Immary: November 2009

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Origin of species via natural selection

Catholics ought to embrace Charles Darwin's theory on the origin of species by means of natural selection. After all, it is a process operating at every levels of animate and inanimate world and is as obvious as the back of one's own hand. Also, it surprises me when a Christian fundamentalist while vehemently denouncing evolution as an agent of creation of life and everything else, conveniently forgets that Gregor Mendel, the "father of genetics" was an Augustinian monk. In addition, a Jesuit priest by the name Georges Maitre was responsible for what is known today as "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe. Interestingly, both these contributions strike at the very roots of origin of life and the universe we live in. These men ought to be elevated to the status of prophet, for, indeed, it is to them that God revealed the wonders of His magnificent creation.

Poem of the Month

The Dead

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats
of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

— Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room

Father, I bring thee not myself, -
That were the little load;
I bring thee the imperial heart
I had not strength to hold.

The heart I cherished in my own
Till mine too heavy grew,
Yet strangest, heavier since it went,
is it too large for you?

Emily Dickinson

Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see swallow immeidately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike,
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers
faces and darkness separates us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath

Good-Night
A latch lifting, an edged den of light
Opens across the yard. Out of the low door
They stooped into the honeyed corridor,
Then walk straight through the wall of the dark.

A puddle, cobble-stones, jambs and doorstep
Are set steady in a block of brightness.
Till she strides in again beyond her shadows
And cancels everything behind her.

Seamus Heaney

Flight

The city green steepled and calm,
words strung like beads worn close
to the skin to count and recount and
the nearest we get to heaven today
is in seeing a distant osprey
lift its wings, prepare for passage,
bear all the weight of our imagining.

Charmaine Cadeau (from what you used to wear)

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they had wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

William Butler Yeats

To a Reader or
In praise of grief

I’ve watched memory wound you.
I felt nothing but envy.
Having slept in wet meadows,
I was not through desiring.
Imagine January and the beach,
a bleached sky, gulls. And
look seaward: what is not there
is there, isn’t it, the huge
bird of the first light
arched over first waters
beyond our touching or intention
or the reasonable shore.

Robert Haas (From Praise)

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost
(One of my favorite Robert Frost poems. Many perhaps know this one by heart)

By such strange means did I sustain
A thousand starry flights in one,
Since hope of Heaven yet by none
Was ever truly hoped in vain.
Only by hope I won my way
Nor did my hope my aim belie,
Since I soared up so high, so high,
That in the end I seized my prey.

St. John of the Cross
(The last stanza from “ Other verses with divine meaning”)

Having Misidentified a Wild-Flower

A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.

Richard Wilbur
(I would like to thank Catherine Nolan @ The Alexandrian Blog for introducing me to the poems of Richard Wilbur)

Choruses from the Rock (Opening Stanza)

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

T. S. Eliot

Science and Health

Can eating chicken help reduce colon cancer? Want to know more? Read here. How about Aspirin? Find out more here. Obesity and Cancer - Old theme, new analysis.Read here. In primary cells, activated oncogenes are known to induce senescence and apoptosis. By using genome-wide RNAi screening , Michael Green’s group identifies one of the proteins responsible for this phenomenon in activated BRAF induced senescence. The protein they have identified turns out to be IGFBP7, a secreted protein of 33 kDa. Nice article! You can read or download it here. This is another article which uses large-scale siRNA screen to identify proteins involved in interesting biological events, in this case HIV-1 infection. According to this article, there are 250 or so cellular proteins that facilitate many facets of viral infection. It is another interesting article. You can read the abstract here. Full article by subscription only. A recent article by Yamanaka’s group demonstrates the feasibility of converting adult human dermal fibroblasts into pluripotent stem cell (iPS) like cells. Although, these cells have stem cell properties, they are still different from real human embryonic stem cells. These results only show a means to obtain stem cell like cells from mature dermal fibroblasts and help understand the process involved in the transition from stem cell to nonstem cell. But it is very unlikely that the cells themselves can ever be used for any regenerative therapy because of the fact that they carry retroviral vectors in which the four transcription factors are cloned in. But at least, we now know four transcription factors that play a role in maintaining the “stemcellness” of stem cells. Details here. In the heart of a tumor is a small population of multipotent, drug-resistant cells known as cancer stem cells (CSC) which are responsible for tumor growth and recurrence after therapy. These CSCs are mostly found in the tumor regions well protected from apoptotic stimuli. In neural tumors, these sites are called “vascular niches.” The idea of targeting CSCs as a critical line of offense in cancer treatment is gaining a wide acceptance in the cancer research community. Read the article here. Canadian Cancer Society News and Research Findings.Read here. A large percentage of breast cancers (70%) are estrogen dependent. Therefore, antiestrogen like tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors are successfully used for breast cancer therapy. But from time to time, these tumors develop resistance to antiestrogen therapy. This article describes the possible cause behind developing drug resistance behavior of these tumors. You can read the full article here. Bcr-abl, the fusion protein product of Philadelphia chromosome, is a key to the genesis of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). The fusion protein is a constitutively active tyrosine kinase. STI-571, an inhibitor of signal transduction, can effectively inhibit the kinase activity of bcr-abl by locking it up in an inactive confirmation. The drug can effectively treat early stage CML. However, in late stage, BCR-ABL gene undergoes mutation that destroys the binding sites for the drug thereby making it ineffective. This article describes those mutations very elegantly. For the full article click here.

Immary

Face of Man

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Because

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Origin of species via natural selection

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