Bad Branding?

Dowsing Hits Thailand

Yikes! The Thai military has purchased at least 500, and as many as 2,000, of these widgets at better than $30,000 each. Do the math. According to the brochure, they detect just about any bad stuff you can name...bombs, drugs, ivory, currency, whatever. "Poppy, cocoa, and marijuana planting areas." Detecting chocolate is nice, but what about coca, from which cocaine is derived? No mention. Hmmmmm. Distance is not an issue..."any thickness of wall can be penetrated, whether concrete, metal, brick or lead." No batteries too!

Similar devices have been used in Iraq, apparently. I'm guessing locales like Iraq and Thailand are good targets for the woo-meisters. Thailand is a world leader in woo, but dowsing has no tradition here; the device looks and feels like any other high-tech mystery box from the West, and few are aware of dowsing's very questionable history.

It was disappointing to see Thai media-darling/forensic scientist Khunying Pornthip defending the device. She gets trotted out every time there's a high-profile murder here in Thailand. Ask a Thai to play word association with her name, and the result is inevitable: "big hair."

I had assumed she was perfectly competent in her craft, but after her assessment of the glorified dowsing rod (well, it's not 100% accurate, it needs to be operated by someone in good physical condition, blah, blah, blah), I now have doubts. Having used the divining rod in the past as a means of detecting bomb residues on corpses, it seems she is now forced to defend its viability or risk humiliation and the wrath of victims' relatives. The military pu-yais ("big people") who ordered the device are in a similar predicament. If they actually recognize the error of their ways, one shouldn't expect a public retraction, but a quiet discontinuation of usage of the "GT-200."

At least in the case of the military, corruption is a reasonable assumption. Let's be generous to the generals, however, and give them the benefit of the doubt. How then, could numerous public figures claim that they've used and validated the device to their own satisfaction? Well, Buddhists (better than 90% of the Thai populace) are familiar with the power of the mind, but sometimes forget that its greatest power may be in its capacity for self-deceit. Witness a gaggle of dowsers exuding supreme confidence in their talents in a double-blinded test, performing no better than chance, and offering up the usual rationalizations (sun spots!) for their failures. It's a five part series, and highly entertaining:

Finally, here's a wonderful BBC expose of a near-identical widget. The company owner doesn't even deny that the ADE651 is, essentially, a dowsing rod.

In all seriousness, it's likely that lives are being lost over this dressed-up medieval artifact.

More on the travesty of the GT-200 here and here and here. It's no surprise to find that the purveyors of this scam have interesting relationships with the law, with the same concept reincarnating under a new name (e.g. "the MOLE", the ADE651, etc.) after the authorities clamp down.

Creating an Auspicious Environment for Biochemical Research

This is the 12th floor of the "Adulyadejwikrom" Building at Sirirat Hospital in Bangkok. Serious research is conducted here in the areas of dengue, thallasemia, and other maladies, making this scene a bit incongruous from my perspective.

Make no mistake, the goal here is to increase the level of good luck in the research facilities for the next year. The ceremony ends with the abbot touring the lab, sprinkling holy water on everyone and everything.

I gently questioned the lab director who organized the affair. Isn't this mix of science and superstition a tad odd? I didn't get a satisfactory answer, though he points out he's also organizing a weeklong meditation retreat that will be entirely devoid of superstition. He refers to meditation as a science of the self. I don't have a big problem with that, though I'm aware of various objections (e.g. in what sense are your "research" findings reproducible/falsifiable?) and would be interested to hear Acharn Pa-Thai's responses.

In fairness, if superstition is ever warranted in a science lab, this might be the place. Floors 3-6 of the building are a morgue. Students report seeing ghosts on the elevator. And floor 2 is a museum where, amongst pickled fetuses, you find the mummified remains of "See Uey", the legendary, cannibalistic, liver-eating, psycho-killer of 1940's Thailand.

Big Hand = Small Banana ???

The Seven Things You Can't Doo in a Thai Taxi

Alternatively, this post could be titled, "Just as I was about to crap in the taxi..."

In case you're wondering, image #6 is a durian fruit.

The Seductiveness of Crystals

That's one DnaC protein sticking to another DnaC protein . The dotted lines detail the interactions down to .01 Angstroms (1/1000000000000 meters). Never mind the fact that the actual data on which the image was based has a "resolution" of 2.6 Angstroms.

Your typical protein contains several thousand atoms. To generate these images, the coordinates of all these atoms must be known. That information is normally painstakingly acquired by crystallizing the protein in question, followed by X-ray analysis. There's an element of karma/luck/art involved in generating a crystal; crystallographers can regale you with tales of how they worked fruitlessly for years to coax proteins into a repeating structure, with a drop of spilt coffee proving to be the catalyst that finally gets the job done. A recent Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to an individual, Ada Yonath, who stubbornly devoted more than 20 years to obtaining her crystal.

More than 60,000 protein structures can be found at the Protein Data Bank. Human DNA only codes for a tad more than 20,000 proteins, but a crystallographer need not fear for his career. You can crystallize proteins interacting with other proteins or ligands. You can crystallize various "isoforms" of proteins. You can mutate your protein strand and recrystallize it. Once you've got the atom-by-atom coordinates in hand, your software can zoom, rotate, label, and color the image. You're an artist. And an explorer, flying over and through the ridges and chasms that might be essential to catalysis.

The work can be important. If you've got a high resolution image of a disease-related protein, it's possible to design drugs that clog it up. It's arguable, however, whether "rational drug design" has come anywhere close to living up to its early promise.

But does this sort of work deserve a Nobel? Does it push boundaries and alter paradigms? Are we talking about extraordinary acts of intellect and creativity? Or just perspicacity?

The questions above are personal, believe it or not. It was flattering to have a professor pursue my services, offering financial inducements, and even pointing out my future lab bench, currently unoccupied. I practically begged for reasons to get excited about the work. I was told of the beauty of meticulousness, the wonders of knowing a subject from the bottom up.

But what about "top down?" Synthesis, integration, binding principles, systems, dynamics, interactions?

The research in question involves a bacterial protein, Cry4a, that is presumed to form a channel in mosquito guts, causing deionization (i.e. death); "presumed" because 20 years of research in labs around the world has failed to prove the point. It would be nice, of course, to benefit humanity by wiping out disease-carrying critters, but...

*Assuming we can engineer a deadlier protein, who's to say it won't get rejected by the bacteria after, say, 1000 generations? The assumption seems to be that a deadlier protein confers greater fitness on the bacteria. Quite naive.

*Assuming a competitive population of bacteria, who's to say the mosquito won't develop resistance to our protein?

*Assuming that resistance doesn't evolve, are we clear about the environmental impact of wiping out a species of mosquitos?

These are "top down" questions. Their answers inform us of the odds that the research might actually be of benefit to humanity. I didn't like the odds. It's possible that some world-beating toxinologists could change my mind. It's surprising, however, that a number of highly respected authorities at my own institute couldn't. There are no vendettas or personal gripes being aired here. I simply wonder a bit about the real state of science in institutes around the world.

Flora and Fauna in Salaya

You can see some more images of my environs here. It's a "photobucket.com" slideshow. I strongly advise against saving pics on photobucket's incredibly counterintuitive, ad-laden website. I do it simply because that's where I've already uploaded a fair number of other pics. It's reasonable to assume flickr.com would be a better choice.

More pics to come...