Category Archives: Science and Technology

Cure Sonia – Bone Marrow Donor Needed

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cure_sonia_rai_2010.jpgWhile visiting Boston on business, I learned some shocking news this past weekend. My good friend Sonia was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML) about 10 days ago. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy. She is 24 and in urgent need of a bone marrow transplant. I am still in shock and having a hard time absorbing this. Since I have known her, I cannot imagine her as being anything other than the cheerful, always smiling, bollywood-movie-loving, happy and positive person that I have known her to be. She is an active member of the South Asian community and many may recognized her contributions as a board member of NetSAP Boston. I pray she finds a donor soon.

Team Sonia – Sonia’s brother Sumit Rai, family and friends are organizing drives today and in the next few weeks. Please take the time to help spread the word about the drives and join the NMDP registry if you have not already done so. You can visit www.curesonia.org, or visit their Facebook page.

As you may be aware from our previous posts on the topic, the National Bone Marrow Registry (NMDP) is in dire need of more ethnic donors. South Asians, as well as any minority, and especially people of mixed ethnicity are needed. Sonia is currently receiving excellent care at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, but in order to survive beyond the next few months, she requires a bone marrow transplant. Most matches occur within ethniticty and increasing the number of South Asians registered as potential bone marrow donors will help Sonia as well as many others who are searching.

Among the 7 million registered donors currently, approximately, only 2% are South Asians. Ethnic Minorities have a 30-40% chance of finding a match from the existing NMDP registry. Caucasians have an 80% chance of finding a match from the existing NMDP registry [link]. Continue reading →

Air Pollution: Is Not Flying a Solution?

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Thumbnail image for globe_west_172.jpgTech geek Anirvan Chatterjee and landscape architect Barnali Ghosh were surprised to learn that their carbon footprint was bigger than 90 percent of Americans, despite their green efforts which included living without a car. They found that air travel was to blame and challenged themselves to spend a year without flying. In words that might resonate with many desis, Chatterjee wrote about why it would be hard to give up flying, just before embarking upon the Year of No Flying project.

Growing up in a family of post-1965 transnational immigrants, our history is deeply connected with the democratization of air travel — countless flights to and from India, Canada, Nigeria, and the United States. Our stories begin and end in airports. (Last flight) Continue reading →

Nukistan!

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Drama drama drama at the Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting in New Zealand last week.

You remember that big nuclear deal between India and the US a couple of years ago, right? You know, the one where Bush gave away the whole store to secure some sort of foreign policy legacy? Well, that decision appears to be coming back to bite the US right in the nuke. China now wants to build two nuclear reactors in Pakistan. Given the lengths the US went to make sure its deal with India went through, it’s going to have a hard time objecting to this agreement without upsetting Pakistan or further alienating China.

The reason the India-US nuclear deal was a good idea, at least the way it was sold to Congress, was that the deal would promote non-proliferation by bringing India into the fold of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its monitoring and regulation. But India only agreed to this on the condition that it would split its civil nuclear program from its military nuclear program, and that only the former would be subject to inspection and regulation.

The US also pushed through an exemption in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) which allowed India to trade in nuclear material and technology even though it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Signing the NPT is a prerequisite for participation in the NSG for every country except India. This blanket exemption drew concerns from the non-proliferation crowd. Their argument was that if India was supplied with enrichment and reprocessing technology for their civilian program, there was no mechanism preventing them from using that technology for their military program.

Makes sense, right? An inspection of a facility can establish whether or not the right amount of nuclear material is there, but how can an IAEA inspector determine whether a particular reprocessing method has been duplicated in a military facility that’s off limits?

Continue reading →

Henna Banned in New Jersey!

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henna2.jpgWhat’s a Jersey Desi girl to do without her “henna tattoo”? The New Jersey Legislature today passed a bill, A940, which would prohibits application of certain temporary tattoos. (h/t inothernews). I was surprised that all hell didn’t break loose from the Jersey Desi Bridezilla population who had to rework the activity on their Mehndi night. Then I read the legislation.

Assembly Bill No. 940 prohibits body art establishments from applying temporary tattoos containing paraphenylenediamine (PPD), including “black or blue henna…

[U]nlike traditional henna which is made from an organic, plant substance, certain temporary tattoos contain additives, in some cases, PPD which can unknowingly cause permanent health concerns and scarring. Long term effects include severe dermatitis, eye irritation and tearing, asthma, gastritis, renal failure, vertigo, tremors, convulsions and coma in humans…PPD is not approved for direct application to the skin. [njleg]

Phew! Y’all can relax.The ban is only on the black henna w/ PPD, not the traditional organic mehndi made from smashing up henna leaves. Though the South Asian subcontinent henna leaves all leave a deep red dying of the skin, the traditional black henna comes from Africa and the Middle East. It turns out black henna isn’t even derived from the same plant as regular henna is.

“Black Henna” is a misnomer arising from imports of plant-based hair dyes into the West in the late 19th century. Partly fermented, dried indigo was called “black henna” because it could be used in combination with henna to dye hair black. This gave rise to the belief that there was such a thing as “black henna” which could dye skin black. Indigo will not dye skin black.[wiki]

The lesson here, Mutiny? Don’t use henna/mehndi unless it is pure and natural, the kind from the motherland. And never get yourself tattooed at one of those beach side tattoo places. Desi, please. Everything-is-Indian Uncle now has another story to add to his list. Continue reading →

The Copycat Facebook Ban

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BangladeshFlag.jpg Remember how on May 19th, the Pakistan government banned facebook? Phillygrrl wrote about how all the hoopla was over how there was one page on Facebook dedicated to the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” which was in turn a retaliation to the anti-South Park activists out there. Soon after, people in Pakistan couldn’t access YouTube (that ban was lifted a few days ago, selectively).

Well yesterday, Bangladesh totally copycatted Pakistan.

Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country’s leaders were uploaded, say reports. Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed.

A spokesman for the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) told AFP Facebook had “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s majority Muslim population” by carrying “offensive images” of Mohammed. [BBC]

I just think it’s kind of silly that that they are “officially” citing the cartoons TEN days after the actual “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” That site isn’t even up anymore. If that was really the issue, the halal-ness of the interwebs in Bangladesh, wouldn’t they have banned Facebook at the same time Pakistan did – on May 19th the day before the ‘sanctioned’ date of May 20th?

I think the real issue is that the current Bangladesh government was insulted by cartoons made about THEM. And they are using the anti-Muslim sentiment as a scapegoat. Continue reading →

Should Indians worry about this scary infographic?

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Yes. I think so. They should be absolutely terrified by what it implies

According to this graphic, India is doing pretty well in avoiding packaged food (but also eating a lot less total food…not always by choice) relative to America and some other western cultures. Yet here is the inescapable fact about where India is headed (and China as well):

After an extensive nationwide survey, China has more than doubled the estimate of its diabetic people to 92.4 million from 43.2 million in 2009, thus replacing India as the country with the maximum number of diabetics in the world.

India has 50.8 million people with diabetes.

The China study, published in New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday pushes up the global diabetes estimates from 285 million to 334.2 million.

Diabetes was almost 1.4 times more common among urban residents than rural ones, the study found, sampling 46,239 adults above the age of 20, from 14 provinces and municipalities.

“The ageing of the population, urbanisation, nutritional changes and decreasing levels of physical activity, with a consequent epidemic of obesity, have probably contributed to the rapid increase in the diabetes burden in the Chinese population,” wrote Yang Wenying, head of endocrinology, at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, who carried out the study between June 2007 and May 2008. [Link]

We Americans are likely to continue to export our food culture around the world. Or rather, countries like India and China will continue to enthusiastically import it and are probably even less equipped than us to deal with the repercussions.

Continue reading →

Working the prefrontal cortex since the Gupta Empire

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There were two stories relating to human cognition today that really had me thinking about the way we…think (how appropriate). The first involves the game of chess. You know, the game of kings invented so long ago in India:

Chess is commonly believed to have originated in North-West India during the Gupta empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as caturanga (Sanskrit: four divisions [of the military] – infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively). The earliest evidence of Chess is found in the neighboring Sassanid Persia around 600 where the game is known under the name became chatrang. [Link]

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion (the current is India’s Viswanathan Anand) has penned a brilliant (absolute must-read) essay/review of the new book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. The title of his essay could have easily been, “How I Learned to Stop Battling and Love the Computer.” It chronicles his victories over the machines, followed by his losses, followed finally by a type of brutally efficient partnership. Let the human worry about strategy and the machine about tactics.

…I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts–and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power–and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.

It was the specialists–the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts–who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play–if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations–with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon….” [Link]

Continue reading →

Maya’s Slim Chance – Bone Marrow Donor Needed

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maya.jpgHere at Sepia Mutiny, we have covered many bone marrow campaigns over the years. As you know by now, South Asian Americans have a 1:20,000 chance of finding a match in the bone marrow registry which is a stark difference to Caucasians who have an 80% chance of finding a match. To put that in terms of numbers, as of Jan ’09 there were 5,408,623 Caucasians in the donor registry, and only 139,460 South Asian donors in the registry. The mutiny has helped to publicize the the Help Vinay & Sameer campaigns, which added 25,000 new South Asian names to the national registry.

But there is a new little girl that needs our help, the precious four year old Maya Chamberlain.

In September, 4-year-old Maya Chamberlin was diagnosed with a rare blood disease known as HLH. Her chances of survival depend on finding a suitable bone marrow donor…. Maya’s mother, Dr. Mina Chamberlin, says her daughter’s illness, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, affects the immune system. [kpcc]

The reason that makes a match especially tough? She’s half desi.

The pool of potentially mixed-race donors is made even more difficult because blood relatives of patients often don’t qualify, and trying to find a volunteer with the right racial combination can be extremely tough, experts said. Marrow transplants are also more complex than those involving organs. [latimes]

> “It’s difficult with Maya because she comes from a mixed genetic background,” Chamberlin says. “I myself am from India and my husband is Caucasian — German and English descent — so the combination of the two is making it more difficult to find a match.” > > A donor’s compatibility is based on their HLA — or human leukocyte antigen — type. “And HLA is basically inherited. So the probability of finding a suitable donor is highest among people of your own race,” Chamberlin says. > >She says the chances of finding a donor are “pretty low — pretty, pretty low… But it is not hopeless. I mean, I know there is that one person out there.”[[kpcc](http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/12/27/4-year-old-girl-faces-long-odds-in-search-for-dono/)] Continue reading →

MexiDesi

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Seems like Abhi may have more in common with turban wearing LA Mayor Villaraigosa than we thought. (via Razib)

Indians and Mexicans.png

In world wide context South Asians and mestizos can be viewed as somewhat analogous; a stable admixture between West and East Eurasian elements. Of course, the “East Eurasian” ancestry of mestizos consists of the New World descendants of Paleolithic Siberians, while those of South Asians are the ancient long resident populations of that region of the world.[geneexpression]

It is kind of a surprising finding. As an activist that works in the umbrella political category of Asian American and Pacific Islander, it’s interesting to see that Houston Gujaratis have more in common with LA Mexicans than East Asians. Of course, one is a construct of political identity and the other one is purely genetics.

Still. I totally see this as potential marriage fodder for Desis who want to prove to their parents that they have more in common with their Mexican boy/girlfriend. I guess Columbus wasn’t that far off then, was he? Continue reading →