Popularising science

THE MOTHER OF ALL GENES (And Other Adventures In Popular Science): Rs. 235.

SWIFT-TUTTLE AND SPACE SHUTTLE (And Other Adventures in Popular Science): Rs. 260. Both by D. Balasubramanian; Both published by Universities Press India) Ltd., distributed by Orient Longman Ltd., 160, Anna Salai, Chennai-600002.

THE AUTHOR of the two books under review is none other than Prof. Balasubramanian whose articles appear every fortnight under the column "Speaking of Science'' in the "Science and Technology'' supplement of The Hindu. He is a biologist by profession who has also been active in writing popular science articles for a number of years. He has a flair for putting across scientific topics in a style that a non-scientist can relate to. The inexorable growth of science since the beginning of the 19th Century led to a phenomenal increase in scientific publication; there is so much of it today, most of which is unreadable for anyone other than the scientists themselves, that science is losing touch with the non-scientist. This is unfortunate because science need not be a mystery to non-scientists provided scientists take the trouble to communicate their work in simple terms free of all technical jargon. This will provide the non- scientists an opportunity to judge for themselves what science is all about and appreciate the potentialities and many achievements of the human mind. There are over 30 articles in each book, none of them more than five or six pages long, and these articles cover a variety of scientific subjects. All of them had appeared in The Hindu and they are based on original scientific research papers that were published in professional scientific journals. Many of them will be of interest to the general reader who is not into any scientific discipline. A good science writer targeting the general reader should be able to convey a scientific concept minus all the technical jargon and equations. These two books represent an effort and a successful one at that in capturing scientific ideas and bringing the "town'' and "gown'' together as the publishers have described it.

The title article "Mother of all genes'' discusses the theory of evolution as far as it relates to human origin. According to this theory we have all evolved from unicellular organisms that appeared on our planet more than four billion years ago. Elsewhere in the book the author talks of the matrilineal genealogy where he tells the reader about the mitochondrial DNA, or the mtDNA, which is passed on to the offspring only by the mother. Here he refers to the work done by Allan Wilson and his colleagues at the UCLA, Berkley, who constructed an evolutionary tree and traced back the human origin to the original ancestor or the prime mother of all humans. According to them the first mother or Eve was a lady from Africa who lived around 200,000 years ago. (In this connection it may be relevant to mention another book The Runaway Brain whose author, Christopher Wills, also refers to the work of Allan Wilson and his team who published a paper on their findings in 1987. Immense publicity accompanied their paper including a cover story in the Newsweek with a cover picture showing a rather hirsute Eve). The author again refers to the work done by Allan Wilson and his team in another article titled "On the origins of Indians'', where the reader is told that all of us, humans, can trace our ancestry back to a woman who lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago - the non-Biblical Eve, if you will. Where do Indians come from? The author says we need to wait for a more in-depth study of the DNA from various indigenous tribes. One of the articles in the first book on tigers, titled "Why save the tiger?'' emphasises the need to conserve our species and life forms that cohabit this planet with us. It is a complex scenario where it is difficult to pinpoint the role and value of each species, says the author. Then there is an article on dinosaurs - were they cold-blooded or warm? The origin, morphological similarity and other factors, classify them with lizards and this would make them cold-blooded. But again, the author points out certain conflicting factors, which would suggest they were warm-blooded. All that we have today to go by are some fossils and eggs. One, therefore, needs to take a look at biology as well as geology to reconstruct the physiological and biochemical information from these remains. Geology is just one of the scientific disciplines that comes to the help of biology in piecing together available information in the area of life sciences that cut across many scientific disciplines and, as the author says in the preface to the books (the preface, word for word, is the same for both the books), are of interest even to historians. Here he quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky, the Russian-U.S. geneticist, according to whom all of biology is historical and nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.

In the title article "Swift-Tuttle and the space shuttle'' the author talks of the U.S. physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a geologist, who studied the problem of the catastrophe of 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs and most of other species. They concluded from tracer analysis that a probable cause for this mass extinction was Earth's impact with an asteroid or a comet resulting in huge fires and/ or screening of the Sun by dust. The author then goes on to tell the reader of the giant comet Swift-Tuttle which, according to some astronomers, is likely to collide with the Earth in August 2126. The topics covered in this second book include such varied ones as the mummies of Egypt, the possible role played by palaeoclimate on the process of evolution, molecular vibration and its relation to the sense of smell, endomycordial fibrosis or EMF that affects children and the work done on studying this by the Institute of Medical Sciences in Trivandrum, alcohol consumption and its effect on coronary problems and so on. One article titled "Ethnic groups and drug doses'' discusses the markedly high incidence of breast cancer in Parsi women and the studies conducted thereon at the biochemical and genetic level.

As the author sums up in the preface we are living in a truly exciting period: the sciences of genetics, anthropology and archaeology are coming together to help us find answers to questions such as where we all came from,and other issues.

C. V. SUBRAMANIAM

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