moral assumptions of a given generation as the result of independent scientific research. Today, addiction often refers to debilitating conditions that are seen as largely outside individuals’ control and independent of context. As with many other psychological afflictions, the DSM seems to describe addiction as if it were a universal disorder, detectable across a diversity of human populations. Although the manual has a section on “cultural formulation” that tries to bring environment factors into the picture, this contingent approach is not integral to DSM categories. “Context, history and politics are regarded as non-essential and somehow external” to disease, wrote the Indian Psychiatric Society in its recent critique of the DSM. Outside the walls of medicine, however, addiction is still frequently used to describe any “compulsive” behaviour, from exercising to updating one’s Facebook status. To ask whether

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such activities should count as addictions, researchers and theorists are now reconsidering what addiction is in the first place. There have also been new attempts to explore how addiction, and conceptions of addiction, interact with personal history, local environment, and culture. These new approaches cluster around three broad approaches to understanding the nature of addiction. One, the neuroscience approach, studies how addiction manifests itself in the circuitry and chemistry of the brain. This model generally takes substance abuse as its paradigm, and often sees addiction as the result of drugs that flick certain neurological switches in the brain. “Addiction is a brain disease,” Alan Leshner, then head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the US, wrote unequivocally in a 1997 Science editorial. The focus of most neuroscientific studies of addiction has been the brain’s so-called ‘reward centre’. Located deep in the brain, this region largely drives our feelings of satisfaction and motivation. In the 1950s, James Olds and Peter Milner, two postdoctoral researchers at Canada’s McGill University, used rats, which have similar reward centres, to demonstrate the importance of this region. They implanted electrodes in a part of the rats’ brains called the nucleus accumbens, the major component of the reward centre. The rats would receive an electric stimulus in the nucleus accumbens whenever they scurried to a specific corner in a cage. Instead of running away from the area that caused the electrical shock, the rats kept returning to that corner. In another test, rats stimulated themselves thousands of times every hour for 24 hours by pressing a lever that caused the electrodes to send similar electrical signals into their brains; they ignored all other activities. There was, Olds and Milner noted, some method to the rats’ impulse; it was as if the rodents were addicted to the stimulus. This was the first series of experiments that showed it was possible to create pleasure, and behaviour that approximated certain features of addiction, by directly triggering the brain’s reward centre. Other external stimuli, such as food, were known to have similar effects. However, instead of directly activating the reward centre, like the electrodes in the rats’ brains, these other stimuli follow a complex set of message transfers. If the front of the brain, the cortex, receives a stimulus through one of the five senses, it forwards that signal to a part of the reward centre called the ventral tegmental area. Neurons in this area then produce the chemical dopa-

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“Addiction is a brain disease,” Alan Leshner, then head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the US, wrote unequivocally in a 1997 Science editorial. The focus of most neuroscientiﬁc studies of addiction has been the brain’s so-called “reward centre”. Located deep in the brain, this region largely drives our feelings of satisfaction and motivation.

Ç The brain’s reward system and pathways.

mine, a neurotransmitter that flows into the synapses between brain cells and lodges in the receptors of adjacent neurons, stimulating those cells into certain kinds of response. Dopamine moves from neuron to neuron through the brain along broadly predictable courses known as ‘dopamine pathways’. One of these pathways triggers feelings of pleasure by connecting with the nucleus accumbens, the region where the McGill scientists had plugged their electrodes. Drugs, too, work to a great extent by altering the chemical balance and stimulating neurological pathways in the brain. The brain has a variety of mechanisms that help it regulate the flow of neurotransmitters. For example, dopamine usually travels from one neuron, across a synapse, to another neuron, where it typically attaches to a structure called a receptor and stimulates the receiving neuron. Once that’s done, the transmitting neuron uses structures called transporters to absorb any excess dopamine that gets stuck in the synapses. This process, called reuptake, ensures that you never get too great a dose of any one neurological stimulus. In addition, the sending neuron has its own receptors that regulate how much dopamine gets out in the first place. All of these regulatory mechanisms can be inhibited, however, if other molecules block the relevant receptors or transporters. When transporters are affected, reuptake is decreased and more of the stimulating neurochemical, such as dopamine, is free to flow around the brain, thereby increasing dopamine’s effects. Many antidepressants work on the same principle, blocking transporters designed to reuptake serotonin, a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in inducing feelings of well-being. In a similar but more potent way, cocaine inhibits the reuptake of dopamine; the more cocaine a person ingests, the more dopamine stays in the synapses that fire the dopamine pathway and, ultimately, the reward centre.

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The brain is malleable for as long as we live, tweaked by everything we do, every event we witness. Although alcohol causes chemical changes in the brain that could lead to craving, we are also driven by our desire for a repetition of the memories or the feelings those social events may have invoked. Ç Punters prepare to bet on horses in Bangalore, India. Å UK Poker player Beth Shak and her shoe collection worth almost £700,000.

Over time, however, the brain responds to such dopamine ‘overdoses’ by producing less of the pleasure-generating neurotransmitter. As a result, an addict needs ever greater quantities of of cocaine to release the levels of dopamine needed to get an equivalent high. Activities that aren’t able to artificially flood the brain with dopamine in this way become less and less pleasurable. If you take away the drug, you take away the mechanism that an addict has for stimulating his reward centre, and cravings set in. Behavioural addictions—shopping, sex addiction, gambling, and Internet-based activities such as compulsive pornography viewing and gaming—are now being understood on the neurophysiological model of drugs. In a widely cited 2010

review paper, four researchers in the US wrote that addictive behaviours, including Internet use, trigger activity in the same dopamine and serotonin pathways as drugs do. In other words, humans get a neurochemical rush, in varying degrees, when having sex, checking email after a long gap, sitting at a slot machine or playing an immersive game; in each of these activities, dopamine surges through the reward centre. Over time, as with substance addictions, the current theory is that the brain tries to respond to the overdose, and people end up having to gamble more, search for more pornography, or play an engrossing online game continuously to get the same effect. The second paradigm for understanding addiction is to look outwards, at symptoms and consequences. Howard Shaffer, a

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Courtesy World of Warcraft

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Ç World of Warcraft merchandise.

psychologist at Harvard University, proposed in 2004 that all addictions should be viewed as one single condition, which he termed an “addiction syndrome”, with a set of symptoms and a spectrum of severity. For instance, a patient could go to a doctor and complain of mild withdrawal anxiety the day after a night of drinking. Another could complain of moderate withdrawal anxiety during a break from days of gaming, and another could have the same symptom, but much more intensely, after a week away from his cocaine fix. The symptom—withdrawal anxiety—is the same in each patient, even though it has been produced by a variety of behaviours and is of varying intensity. Now, the doctor could diagnose each patient differently, one with alcohol addiction, another with cocaine addiction, and another with video-game addiction. But they might all be patients with the same manifestation of the addiction syndrome. In such a scenario, what would be the value of pinning a specific substance or behavioural label on the addiction and looking for the neurochemical evidences of say, an Internet addiction? This second paradigm for addiction brings back elements of the 17 th-century view that addiction is just a habituation, not a disease. Drinking five beers every evening, playing 10 straight hours of World of Warcraft or smoking marijuana may be abnormal or excessive in the eyes of some, but sheer quantity isn’t in itself bad. Jim Orford, an emeritus professor of clinical and community psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK, articulated this view in a 2001 paper in the journal Addiction. The focus, he argued, should never be on an the volume of the habit, but on its consequences, including the interpersonal conflict that arises from it. Driving rash-

ly after five beers, stealing money to pay for marijuana, or avoiding family and work to game might be issues that need to be resolved, but there is “no point at which normality ends and abnormality begins,” Orford wrote. That murky boundary between normal and abnormal is where a third view of addiction shows up. While this view considers both the previous approaches, it attempts a more holistic understanding. An addiction, in this view, always starts as an external event, in which context, not a change in our brain cells, is key. Sure, we are partly defined by our internal wiring. But we define ourselves as much by our external influences, what we do, and why we do what we do. For instance, alcoholism cannot be understood simply as a brain disease: it is something that starts off as a cultural event. Think of family dinners, bars, community gatherings and the possibilities that alcohol offers—business opportunities, relationships, or just a good conversation. Evenings spent drinking and socializing with friends lodge memories in the brain, and understanding how memory forms is crucial to understanding how addiction shapes our brain. The brain is malleable for as long as we live, tweaked by everything we do, every event we witness. Although alcohol causes chemical changes in the brain that could lead to craving, we are also driven by our desire for a repetition of the memories or the feelings those social events may have invoked. In a similar way, Daniel Lende, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida, believes that addiction isn’t just about pleasure; it’s also about desire—not just about the chemicals in the brain, but also external reinforcements. In an interview with Scientific American, Lende, who also runs the Public Library of Science blog on neuroanthropology, which studies the bridges between brains and culture, illustrated the role of context and memory in addiction with the following anecdote. A former drug addict in Colombia was just out of treatment, was broke, and needed a free ride on a bus. The bus driver told the addict that he could ride if he stole a watch for him. The addict had led a past life that circled around theft, money and drugs. The driver’s words triggered a series of memories and cravings for that life—and it almost triggered a relapse. The addict goes in search of the drug, but what he wants is the memories and their effect, not the substance. In other words, the addict wants an alternate or virtual reality built of his memories rather than the reality he is living now, and the drug seems to be the only way to try and reach those memories. Nothing else seems to assemble the dream world, and the addict has no other desires. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze studied this yin-yang nature of the real and the virtual and wrote that the desire for alternate reality starts closing doors on other possibilities. The addict’s body, Deleuze provocatively wrote, is like a body without organs; it exists purely as a medium for that one thing (the drug) that might make it possible for him to reach that one desire (his alternate reality). Over time, the body will undergo chemical changes, and the addictive behaviour may have huge personal costs, but the alternate world is the only world that an addict sees. If alcoholism has pushed an addict into this virtual world and has ravaged his brain chemistry, then it may be as important to focus on opening other doors into this imagined world as it may be to wean the addict off alcohol.

ach of these approaches to addiction can be applied to understanding the influence of the Internet. During the same period that Willy was getting sucked into World of Warcraft, David Greenfield started treating patients for Internet addiction at the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, in Connecticut. Greenfield, the centre’s founder and a practising psychologist, said the Internet was “the world’s biggest slot machine, with an IV-drip to the brain feeding it dopamine.” Gamblers become hooked on slot machines, he explained, because every once in a while they receive a reward, and that reward drives a dopamine surge in their brains. They don’t know when the coins will pour from the machine, or how many coins there will be. The Internet works in a similar way, and Internet addicts can easily lose their sense of space and time (as gamblers do at slot machines) while they hunt for the dopamine rewards that gaming, social networking and Internet surfing can produce. “We have accidentally discovered the most addictive form of media ever known,” Greenfield said. A 2011 neuroscience study from South Korea confirmed this view by showing that Internet addicts—defined using a version of the Young questionnaire—had reduced levels of certain dopamine receptors as compared to a control group. With fewer receptors, dopamine stays in the synapses and fires the dopamine pathway, through other available receptors, for longer periods of time. Critics, however, maintain that the Internet is merely a medium that facilitates addiction. If the Internet itself is just a conduit—for news, work, education, communication, friends and entertainment—how can one get addicted to it? “Gambling addiction, shopping addiction, game playing addiction—all of these are plausible,” Sara Kiesler, a human–computer interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. “But not Internet addiction.” This is where approaching addiction as a syndrome is useful, where it could manifest in various ways, depending on circumstance—as a gambling urge, a hunt for cocaine, or immersion into a game. In fact, the form that a person’s addiction syndrome takes may even change over the course of her life. Research by Mark Griffiths, a chartered psychologist and the director of the International Gaming Research Unit, has suggested that adolescents addicted to games are prone to gambling later in life. As with other manifestations of the addiction syndrome, it’s important to focus on the consequences, and not the quantity, of online behaviours. A 2011 paper from Griffiths’ institute reviewed 58 studies on gaming addiction and determined that how much one plays a game is not in and of itself indicative of an addiction. A big appetite for a game does not necessarily make it harmful, and there is much that gamers gain from their online experiences. Alexander Voiskounsky, a psychologist at the Moscow Lomonosov State University in Russia, pointed out that people game for the social network it provides, to experience certain kinds of imagination, and to be part of a team. “Online gamers are not on an island,” he insisted. If the popularity of online games is any indication, Voiskounsky is right. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs)—“massive” because they have millions of subscribers, “multiplayer online” because people play against

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Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo

Ç Naltrexone has been used to treat gambling, kleptomania and Internet addiction with some success.

each other on the Internet, and “role-playing” because players create avatars—are one of the fastest growing entertainment markets on the planet. World of Warcraft is the most popular of these worlds in the history of the Internet. It has over nine million monthly subscribers (although competition from other games has driven this figure down from 12 million in 2010). It dominates 45 per cent of the MMORPG market, and makes $1.4 billion in annual revenues for Blizzard Entertainment, the company that owns the brand. Television and YouTube commercials for the game have starred the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the rock-and-roll legend Ozzy Osbourne. South Park, the popular cartoon, even satirised the game in an episode titled, “Make Love, Not Warcraft”. Successful multiplayer online games are like page-turning novels: they are tale-driven. World of Warcraft plays out in the fantasy world of Azeroth and its numerous continents. There is a delicate balance between two large factions—the Alliance, humans, gnomes and the like, and the Horde, made up of species like orcs. Gamers create an online avatar, the way Willy created Nashaal, based on a variety of races and classes. However, instead of having a single storyline, like traditional computer games, the characters act out a multitude of stories. Breathtaking landscapes, detailed worlds and intricate plot twists unfold throughout game play. A player scours the land, builds alliances, completes missions and strategically beefs up his character’s strength. Players slowly develop their avatars, all while chatting online, mostly in character, with others. The game plays out like an alternate reality for the player—a parallel universe, like the one Deleuze conceived of, that triggers positive feelings. Griffiths has explored how structural characteristics of a game give it an addictive quality. Sound effects and colourful displays heighten player arousal, as do immersive lifelike scenes that bring about a reality seemingly better than the real world. “The blurring of the boundaries between the real and the virtual appears particularly relevant,” Griffiths wrote in the 2011 paper. In her book Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes that players of these Internet-based games

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Grifﬁths has explored how structural characteristics of a game give it an addictive quality. Sound effects and colourful displays heighten player arousal, as do immersive lifelike scenes that bring about a reality seemingly better than the real world. “suspend disbelief and become absorbed in what is happening on the screen”. They start to see the world differently and have a different paradigm for reality. For example, SecondLife, another virtual-reality game, provides players with an alter ego that inhabits an alter world where members are not restricted by real-world geography. Its immersive and communal environment starts to have more value than the “real” world. Like Deleuze’s view of alcoholics, an addictive gamer may search for the effect—friendships, memories of bravado, high self-esteem—that an immersive game offers nearly every time they play. The second life very easily becomes the first. ane found it nearly impossible to stop Willy from playing World of Warcraft. In her desperation, she resorted to weak attempts at controlling Willy’s game time. “Two hours a day,” she would tell him. He would agree—but then two hours would become three, and three became six, eight, twelve. Jane tried her old carrot-and-stick tactics. If he’d game less than two hours a day, she promised to take him out to dinner, or he could get new shoes. But World of Warcraft was far stronger than any of his mother’s inducements. The rewards of Nashaal’s world were the only ones Willy wanted. World of Warcraft was more than just a game for Willy. It was a social network, and in his case, his only network. He and his “guildees,” he said, would usually plot out strategies for the game. They’d also chat about real life events—wishing each other a happy new year, for instance, like the rest of the world did. “I was sometimes only chatting, not playing,” Willy told me. “That’s part of the pull.” Willy felt his family didn’t understand him or the game. He and Nashaal led a normal teenage life with friends, exciting conquests, and the associated challenge, camaraderie, secrets and banter. Why did his family find that so disappointing? He had a life. Just not the one they wanted. To Jane and the family though, there seemed no way to reach Willy, and they felt his alarming behaviour kept getting worse. In November 2006, his 13-year-old sister, Katie, received an award in recognition of her work as a youth volunteer in the Girl Scouts. The women’s club at their local church invited her to give a speech. The whole family excitedly gathered at the church that afternoon—except for Willy. Willy, then 14, was supposed to leave from home later and meet the rest of the family at 1 p.m. Instead, he spent the whole day being Nashaal. Nashaal didn’t know Katie, and never showed up to hear her speak. “Everybody else from the church knew he wasn’t there,” Katie recalled. When the family returned home, Jane went up to Willy’s room and yelled at him. Willy wasn’t sure what the fuss was about.

The game had a powerful hold over him. He later compared his experience of World of Warcraft to the movie, The Matrix, in which humans spent their lives plugged into a virtual world. “I felt like the game had a hand on one side, and my mom had a hand on the other,” he said. As long as he was in the game, he felt calm. But whenever his mom came around with that hand, he felt “it was a tussle, a thing to be avoided”. By the time he was 15, Willy’s behaviour started to resemble that of a six-year-old. He refused to accede to any bargains, and resorted to crying and fidgeting. Jane cried, too, and set timers to monitor his game playing. Willy became irritable. “The game released you from the concept of time,” he said. “So it was very irritating to be brought back to a world that actually did have that.” He didn’t want to be Willy anymore. “Outside life became a means to an end,” he said. By 2007, Willy was averaging 2,000 hours a year on World of Warcraft, and was now one of the best players in the game. Over the years, he’d also become increasingly adept with gadgets. In 2005, for instance, 13-year-old Willy and his father put together a desktop computer from old computer parts. He would easily make model rockets and fighter planes, and was the designated engineer in the family. But mostly he did anything he could to play the game. He lied about Boy Scouts meetings, saying they had been cancelled, so that he could sit in front of the computer. One weekday afternoon in May 2007, when Jane was away, he was scheduled to take the train to a Boy Scouts outing, his first in many months. Willy’s dad, Bill, was working in New York City and offered to drive to New Haven on his way back so that he could pick Willy up after the trip. Willy was to wait at the New Haven train station. On the way back from work, Bill got stuck in a long and tiring traffic jam. He finally reached New Haven late at night. Willy, though, was nowhere at the station. He had never gone to the Boy Scouts meeting, opting instead to be Nashaal. His parents were furious. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Jane told me. Jane began to search online to see if there was such a thing as gaming addiction. Discussion forums and support groups like Online Gamers Anonymous popped up. Much of what these sites said fit well with Jane’s experience of Willy. Until then, his life had felt to her like a jigsaw puzzle without the picture clue. Now, things started to make sense, as she began to see her son through this lens of addiction. She herself had been a chain smoker growing up, often smoking more than a pack a day. “I understood why he was acting the way he was,” she said. “He was part of something that was beyond himself.” She’d stopped in her late 20s, using a 12-step program that guided her out of it. “I saw myself in him,” she said. “If you’re really addicted, there’s no such thing as controlling it.” he addiction treatment market isn’t well defined. Richard Friedman, a psychiatry professor at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medical College, remembered a patient he treated after she complained to him in 2006 of excessive Scrabble and Risk playing on the Internet. The roots of her problem, Friedman diagnosed, lay in procrastination and her history of depression. In technical terms, she had what clinicians call comorbidity—the presence of multiple interacting conditions in the same patient. Friedman prescribed

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Cancan Chu/Getty Images

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Ç A young Chinese Internet addict receives an electroencephalogram check at the Beijing Military Region Central Hospital.

an anti-depressant, her husband password protected the computer to prevent her access, she started a job, and lost her interest in playing online Scrabble soon after. Although there are no medicines specifically approved to treat behavioural addictions, researchers have tried to use substance-abuse medications to treat behaviours. Naltrexone is the most prominent cross-platform drug. It is typically used for blocking the feeling of pleasure from substances like alcohol and cocaine. It has now been used to treat gambling, Internet addiction, and kleptomania with some success. Another drug that has been used in attempts to control addiction is escitalopram, an anti-depressant that regulates serotonin levels. Neither medicine has had extensive trials for Internet addiction treatment though. David Greenfield, at the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, who uses both behavioural therapy and medication, is pained that the debate in psychiatry is still about diagnosis. Greenfield feels diagnoses are a non-issue since doctors term a behavioural addiction with whatever gets reimbursement. “Every doctor has been doing it since they got out of school,” he says. The DSM-IV had a catch-all category, “Impulsive-Compulsive Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified,” that could be used for Internet-use-disorder patients. But that’s hardly the point, he felt. To him, excessive gaming is an issue, whether or not it is an addiction. Having an official disorder is a double-edged sword. It makes it okay to talk about it in public. But it also gives the

diagnosis a disease-like quality, used to explain away a patient’s symptoms. Over the last decade, a number of centres like Greenfield’s have sprung up around the world, specializing in treating behavioural, Internet-related and other addictions using a range of methods. The Institute of Mind Control and Personal Transformation at Bangalore uses alternate techniques like Reiki, a Japanese spiritual practice that uses the palm of the hand for transferring energy. (They have seen about a dozen technology addiction cases in total.) The Muktangan Rehabilitation Center in Pune favours a regimented timetable for all its “inmates” who have had excesses of drugs or habits. The centre follows a five-week course, a timed schedule of yoga, physical exercise, group and individual discussion sessions, prayer and medicines. Another US Internet addiction rehabilitation clinic, reSTART, offers a 45-day in-patient program—a therapeutic “detoxification” retreat. The General Hospital of Beijing Military Region has an Internet Addiction Treatment Center that has treated more than 3,500 people, predominantly male teenagers. The centre does it all: medicine, bringing in the family, military drills, and cognitive behavioural therapy—a combination of time management strategies, self-awareness and resolving conflict. New avenues for treatment are also opening up through recent research in brain training. Working memory, the system in the brain that is used to plan and recall quickly, is also the place that tells an individual whether she should do

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The Institute of Mind Control and Personal Transformation at Bangalore uses alternate techniques like Reiki, a Japanese spiritual practice that uses the palm of the hand for transferring energy. (They have seen about a dozen technology addiction cases in total.) what gives her pleasure in the moment, or delay and plan for a future and better reward. By training the working memory, some researchers believe they can help addicts forego their substance cravings in favour of longer-term benefits, but the field is still young and the method largely unproven. The most common way to combat an addiction is to, of course, simply stop doing whatever it is that is addictive. But abstinence is also easier prescribed than practised. Stopping a drug that opened a new worldview is to deny the worldview. An addict will invariably do whatever it takes to find that world again. “Abstinence is a failed policy,” wrote Howard Kushner, in a 2010 cultural review of addiction. “It denies the historical evidence that humans in all societies and cultures have and continue to rely on substances to alter their consciousness.” n May 2007, after browsing addiction support-groups like Online Gamers Anonymous, Jane started to see Willy as a gaming addict. Her family couldn’t risk losing Willy to Nashaal. Abstinence seemed to them to be the right way forward: Nashaal had to go. Willy was forced to sell his alter ego on eBay for US$350 in June 2007. He bid farewell to his guild. His friend, David, who used to hang out with him, called within 24 hours of learning that Willy was leaving the game. He hasn’t been in touch since. The first week without Nashaal was the most dramatic for the family. A change would do their 15-year-old some good, they hoped. Selecting a clear summer day in June 2007, the family decided to set out to the Hammonasset Beach State Park on the Connecticut shores. But Willy stayed in the car throughout the family’s time at the beach and cried. “I don’t think life’s worth living without it,” he would often plead with his mom. “I’ll do anything you want if you let me play for 15 minutes.” Jane paused as she recounted what he said. “It’s a lot to ask of somebody of that age, especially when everybody else is doing it,” said Jane. “I think he was relieved to get off the merry-go-round. But it was sad to see him begging.” Willy stopped eating regularly. He had three “relapses” in the next two years, including one that got him back on World of Warcraft. He set up a PayPal account with money from his parents and bid for a character on eBay. Maybe someone else out there was selling their character like he had done. He wanted his world back. Willy’s desire to game gradually began to subside with constant intervention from his parents. “You see this as us against you,” Jane would say, trying to reason with him. “But

really, it’s you against you.” To her, the game was preventing Willy from realizing his potential. Willy entered high school in the fall of 2007. Jane could not keep up with the higher education load and also feared the consequences of him staying at home. For the most part, the family pushed this self-devised rehab, which involved a strict routine, abstinence, and talking Willy through the withdrawal phase. He went to 12-step meetings, doctors and counsellors. One psychiatrist who thought he had attentiondeficit disorder (ADD) prescribed Adderall. (The doctor felt afterward that he did not have the disorder, and stopped the medication.) The transition back to a school was hard for Willy. At home, “there were no due dates” for assignments. “It was hard to be organized,” he said. He reflected back on his time gaming, thinking of its hook, how he cracked complex game plays, climbing up the levels. “It’s an icon of your accomplishments,” he told me in 2009. “And it’s an icon of what you’ve not accomplished.” Willy was in 11th grade then. It was more than a year after Willy first quit World of Warcraft. He said he hung out with more people and started dating. He spent more time in Boy Scouts, eagerly preparing for an Eagle Scouts Award. He also started participating in FIRST Robotics, a NASA-initiated program at his school. “It’s sort of a team sport for those who do science and math,” Jane explained. Willy worked on a game that involved moving robots across a slippery surface. He coded for the project. “I feel really good because it is not gaming,” Jane said. “It’s just something I am interested in,” Willy replied. “You’re not so much thinking now that you want do that for a career?” Jane asked. “No.” There was an awkward pause. “I don’t think it will be a good environment to be in,” Jane said. “No, you’ll be around computers the whole day,” said Willy. He wanted to become a doctor. Jane liked that. t got worse before it got better,” Jane told me earlier this year. Willy had hacked into his school’s computer network. “They were particularly angry with him,” Jane said. “For them, it was hack proof.” Around the same time though, Willy had aced a national merit test and was called down to the school office for being a semifinalist. “Two hours later, they called him again,” said Jane. The police wanted to inquire about the computer crime. Willy was suspended for a week. And then, again, a couple more times. After graduation, the family insisted that he stay at home and not go to college immediately, fearing it would have been money down the drain. Willy worked at a bakery for a year after high school. He is now enrolled in a degree program in the University of Connecticut, and has an interest in biochemistry. He still works four days a week at the bakery, and commutes to the campus. He wants to work a couple of years after college, said Jane, and then go for his masters and doctorate. “If we force him to be very busy, it works well,” said Jane. “But he’s going to be 21, and he’s going to have to leave the nest.” a

“I

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Sun and Sand Ivanpah Valley, home to the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest solar power station. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMEY STILLINGS

everal hours down Interstate 15, which passes through the US states of California and Nevada, the vast and desolate Mojave desert starts to bloom. From a high vantage point, an alien landscape reveals itself in which fields of mirrors encircle three tall towers. The Ivanpah Solar Power Station cost $2.18 billion to build and is the biggest solar thermal project in the world at the moment, generating 392MW of electricity. The project gets its name from the Its developers, NRG Energy and BrightSource Energy (in partnership with Bechtel and Google), have already used more than 150,000 of what will be the final 173,500 mirrors, called heliostats, to reflect sunlight that heats boilers housed in the three towers. Six years in the making and a month to go before operations, the plant spans 3500 acres—almost the size of 2000 soccer fields—and will produce enough energy to power 140,000 homes in California at about 25c/kwh in its initial years (conventional power is much cheaper, though, averaging about 12c/kwh in the United States). The plant has had to face many challenges to its construction. First, solar plants consume large quantities of water to cool down, and water is scarce in the Mojave. Add to this the mirrors, which need a daily cleaning of dust raised from the desert. Because dust isn’t transparent, a single gram of dust per square metre of a solar panel can reduce its efficiency by 40 per cent, but BrightSource has tried to reduce its water consumption by 90 per cent using ‘dry cooling’ instead of ‘wet cooling’. The plant for transmission of power was named El Dorado and millions of dollars had to be spent in high-voltage power lines. Environmentalists have raised concerns about the plant’s

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effect on the fragile desert ecosystems around it. The land on which the plant now stands was inhabited by the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), a species threatened with extinction. BrightSource’s biologists found and relocated almost 200 of these tortoises to new habitats in the Mojave at the cost of about $55,000 per animal, but the animals may not easily adapt to their new surroundings. It is also possible that the heated air emerging from the towers could singe migrating birds. A similar project coming up in Indio, California, has concerned the Native American community residing there, because its construction will destroy ancient tribal trails. The US Department of Energy subsidises 30 per cent of the cost of solar installations, and some tax payers worry that the money is not being put to use in the production of less expensive power such as that from natural gas and the more conventional fossil fuels. They’re reminded of Solyndra, a stateof-the-art start-up that failed in 2011 due to a combination of bad management and a dip in the market for solar energy. For the present, two other projects by a company called First Solar have been proposed for the Ivanpah Valley, and there will be a 3000 acre solar farm further north in the Panoche Valley. Photographer Jamey Stillings has documented the construction of the Ivanpah facility. His work captures the conflict between technology and the land that it occupies. All the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun in six hours than humans can use in a year. It’s been speculated that if even 4 per cent of desert spaces (equal to twice the size of North America) were covered in solar panels, it is possible to generate enough electricity to power the world.

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Ă&#x2021; Heliostats, mirrors mounted to structural frames, are brought out to Solar Field One for installation onto tubular pylons.

Ă&#x2021; The site of Ivanpah Solar prior to commencement of construction in 2010.

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Ă&#x2021; The power block of Solar Field Two begins to take shape. A large berm on the uphill side is constructed to protect the site from the powerful erosive forces of desert storms.

È Detail of construction within the power block of Solar Field Two.

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ÈÈ Circular service roads for future Solar Field Two serve as counterpoints to the organic erosion gullies of the desert’s alluvial slope.

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Ă&#x2C6; Tower construction in the power block of Solar Field Two. For scale, a parking lot is on the right side of the construction zone.

Ă&#x2C6; Large heliostats, or mirrors, are assembled on site, put on small trailers, then moved out into the solar fields for installation.

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È As construction was completed in the power block of Solar Field One, heliostats were installed adjacent to it within the circular construction zone.

ÈÈ Thousands of heliostats, or mirrors, surround the power block of Solar Field One. The mirrors will redirect the sun’s thermal energy to the black section atop the tower super heating water to create steam that will then drive turbines to create electricity.

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menagerie Darwin, the artistry of iron, and the discovery of malaria in three book excerpts.

Bettmann/Corbis

STEPHEN JAY GOULD (1941–2002) was one of the most widely read science writers of his time and a teacher of paleontology, evolutionary biology, and the history of science at Harvard. This excerpt is from The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reﬂections on Natural History (Random House, 2000).

A SLY DULLARD NAMED DARWIN: RECOGNIZING THE MULTIPLE FACETS OF GENIUS ost young men of his time could only fantasize; but Charles Darwin experienced the overt drama of his century’s archetypal episode in a genre of personal stories that we now call “coming of age”: a five-year voyage of pure adventure (and much science), circumnavigating the globe on H.M.S. Beagle. Returning to England at age twentyseven, Darwin became a homebody and never again left his native land, not even to cross the English Channel. Nonetheless, his subsequent life included two internal dramas far more intense, far more portentous, and (for anyone who can move beyond the equation of swashbuckling with excitement), far more thrilling than anything he had experienced as a world traveler: first, the intellectual drama of discovering both the factuality and mechanism of evolution; and second, the emotional drama of recognizing (and relishing) the revolutionary implications of his theory of natural selection, while learning the pain that revelation would impose upon both immediate family and surrounding society. … In addition to general benefits conferred by wealth and access to influential circles, Darwin enjoyed specific predisposing advantages for becoming the midwife of evolution. His grandfather Erasmus had been a famous writer, physician, and freethinker. (In the first sentence of his preface to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, P. B. Shelley had, in order to justify Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment, alluded to Erasmus Darwin’s atheistical view on the possibility of quickening matter by electricity.) Erasmus died before Charles’s birth, but the grandson studiously read and greatly admired his grandfather’s writing—and Erasmus Darwin had been a thoroughgoing evolutionist. Charles studied medicine in Edinburgh, where he became close to his teacher Robert Grant, a committed Lamarckian evolutionist delighted to have Erasmus’s grandson as a student. And then, of course, Darwin enjoyed the grandest privilege of five years’ exposure to nature’s diversity aboard the Beagle. Still, he remained a creationist, if suffused with nascent doubt, when he returned to London in 1836. Some people display their brilliance in their cradles—as with Mill learning classics and Mozart writing symphonies almost before either could walk. We are not surprised when such men become “geniuses”; in fact, we expect such an eventual status, unless illness or idiosyncrasy conquers innate promise. But descriptions of Darwin’s early years could lead only to a prediction of a worthy, but undistinguished life. Absolutely nothing in any record documents the usual accoutrements of intellectual brilliance. Geniality and fecklessness

Å Charles Darwin (1809–1882).

emerge as Darwin’s most visible and distinctive traits. “He was so quiet,” Janet Browne writes, “that relatives found it difficult to say anything about his character beyond an appreciative nod towards an exceedingly placid temperament. Geniality was what was most often remembered by Darwin’s schoolfriends: the good-humored acquiescence of an inwardlooking boy who did not appear much to mind whatever happened in life. . . . Some could barely remember Darwin when asked for anecdotes at the close of his life.” Darwin did develop a passion for natural history, expressed most keenly in his beetle collection—but so many children, then and now, become total devotees to such a hobby for a transient moment in a life leading elsewhere. No one could have predicted The Origin of Species from a childhood insect collection. Darwin performed as an indifferent student in every phase of his formal education. Sickened by the sight of blood, he abandoned medical studies in Edinburgh. His father became so frustrated when Charles quit Edinburgh that he admonished his son: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Charles recounted the episode in his Autobiography, written late in life with characteristic Victorian distance and emotional restraint: “He was very properly vehement against my turning an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination.” Robert Waring Darwin therefore sent his unpromising boy to Cambridge, where he could follow the usual course for unambitious later-born sons and train for the sinecure of a local parsonage. Charles showed the same interest in religion that he manifested at the time for all other academic subjects save natural history—none at all. He went along, faute de mieux, in his usual genial and feckless way. He obtained the Victorian equivalent of a “gentleman’s C” degree, spending most of his time gambling, drinking, and hunting with his upper-class pals. He still planned to become a minister during the entire Beagle voyage—though I am quite sure that his thoughts always focused upon the possibilities for amateur work in natural history that such a job provided, and not at all upon the salvation of souls, or even the weekly sermon. The Beagle worked its alchemy in many ways, mostly perhaps in the simple ontogenetic fact that five years represents a lot of living during one’s midtwenties and tends to mark a passage to maturity. Robert Waring Darwin, apprised by scientific colleagues of his son’s remarkable collections and insights, surrendered to the inevitable change from religion to science. Charles’s sister Susan wrote as the Beagle sailed home: “Papa and we often cogitate over what you will do when you return, as I fear there are but small hopes of your still going in the church—I think you must turn professor at Cambridge.” But the mystery remains. Why Darwin? No one thought him dull, but no one marked him as brilliant either. And no one discerned in him that primary emotional correlate of greatness

Bettmann/Corbis

Ç A drawing of the HMS Beagle from A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World (1912) by Charles Darwin.

that our modern age calls “fire in the belly.” Thomas Carlyle, a good judge, who knew both Darwin brothers Charles and Erasmus well, considered Erasmus as far superior in intelligence. I believe that any solution to this key puzzle in Darwinian biography must begin with a proper exegesis of intelligence—one that rejects Charles Spearman’s old notion of a single scalar quantity recording overall mental might (called g or general intelligence, and recently revived by Murray and Herrnstein as the central fallacy of their specious book, The Bell Curve—see the second edition of my book The Mismeasure of Man). Instead, we need a concept of intelligence defined as a substantial set of largely independent attributes. This primary alternative to g has its own long and complex history, from an extreme in misuse by the old phrenologists, to modern tenable versions initiated by Louis L. Thurstone and J. P. Guilford, and best represented today by the work of Howard Gardner. I do not know what g-score might be given to Darwin by a modern Spearmanian. I do know, however, that we must follow the alternative view of independent multiplicity to grasp Darwin’s triumph in the light of such unpromising beginnings (unpromising in the apparently hopeless sense of little talent with maximal opportunity, rather than the more tractable Horatio Alger mode of great promise in difficult circumstances). … If the sum of a person’s achievement must be sought in a subtle combination of differing attributes, each affected in marvelously varying ways by complexities of external circumstances and the interplay of psyche and society, then no account of particular accomplishment can be drawn simply by prediction based on an overall inherited mental rank. Achieved brilliance must arise from (1) a happy combination of fortunate strength in several independent attributes, joined

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to think that the last section of Darwin’s autobiography (on “mental qualities”) represented little more than a lie, enforced by conventions of Victorian public modesty, since Darwin could not speak openly about his strengths. The very last line may indeed be regarded as a tad disingenuous: “With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.” a

CC by 2.0/Darrel Birkett

with (2) an equally fortuitous combination of external circumstances (personal, familial, societal, and historical), so that (3) such a unique mental convergence can lead one mind and personality to solve a major puzzle about the construction of natural reality. Explanations of this kind can only be achieved in the mode of dense narrative. No shortcuts exist; the answer lies in a particular concatenation of details—and these must be elucidated and integrated descriptively. I used

PERISCOPE

Many knew JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900) as an art critic and patron or as a social reformer, but he had numerous other interests, one of which was geology. This excerpt is a lecture he gave at Tunbridge Wells in 1858, The Two Paths.

IRON IN NATURE ou all probably know that the ochreous stain, which, perhaps, is often thought to spoil the basin of your spring, is iron in a state of rust: and when you see rusty iron in other places you generally think, not only that it spoils the places it stains, but that it is spoiled itself—that rusty iron is spoiled iron. For most of our uses it generally is so; and because we cannot use a rusty knife or razor so well as a polished one, we suppose it to be a great defect in iron that it is subject to rust. But not at all. On the contrary, the most perfect and useful state of it is that ochreous stain; and therefore it is endowed with so ready a disposition to get itself into that state. … Nay,

in a certain sense, and almost a literal one, we may say that iron rusted is Living; but when pure or polished, Dead. You all probably know that in the mixed air we breathe, the part of it essentially needful to us is called oxygen; and that this substance is to all animals, in the most accurate sense of the word, “breath of life.” … Now it is this very same air which the iron breathes when it gets rusty. It takes the oxygen from the atmosphere as eagerly as we do, though it uses it differently. The iron keeps all that it gets; we, and other animals, part with it again; but the metal absolutely keeps what it has once received of this aerial gift; and the ochreous dust which we so much despise is, in fact, just so much nobler than pure iron, in so far as it is iron and the air. Nobler, and more useful—for, indeed, as I shall be able to show you presently—the main service of this metal, and of all other metals, to us, is not in making knives, and scissors, and pokers, and pans, but in making the ground we feed from, and nearly all the substances first needful to our existence. For these are all nothing but metals and oxygen—metals with breath put into them. Sand, lime, clay, and the rest of the earths—potash and soda, and the

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George Steinmetz/Corbis

rest of the alkalies—are all of them metals which have undergone this, so to speak, vital change, and have been rendered fit for the service of man by permanent unity with the purest air which he himself breathes. There is only one metal which does not rust readily; and that, in its influence on Man hitherto, has caused Death rather than Life; it will not be put to its right use till it is made a pavement of, and so trodden under foot. … It stains the great earth wheresoever you can see it, far and wide—it is the colouring substance appointed to colour the globe for the sight, as well as subdue it to the service of man. You have just seen your hills covered with snow, and, perhaps, have enjoyed, at first, the contrast of their fair white with the dark blocks of pine woods; but have you Ç An pick-up truck in a long-abandoned mining settlement in Dallol, Ethiopia. ever considered how you would like them always white—not pure white, but dirty white—the white of thaw, with all the chill of snow in it, but none of its brighther books by the pretty colours in them. The pretty colours in ness? That is what the colour of the earth would be without her limestone-books form those variegated marbles which all its iron; that would be its colour, not here or there only, but mankind have taken delight to polish and build with from the in all places, and at all times. Follow out that idea till you get beginning of time; and the pretty colours in her flint-books it in some detail. Think first of your pretty gravel walks in form those agates, jaspers, cornelians, bloodstones, onyxes, your gardens, yellow and fine, like plots of sunshine between cairngorms, chrysoprases, which men have in like manner the flower-beds; fancy them all suddenly turned to the cotaken delight to cut, and polish, and make ornaments of, lour of ashes. That is what they would be without iron ochre. from the beginning of time; and yet, so much of babies are Think of your winding walks over the common, as warm to they, and so fond of looking at the pictures instead of reading the eye as they are dry to the foot, and imagine them all laid the book, that I question whether, after six thousand years of down suddenly with gray cinders. Then pass beyond the comcutting and polishing, there are above two or three people out mon into the country, and pause at the first ploughed field of any given hundred, who know, or care to know, how a bit of that you see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its agate or a bit of marble was made, or painted. deep brown furrows, and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved … aside by the ploughshare, like deep folds of a mantle of rusBut this is not all, nor the best part of the work of iron. Its set velvet—fancy it all changed suddenly into grisly furrows service in producing these beautiful stones is only rendered in a field of mud. That is what it would be without iron. Pass to rich people, who can afford to quarry and polish them. But on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending Nature paints for all the world, poor and rich together: and line of the sea shore; go down upon its breezy beach—watch while, therefore, she thus adorns the innermost rocks of her the white foam flashing among the amber of it, and all the hills, to tempt your investigation, or indulge your luxury,— blue sea embayed in belts of gold: then fancy those circlets she paints, far more carefully, the outsides of the hills, which of far sweeping shore suddenly put into mounds of mournare for the eyes of the shepherd and the ploughman. ... Have ing—all those golden sands turned into gray slime, the fairyou ever considered, in speaking as we do so often of distant ies no more able to call to each other, “Come unto these yellow blue hills, what it is that makes them blue? To a certain exsands;” but, “Come unto these drab sands.” That is what they tent it is distance; but distance alone will not do it. Many would be, without iron. hills look white, however distant. … Some of their rocks are, … indeed, too dark to be beautiful, being black or ashy gray; owThese being what we have usually to deal with, Nature ing to imperfect and porous structure. But when you see this seems to have set herself to make these three substances as dark colour dashed with russet and blue, and coming out in interesting to us, and as beautiful for us, as she can. The clay, masses among the green ferns, so purple that you can hardly being a soft and changeable substance, she doesn’t take much tell at first whether it is rock or heather.... pains about, as we have seen, till it is baked; she brings the …Perhaps you have wondered at my use of the word “purcolour into it only when it receives a permanent form. But the ple,” so often of stones; but the Greeks, and still more the Rolimestone and flint she paints, in her own way, in their namans, who had profound respect for purple, used it of stone tive state: and her object in painting them seems to be much long ago. You have all heard of “porphyry” as among the most the same as in her painting of flowers; to draw us, careless precious of the harder massive stones. The colour which gave and idle human creatures, to watch her a little, and see what it that noble name, as well as that which gives the flush to all she is about—that being on the whole good for us,—her chilthe rosy granite of Egypt—yes, and to the rosiest summits of dren. … [S]he makes picture-books for us of limestone and the Alps themselves—is still owing to the same substance— flint; and tempts us, like foolish children as we are, to read your humble oxide of iron.

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And last of all: A nobler colour than all these—the noblest colour ever seen on this earth—one which belongs to a strength greater than that of the Egyptian granite, and to a beauty greater than that of the sunset or the rose—is still mysteriously connected with the presence of this dark iron. I believe it is not ascertained on

SIR RONALD ROSS (1857–1932) was born in India. He took up medicine and joined the Indian Medical Service, but really wanted to be a writer. He is credited with forming the theory that malaria was carried and spread by mosquitoes. This excerpt is taken from his Memoires: With a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and Its Solution (1923).

will try to reconstruct the events as exactly as I can out of my notebooks, letters, and memories. On arrival at Secunderabad after the severe labour in Ootacamund, I felt my first violent reaction against the microscope, and could scarcely bring myself to look through mine for a month. The Great Monsoon seemed to have failed. The hot blast which, instead of it, struck us in June was followed by a suffocating stillness, and the sky was filled with a haze of dust through which the sun glared like a foiled enchanter. … I do not boast my premonitions, because they seldom come true! but at that time I was certainly much exalted in spirit and said to myself: “One more effort and the thing will be done.” I remember especially a dreadful evening, when I climbed one of the heaps of great boulders piled upon each other which dot the plain outside the station, and saw the vulture and the dead jackal … below. Then it was that the thought struck me: Why not see whether mosquitoes fed on malaria blood as before contain any of the mosquito-parasites which I had found in the Sigur Ghat? … But the weather became very hot again in August. At first I toiled comfortably, but as failure followed failure, I became exasperated and worked till I could hardly see my way home late in the afternoons. Well do I remember that dark hot little office in the hospital at Begumpett, with the necessary gleam of light coming in from under the eaves of the veranda. I did not allow the punka to be used because it blew about my dissected mosquitoes, which were partly examined without a cover-glass; and the result was that swarms of flies and of “eye-flies”—minute little insects which try to get into one’s ears and eyelids—tormented me at their pleasure, while an occasional Stegomyia revenged herself on me for the death of her friends. The screws of my microscope were rusted with sweat from my forehead and hands, and its last remaining eye-piece was cracked! By the 15 August thirty-one mosquitoes of types A and B, all bred from the larva and fed on malarial patients, had been scrupulously examined; not counting numerous unfed mosquitoes, bad dissections, partial dissections, and other studies… On the previous day I had written to my wife: “I have failed in finding parasites in mosquitoes fed on malaria

what the crimson of blood actually depends; but the colour is connected, of course, with its vitality, and that vitality with the existence of iron as one of its substantial elements. Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so delicately in our human life, that we cannot even blush without its help? a

Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

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Ç Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932), director-in-chief of the Ross institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

patients, but perhaps am not using the proper kind of mosquito.” Now, as if in answer, some Angel of Fate must have met one of my three “mosquito-men” in his leisurely perambulations and must have put into his hand a bottle of mosquito larvae, some of which I saw at once were of a type different from the usual Culex and Stegomyia larvae. Next morning, the 16 August, when I went again to hospital after breakfast, the Hospital Assistant (I regret I have forgotten his name) pointed out a small mosquito seated on the wall with its tail sticking outwards. I caught it by my method of placing the mouth of a bottle slowly over it—if one jabs the bottle quickly the insect always escapes sideways—and killed it with tobacco smoke. It had spots on the wings, and was evidently like the insect which I had found in the rest-house at Sigur (page 208), and is described in my notebook as “A brown mosquito, not brindled, with three black bars on wings caught in ward.” I dissected it at once and found nothing unusual; but while I was doing so—I remember the details well—the worthy Hospital Assistant ran in to say that there were a number of mosquitoes of the same class which had hatched out in the bottle that my men had brought me yesterday. Sure enough there they were about a dozen big brown fellows, with fine tapered bodies and spotted wings, hungrily trying to escape through the gauze covering of the flask which the Angel of Fate had given to my humble retainer!—dappled-winged mosquitoes. Type C, the first I had ever found in Secunderabad, but larger than the one I had just caught on the wall. Immediately my patient, Husein Khan, a man with fairly numerous crescents (and also Filarice) was stripped and put on the bed under the mosquito-net. This was at 12.25 p.m. by my notebook; and in five minutes ten of the new mosquitoes had gorged them-

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Ç A view through a microscope of fresh blood, possibly infected with malaria.

selves on him and were caught by the Hospital Assistant, each in its separate test-tube, with a drop of water to drink and a loose lump of cotton- wool to prevent escape—Husein Khan received one anna for each. Next day, 17 August, two of my new beauties (A. stephensi) were dead, but I dissected two of the survivors, mosquitoes 32 and 33. They are described in my notebook as “Large, legs, proboscis and anterior border of wings, spotted dark brown and white—brown spots on tail joint of body. Back of abd. and thorax light brown, belly dark brown. Wings nearly white.” I was rather excited over the dissections, spoiled them, and found nothing... The 20 August 1895—the anniversary of which I always call Mosquito Day—was, I think, a cloudy, dull, hot day. I went to hospital at 7 a.m., examined my patients, and attended to official correspondence; but was much annoyed because my men had failed to bring any more larvae of the dappledwinged mosquitoes, and still more because one of my three remaining Anopheles had died during the night and had swelled up with decay. After a hurried breakfast at the Mess, I returned to dissect the cadaver (Mosquito 36), but found nothing new in it. I then examined a small Stegomyia, which happened to have been fed on Husein Khan on the same day (the 16th)—Mosquito 87—which was also negative, of course. At about 1 p.m. I determined to sacrifice the seventh Anopheles (A. siephensi) of the batch fed on the 16th, Mosquito 38, although my eyesight was already fatigued. Only one more of the batch remained. The dissection was excellent, and I went carefully through the tissues, now so familiar to me, searching every micron with the same passion and care as one would search some vast ruined palace for a little hidden treasure. Nothing. No,

these new mosquitoes also were going to be a failure: there was something wrong with the theory. But the stomach tissue still remained to be examined—lying there, empty and flaccid, before me on the glass slide, a great white expanse of cells like a large courtyard of flagstones, each one of which must be scrutinised—half an hour’s labour at least. I was tired, and what was the use? I must have examined the stomachs of a thousand mosquitoes by this time. But the Angel of Fate fortunately laid his hand on my head; and I had scarcely commenced the search again when I saw a clear and almost perfectly circular outline before me of about 12 microns in diameter. The outline was much too sharp, the cell too small to be an ordinary stomach-cell of a mosquito. I looked a little further. Here was another, and another exactly similar cell. The afternoon was very hot and overcast; and I remember opening the diaphragm of the sub-stage condenser of the microscope to admit more light and then changing the focus. … In each of these cells there was a cluster of small granules, black as jet and exactly like the black pigment granules of the Plasmodium crescents. As with that pigment, the granules numbered about twelve to sixteen in each cell and became blacker and more visible when more light was admitted through the diaphragm. I laughed, and shouted for the Hospital Assistant—he was away having his siesta. Next day I went to hospital intensely excited. The last survivor of the batch fed on the 16th, Mosquito 39, was alive. After looking through yesterday’s specimen I slew and dissected it with a shaking hand. There were the cells again, twenty-one of them, just as before, only now much larger! Mosquito 38, the seventh of the batch fed on the 16th, was killed on the fourth day afterwards, that is, on the 20th. This one was killed on the 21st, the fifth day after feeding, and the cells had grown during the extra day. The cells were therefore parasites, and, as they contained the characteristic malarial pigment, were almost certainly the malaria parasites growing in the mosquito’s tissues. The thing was really done. As I said on page 211, we had to discover two unknown quantities simultaneously—the kind of mosquito which carries the parasite, and the form and position of the parasite within it. We could not find the first without knowing the second, nor the second without knowing the first. By an extremely lucky observation I had now discovered both the unknown quantities at the same moment. The mosquito was the Anopheles, and the parasite lives in or on its gastric wall and can be recognised at once by the characteristic pigment. All the work on the subject which has been done since then by me and others during the last twenty-five years has been mere child’s play which anyone could do after the clue was once obtained. … Then, or a few days later, I wrote the following […] verses on a separate slip of paper: … I know this little thing A myriad men will save. O Death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave? a

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PERISCOPE

CATALOGUE Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy: From the Earliest Dawn of that Science in India to the Present Time

Mary Roach W.W. Norton & Co. 348 pages, R1252 Why do we like crunchy food? Can we die from constipation? How much can a human being eat at one go? We have a lovehate relationship with our gut, and Mary Roach has capitalized on that repulsion by undertaking a study of the human digestive system. Gulp follows a piece of food from the mouth to the end of the colon to illustrate the fate of a meal and introduces you to scientists who answer questions people don’t usually ask. In her signature funny delivery, Roach reveals that it’s not at all about the familiar “you are what you eat”, but rather that one is a product of how one eats.

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present

John Bentley Cambridge University Press 334 pages, R1993 Early accounts of Hindu astrology spoke of gods, giants, shadows, and the marriage of the moon to 27 princesses, renderings that seem obscure to the modern reader. A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy was first published in 1823 and the current reissue is of its 1825 edition. In it, Bentley tried to reveal the foundations of the mythological stories and then charted a history of Indian astronomy up to the 19th century.

Eric Kandel Random House 656 pages, R2310

Maria Konnikova Viking 288 pages, R1500

From the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology comes an examination of the intermingling of art and science using the Vienna of 1900 to illustrate the dialogue. The book combines the art of the Viennese Modernists, Gustav Klimpt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele, and the science of the mind, neuroaesthetics more specifically. Detailed discussions of vision, emotion, and empathy show how the Viennese Modernists and artists before them had a deep understanding of how things worked before science had progressed to prove it.

This book is based on the premise that Sherlock Holmes can teach us much about our brains and how they work. Aficionados and others who want to know how to upgrade their minds can take lessons from Maria Konnikova’s exploration of Holmes’ most famous cases. Alternating between the deductive powers of the enigmatic detective and current cognitive studies, she teaches the reader how to “observe, not merely see”, question everything, ignoring the superfluous, and continually self-educate. As Holmes himself said, “Education never ends.”

Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind (A Life inside the Center))

Extremes: Life, Death, and the Limits of the Human Body

James Gleick Pantheon Books 526 pages, R1291 He’s been called one of the best science writers of our time and here, James Glieck brings us a natural history of information, communication, and information theory. As he argues in the book, information is more than just content, it’s “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of everything. Calling us “creatures of information” he also explains that though we might feel engulfed by it, it is as much a part of our make up as our biological and physical universe.

Ray Monk Random House 848 pages, R2160 A biography of a man of stunning intellectual abilities, this book tells the story of Oppenheimer’s intriguing choices, ambition, and talent. Oppenheimer had overseen the US effort to beat the Nazis at developing the first atomic bomb, but in doing so found himself on a collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Written lucidly and with intensive research, Monk also provides a look into the mindset of Oppenheimer’s time.

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

Curtis White Coronet 400 pages, R1384 We’ve been taught that science can answer all questions and allow theories to flourish, unchallenged. Curtis White believes that without a “collaboration with art, science is doomed to moral sterility, or to a nihilism that asserts that there are no values.” Paying equal attention to both fundamental atheists and fundamental Christians, White argues against what he terms as “scientism” and fears what this will do if allowed to take hold. One of the many downfalls would be the abandonment of the compelling philosophical debates of the past and in the future.

Science between Europe and Asia: Historical Studies of the Transmission, Adoption, and Adaptation of Knowledge

Kevin Fong Hodder & Stoughton 352 pages, R1816 Humans sometimes overcome the odds, sometimes even death. Kevin Fong is an anesthetist who, through his television appearances, has demonstrated the extremes the human body can withstand. Science has made what was once lethal quite survivable and Fong illustrates this with stories such as the woman who froze to death after being trapped under a mountain stream in Norway but who now is alive and well thanks to what we have learned over the last century. It also points to what more can be probed in the future.

Feza Günergun and Dhruv Raina (eds) Springer 292 pages, R8006 How did scientific exchanges take place between Europe and Asia? This book tells you how with the backing of a number of papers that show how mobility and the translation of European languages facilitated the exchange of ideas and knowledge in fields such as printing, weaponry, construction, mining, mapping, math, and medicine. Arguing that the transmission of knowledge was not simple and not a oneway process, the book brings a new perspective to this issue based on new investigations.

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PERISCOPE

ALMANAC Science Street Fair

8 NOV

3–5 JAN

The first of its kind, this festival will be a four-day celebration that will see the Science Centre and Snow City in Singapore turned into a fair ground. Aiming to present the fun and unexpected side of science, the line-up of events include science performances, street challenges, mega exhibitions, unique game stalls, good food as well as hands-on activities.

Techfest Techfest is IIT Bombay’s annual student run technology bonanza, Asia’s largest tech festival and one of the very few student-run initiatives to receive coveted funding from UNESCO. By day, visitors can watch robots battle in the famed Robowars competition, visit the Ozone open space for games and workshops, or attend the acclaimed lecture series to hear about cutting edge science and technology breakthroughs, and by night the festival boasts the Technoholix professional science entertainment shows series. A centerpiece of the festival is the grand finale of the International Robotics Challenge—the final round pits teams from across the world against each other to see who can build the best bots. Techfest, 3–5 January 2014, Mumbai, India. Visit http://www.techfest.org/

Science Street Fair, 8 November 2013, Singapore. Visit http://www.sciencefest.sg/event_single.php?id=149 14–18 AUG

21–26 JUN

Loncon 3 The next World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) will be held in London, and writers, artists, editors, publishers and academics will be among the 7000 or so expected attendees. These international gatherings of the science fiction community have been held since 1939. Events include the Hugo Awards Ceremony, theatre performances, exhibitions, an art show and an auction.

EuroScience Open Forum This year’s EuroScience Open Forum festival will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, bringing together some of the world’s leading researchers and young enthusiasts alike. Themed ‘Science Building Bridges’, the festival will include presentations, debate, and lectures aimed at showcasing contemporary science’s multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural potential. In addition, visitors can delight in the Science in the City initiative, a public outreach program in which top scientists will run sponsored events throughout the Carlsberg City District, primarily on the weekend of 21 June 2014.

Loncon 3, 14–18 August 2014, London, UK.

EuroScience Open Forum, 21–26 June 2014,

Visit http://www.loncon3.org/index.php

Copenhagen, Denmark. Visit http://esof2014.org/

(REGISTERED) RNI DELENG/2008/27062/08 DL(C)-14/1296/2012-14/ KA/BGGPO/2568/12-14 Posted at BGGO on 1st, 5th & 10th of every month KL/EKM/727/12-14/MR/TECH/47/6/2013/Pgs.—120+60 P.O. SRT Nagar Posting Dt. 24 to 30 Published on 15/10/2013.