A letter to a curious high school student

 A letter to a curious high school student

Context - Science, technology and culture are ever fluctuating  during one’s formative years they can be the source of much fascination, evoking awe and joy; but also one of conflation – why and how do these entities influence intellectual discourse. This exercise is simply an attempt to collate some of my own observations during the course of my high-school and medical college years in a manner that I personally relate to.

Dear friend,

I hope your journey with knowledge is going well. I am writing from a point in my own journey with a mind of intense reminiscence. 

While we all may be immersed in our own journeys of learning, in a way, we are simply reliving humankind’s journey on Earth, the discoveries of fire, the wheel and agriculture were all driven by curiosity and yet they drove humans to progress. Particularly important are the connotations these discoveries had for society. We understand the role of agriculture – the radical notion that a seed could give rise to plants that could serve as subsistence – in the form of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’. There are some interesting parallelisms with one’s own journeys, a child often discovers through sheer luck the so-called painful kiss of fire, scorching fingers – theirs or someother’s, and endeavours to stay away from fire. Science is thus one’s attempt to rationalise the natural world as it is. An interesting lesson can be wrought from this realisation. From the thoughts that fire is dangerous or that agriculture is yielding arise the actions of avoidance and farming. But there is another layer to this, from science arises technology – the art of manipulating the natural world to better suit one’s needs. Going back to our examples, the industry of food with a baker in his tiny kitchen in revolutionary France or a Spartan vessel using Greek fire to set alight an Athenian ship all acted upon what they believed. 

But this system isn’t complete. Indeed there can be many sources of interruption. Although the Earth might seem to be flat from our own sensory experience, today we have evidence to believe it is not. The careful observations of Copernicus and Galileo served as interruptions to both scientific understanding and the meaning society drew from it. Another form of interruption would be Einstein’s conception of relativity – through astute observations, Einstein was able to elicit rationalisation of physical phenomena such as time dilation. Most geo-satellites work with this theory in mind. A sharp observation would point out the lack of linearity or any end in what seems to be an endless pool of knowledge. 

Amidst this discussion, history flashes before us a warning. There are two approaches that are detrimental when reading civilization of the past. The first is assuming that they thought as we do and that they were simply extensions of what we are now. The second is to assume that were stuporous for not thinking as we do. The former line of thought will lead us to the rather bleak conclusion that the Earth’s sphericity was always there to see, for we have grown up with the notion that the Earth is a sphere – validated by photos and globes, things that simply didn’t exist in days of yesterday. The later will lead us a state of assumption that we are live in a time when all is known to us. Of course, those who scaffolded a flat earth have fallen prey to the same error. 

My own experience with medicine has been a validation of many of the principles I’ve discussed above. Evidence in medicine is almost always circumstantial. Although much is unknown to us, it is in field of medicine that our precarious foundations are most openly exposed. Neither is the pathological basis for most diseases understood properly nor has the pharmacological basis for drug action been clearly worked out. For the earlier, we resort to hypotheses – systems that aim to explain the natural order. For instance, the monoamine and the neuroplastic hypotheses of depression, that state that depression is due to a lack of monoamine (chemical) neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity (change in neuronal networks), respectively. An integrationist approach would be to synergise the above concepts – the lack of neuroplasticity leads to a lack of monoamines. But the eventual hope for a hypothesis is for it to lead to a model – a system that lets us work with nature. For that to transpire, hypotheses must be tested. Suppose a demonstration elaborates a decrease in symptoms of depression in people who have consumed pharmacological substances acting on these pathways in relation to those who haven’t, we can empirically assert the effectiveness of the drug and produce it for mass usage. When results don’t correlate with a model it very often indicates that we must return to the drawing board and rework our hypothesis. For example, anti-histamines do not help asthmatics with their symptoms – an observation that lead us to suppose that histamine doesn’t play as important a role in the pathogenesis of asthma as we thought it did. 

Medical technology’s position in this dilemma is unique. Technology also finds its rooting in models. All technology that we use – microscopes, scanning devices and surgical implants, to name a few are explained using the same models we use to explain the diseases they are used to fight. Many of these devices help us extend our sensory perception Very often, we are forced to change the technology that we use due to inherent weaknesses in the model itself. For instance, liposuction (surgical removal of body fat) didn’t prove to be an effective treatment obesity – a realisation that lead to re-understanding of obesity itself. In many ways, medical technology underlines the adage – ‘All models are wrong, some are useful’ better than anything else. But technology can also solve such issues. In medicine, Artificial Intelligence is often touted as a technology that can preventing us from erring due to its capacity of process magnanimous amounts of data and draw usable conclusions from it. But that discussion is for another day.

I started this letter with an enquiry of your journey in light of humankind’s. With that in mind, I hope to conclude by invoking the first lines of Jaques’ monologue from Shakespeare’s ‘As You like It’  –  ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;’. Eagerly awaiting your response.

Yours lovingly

Your friend

Arjun S