Indian Express – Close Read

A difficulty celebrating Chandrayaan 3

I’m grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29.

After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon’s south polar region, there was widespread jubilation, but I couldn’t celebrate. I felt guilty and distressed, actually, with the thought that my well-rewarded scepticism of India’s affairs these days had finally scabbed over (and back) into cynicism. Even the articles I wrote on the occasion had to pass via the desk of a colleague, who helped spruce them up with some joy and passion.

I had a few hypotheses as to the cause. One was that, by virtue of knowing what exactly happened behind the scenes, and having followed it for many years, I saw the really wow-worthy thing to be some solution to some problem with Chandrayaan 2 that, if fixed, would lead to success today. But something about it didn’t ring true.

Another that did was rooted in an anecdote I’d heard or read many years ago, I can’t recall where. There was a stand-up comic event in Bombay. During a break, the comic steps out to the side of the building and has a smoke. A short distance away, he sees some people from the audience stream out for some fresh air. A beggar approaches this group asking for money. They tell him that if he shouts BMKJ, they will give him 10 rupees. He does, and they hand him the money and walk back in. The comic (who is the narrator) then says that he doesn’t want to make this crowd laugh and leaves.

I don’t know if I have ever been a nationalist but I have been and am a patriot. In his article, Pathak berated the “muscular nationalism” fostered by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its consequences for the forms that the education, practice, and expression of science have taken in the country. In this milieu, he wrote, he couldn’t bring himself to overtly celebrate the success of Chandrayaan 3, tracing his arrival at this conclusion from the ‘first principles’ of the reactions to the mission, its “political appropriation” by the powers that be, and the unglamorous nature of work to bridge the “gap between technology as a spectacle and science as a way of life”. It is this articulation for which I’m grateful: I couldn’t find the path myself, but now I know.

Celebration isn’t for the outcomes of a single mission on one occasion. It’s for all the outcomes of a process that assimilates many impulses, driven by multiple beliefs and aspirations. Chandrayaan 3 may have been a resounding success but imagine it is one point in a process, and then take a look at what lies behind it. I see an island called ISRO, the unique consequences of India’s fortuitous history, and the miracles that have become necessary for celebration-worthy scientific success in India today.

Among the distributed sweets, the light and sounds of the firecrackers, and the torrent of applause, I sense the comedian’s jokes to ease the mind of a nation that preserves this state of affairs.

Land on the moon, feet on the earth

Yesterday was fantastic. India made a few kinds of history, when one is great enough, by autonomously landing a robotic instrument in the moon’s south polar region. Some seven hours later, it deployed a rover, bringing the Chandrayaan-3 mission’s toughest phase to a resounding close and beginning its scientific mission, significant in its own right for being the first to be undertaken in situ in this part of the earth’s natural satellite. As a colleague told me yesterday, the feat is one that we can celebrate unreservedly – an exceedingly rare thing in today’s India. That, however, still hasn’t sufficed to keep either the accidental or the deliberate misinformant quiet. I woke up this morning to several WhatsApp-borne memes proclaiming, in different ways, that the moon’s south pole and/or the far side was now India’s. The spirit of the message is obvious but that doesn’t mean it can’t be mistaken. India’s feat is to do with the moon’s south polar region; the distinction of the first autonomous robotic landing on the far side belongs to China (Chang’e 4 in 2019). But the most egregious offender today (so far) seems to be The Indian Express, whose front page is this:

We are all over the moon but let’s keep our feet on the ground: India has achieved a profound thing by getting a robotic representative on the moon’s surface, and just as we took a long road to get here, there’s a long road to go. And on this road, we should develop a habit of seeing the moon as ours – including us and our collaborators – and make sure our expressions of joy have room for the spirit of cross-border teamwork. Let’s resist casting Chandrayaan-3 as comeuppance for past slights, as the triumph of a narrowly defined self-sufficiency, or as to make a mountain out of molehill – a deceptively dangerous misstep that can quickly confuse ability for entitlement. I would much rather always celebrate the former rather than admit even a little bit of the latter. Congratulations, Chandrayaan-3, and congratulations, ISRO! It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the events of August 23, 2023 – but it’s still possible.

With Gyanvapi article, Abhinav Prakash Singh does logic wapsi

The national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, Abhinav Prakash Singh, published an article on May 22 on the Gyanvapi mosque issue that is from start to finish an exercise in verbal sophistry. But while we have come to expect such nonsense from functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party, I was shocked to see this coming from Indian Express. (Some of my friends weren’t, so I am probably behind the curve here.)

Singh’s argument is not concerned with the historical facts of the case (many of which are gathered here) but with the people calling Gyanvapi a “controversy” hiding behind secularism, which according to him was developed to separate the state only from Abrahamic religions, and that the faux-controversy should nonetheless be allowed to blow through in favour of Hindus because the left is only resorting to “political rhetoric, academic obfuscation and chicanery”, and not because the right doesn’t seem concerned about the burden of proof. This is a defence of malice on the grounds of what it is not (not anti-national, not Islamic, not western, not leftist, not scholarly) over what it is (proofless, perfidious, communal). Oh, what it is also not is violent and riotous, which, in Singh’s telling, the protests against the farm laws and the CAA respectively were.

A national newspaper that believes it’ i’s okay to amplify lies can’t be on the side of democracy. And while India may be far from a perfect democracy at the moment, its institutions and civil society must still maintain their democratic tendencies, especially in the spirit defined by the constitution. This is more important than to be perfectly democratic at every moment, which is obviously not possible. Challenges will arise and there will be failures, and that is not an implicitly bad thing. When we tend to the best of our abilities, that is good enough. But a democratic nation will lose that character if we altogether stop aspiring in that direction and begin to admit exceptions to favour a political agenda and/or personal gain. It will also lose that character if we don’t employ common sense.

It will always be a virtue to be more informed (with reasonable exceptions), to keep learning and to value the methods by which we acquire knowledge and establish facts. One popular technique for this, standing on the deceptively simple foundation of logic, is called science – and in most democratic societies today, science and its exponents occupy a place of pride. But the unbridled application of science to solving society’s problems is not a good thing. Such overreach, called scientism but also encompassing hard-line rationalism, attempts to use science to solve problems that its methods and principles were never designed to solve, and eventually produces outcomes that subvert the proper functioning of a democracy in favour of a scientistic or falsely meritocratic agenda.

This said, scientism is not the only form in which science can get in the way of a functional democracy. Bharatiya Janata Party members’ claims that Ayurveda, yoga, the Vedas, the entangled Hindu state-culture-religion and whatever else anticipated and solved advanced problems that modern natural as well as social sciences still fumble with come first to mind. Ancient India’s feats, in the party’s telling, are a demonstration of its immense prowess and to which we must bow your heads without question. But the evidence for these claims is always, without exception, unfalsifiable: that which can neither be proved nor, more importantly, disproved.

This may be a carefully designed strategy at work but that doesn’t mean we’re obliged to recognise it as one. To everyone who has been to high school and studied a little bit of logic and set theory, it’s a blooper, and hopefully also a reminder that democracy can and is regularly undermined by our being okay with letting bloopers pass. For example, Abhinav Prakash Singh’s article is rife with pleas to let the Gyanvapi controversy swing in favour of the right-wing, each based on the premise that “what is not offensive is therefore good”. This is the fallacy of affirming the disjunct. It goes like this:

The left manufactured the Gyanvapi controversy because it has proof or it claims the supremacy of Islam.
The left is anti-Hindu and pro-Islam.
Therefore the left has no proof.

Does it make sense to you? It shouldn’t. It’s just how empty of meaning and substance Singh’s article is. The affirmation of the disjunct might tempt you to ask yourself whether there is something he knows that you don’t. Don’t give in; instead, ask whether there is anything rather than nothing at the heart of his argument. Don’t let his claim pass unchecked; don’t read it and believe that Singh may have a point. He and his colleagues seldom do, and prefer instead the use of kettle logic, as demonstrated in the opening lines of a recent article by Apoorvanand: “Who could have thought that an argument for syncretism and the blurry nature of culture can be used to first enter the religious or sacred places of non-Hindu communities and then lay claim over them?” Most of all, read Singh’s article and conclude, because Singh himself forces us to, that his remarks are foolish. All he has are big words wrapped around a statement that can’t possibly make sense.

Hat-tip to Jahnavi Sen

Press releases and public duty

From ‘Science vs Marketing’, published on In The Dark, on May 20, 2022:

… there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead of informing and/or educating the public. Press releases about scientific research nowadays rarely make any attempt at accuracy – they are just designed to get the institution concerned into the headlines. In other words, research is just a marketing tool.

What astrophysicist and blogger Peter Coles writes here is very true. It is not a recent phenomenon but it hasn’t been widely acknowledged either, especially in the community of journalists. I had reported in 2016 on a study by researchers at the Universities of Cardiff and Wollongong that concluded that university press releases bloated with hype don’t necessarily result in reports in the media that are also bloated with hype. The study was mooted in part by an attempt to find if there was a relationship between the two locations of hype: in press releases and news reports. The study’s finding was a happy one because it indicated that science journalists at large were doing their jobs right, and were not being carried away by the rubbish that universe press offices often printed.

But this said, the study also highlighted the presence of hype in science news reports and which I have also blogged about on many occasions. It typically exists in two contexts: when journalists turn into stenographers and print press releases either as is or with superficial rephrasing, and when journalists themselves uncritically buy into the hype. I find the former to be more forgivable in the Indian context in particular because there are many hapless science journalists here: journalists who are actually generalists, not bound to any particular beat, and whose editors (or their editors’ bosses) have forced them to write on topics with which they are not at all familiar (I strongly suspected this bizarre article in Indian Express – while not being based on a press release of any sort – to be a good example of some sort of editorial pressure). Such a failure reflects to my mind the state of Indian mainstream journalism more than Indian science journalism, the best versions of which are still highly localised to a single handful of outlets.

The latter – of science journalists willfully buying into the hype – is a cardinal sin, more so when it manifests among journalists who should self-evidently know better, as with Pallab Ghosh of the BBC. University press releases affect the former group more, and not the likes of Pallab Ghosh, although there are exceptional cases. Journalists of the former group are more populous and are also employed by larger, wealthier newsrooms with audiences orders of magnitude larger than those that have adopted a more critical view of science. As a result, bad claims in bad press releases crafted by university press offices often reach more people than articles that properly interrogate those claims. So in addition to Coles’s charge that universities are increasingly concerned with “income”, “profit” and “marketing” over “education and research”, I’d add that universities that publish such press releases have also lost sight of their duty to the publics, and would rather be part of the problem.

Super-spreads exist, but do super-spreaders?

What does the term ‘super-spreader’ mean? According to an article in the MIT Tech Review on June 15, “The word is a generic term for an unusually contagious individual who’s been infected with disease. In the context of the coronavirus, scientists haven’t narrowed down how many infections someone needs to cause to qualify as a superspreader, but generally speaking it far exceeds the two to three individuals researchers initially estimated the average infected patient could infect.”

The label of ‘super-spreader’ seems to foist the responsibility of not infecting others on an individual, whereas a ‘super-spreader’ can arise only by dint of an individual and her environment together. Consider the recent example of two hair-stylists in Springfield, Missouri, who both had COVID-19 (but didn’t know it) even as they attended to 139 clients over more than a week. Later, researchers found that none of the 139 had contracted COVID-19 because they all wore masks, washed hands, etc.

Hair-styling is obviously a high-contact profession but just this fact doesn’t suffice to render a hair-stylist a ‘super-spreader’. In this happy-making example, the two hair-stylists didn’t become super-spreaders because a) they maintained personal hygiene and wore masks, and b) so did the people in their immediate environment.

While I couldn’t find a fixed definition of the term ‘super-spreader’ on the WHO website, a quick search revealed a description from 2003, when the SARS epidemic was underway. Here, the organisation acknowledges that ‘super-spreading’ in itself is “not a recognised medical condition” (although the definition may have been updated since, but I doubt it), and that it arises as a result of safety protocols breaking down.

“… [in] the early days of the outbreak …, when SARS was just becoming known as a severe new disease, many patients were thought to be suffering from atypical pneumonia having another cause, and were therefore not treated as cases requiring special precautions of isolation and infection control. As a result, stringent infection control measures were not in place. In the absence of protective measures, many health care workers, relatives, and hospital visitors were exposed to the SARS virus and subsequently developed SARS. Since infection control measures have been put in place, the number of new cases of SARS arising from a single SARS source case has been significantly reduced. When investigating current chains of continuing transmission, it is important to look for points in the history of case detection and patient management when procedures for infection control may have broken down.”

This view reaffirms the importance of addressing ‘super-spreads’ not as a consequence of individual action or offence but as the product of a set of circumstances that facilitate the rapid transmission of an infectious disease.

In another example, on July 21, the Indian Express reported that the city of Ahmedabad had tested 17,000 ‘super-spreaders’, of which 122 tested positive. The article was also headlined ‘Phase 2 of surveillance: 122 super-spreaders test positive in Ahmedabad’.

According to the article’s author, those tested included “staff of hair cutting-salons as well as vendors of vegetables, fruits, grocery, milk and medicines”. The people employed in all these professions in India are typically middle-class (economically) at best, and as such enjoy far fewer social, educational and healthcare protections than the economic upper class, and live in markedly more crowded areas with uneven access to transportation and clean water.

Given these hard-to-escape circumstances, identifying the people who were tested as ‘super-spreaders’ seems not only unjust but also an attempt by the press in this case as well as city officials to force them to take responsibility for their city’s epidemic status and preparedness – which is just ridiculous because it criminalises their profession (assuming, reasonably I’d think, that wilfully endangering the health of others around you during a pandemic is a crime).

The Indian Express also reported that the city was testing people and then issuing them health cards – which presumably note that the card-holder has been tested together with the test result. Although I’m inclined to believe the wrong use of the term ‘super-spreader’ here originated not with the newspaper reporter but with the city administration, it’s also frustratingly ridiculous that the people were designated ‘super-spreaders’ at the time of testing, before the results were known – i.e. super-spreader until proven innocent? Or is this a case of officials and journalists unknowingly using two non-interchangeable terms interchangeably?

Or did this dangerous mix-up arise because most places and governments in India don’t have reason to believe ‘high-contact’ is different from ‘super-spreader’?

But be personal and interpersonal hygiene as they may, officials’ use of one term instead of the other also allows them to continue to believe there needn’t or shouldn’t be a difference either. And that’s a big problem because even as the economically middle- and lower-classes may not be able to access better living conditions and amenities, thinking there’s no difference between ‘high-contact’ and ‘super-spreader’ allows those in charge to excuse themselves from their responsibilities to effect that difference.

Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019

At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; listed below). Most of our hits don’t belong to this genre, but quite a few do – enough for us to believe that these issues aren’t as esoteric as they appear to be in day-to-day conversations.

Science communication is becoming more important in India and more people are taking to it as a career. As a result, the visibility of science stories in the press has increased. Scientists are also using Facebook and Twitter to voice their views, whether on the news of the day or to engage in debates about their field of work. If you are an English-speaker with access to the internet and a smartphone, you are quite unlikely to have missed these conversations.

Most popular articles of 2019

The Sciences

Health

Environment

Space

Education

Our choice

The state has become more involved with the R&D establishment, although these engagements have been frequently controversial. In such a time, with so many public institutions teetering on the brink, it is important we ensure science doesn’t become passively pressed into legitimising actions of the state but rather maintains a mutually beneficial relationship that also strengthens the democracy. It is not the prerogative of scientists alone to do this; we must all get involved because the outcomes of science belong to all of us.

To this end, we must critique science, scientists, their practices, our teachers and research administrators, forest officers, conservationists and environmental activists, doctors, nurses, surgeons and other staff, members of the medical industry, spaceflight engineers and space lawyers, rules that control prices and access, examinations and examiners, and so forth. We must question the actions and policies of everyone involved in this knowledge economy. Ultimately, we must ask if our own aspirations are in line with what we as a people expect of the world around us, and science is a part of that.

It would be remiss to not mention the commendable job some other publications have been doing vis-à-vis covering science in India, including The Hindu, The Telegraph, The Print, Mongabay, Indian Express, Dinamalar, etc. Their efforts have given us the opportunity to disengage once in a while from the more important events of the day to focus on stories that might otherwise have never been read.

This year, The Wire Science published stories that interrogated what duties academic and research institutions have towards the people whose tax-money funds them, that discussed more inclusivity and transparency because only a more diverse group of practitioners can ask more diverse questions, and that examined how, though science offers a useful way to make sense of the natural order, it doesn’t automatically justify itself nor is it entitled to the moral higher-ground.

The overarching idea was to ask questions about the natural universe without forgetting that the process of answering those questions is embedded in a wider social context that both supports and informs scientists’ practices and beliefs. There is no science without the scientists that practice it – yet most of us are not prepared to consider that science is as messy as every other human endeavour and isn’t the single-minded pursuit of truth its exponents often say it is.

In these fraught times, we shouldn’t forget that science guided only by the light of logic produces many of the reasons of state. The simplest way science communication can participate in this exercise, and not just be a mute spectator, is by injecting the scientist back into the science. This isn’t an abdication of the ideal of objectivity, even though objectivity itself has been outmoded by the advent of the irrational, majoritarian and xenophobic politics of nationalism. Instead, it is a reaffirmation that you can take science out of politics but that you can’t take politics out of science.

At the same time, the stories that emerge from this premise aren’t entirely immune to the incremental nature of scientific progress. We often have to march in step with the gentle rate at which scientists invent and/or discover things, and the similar pace at which the improvements among them are available to everyone everywhere. This fact offers one downside and one up: it is harder for our output to be noticed in the din of the news, but by staying alert to how little pieces of information from diverse lines of inquiry – both scientific and otherwise, especially from social science – can team up with significant consequence, we are better able to anticipate how stories will evolve and affect the world around them.

We hope you will continue to read, share and comment on the content published by The Wire Science. We have also been publicising articles from other publications and by bloggers we found interesting and have been reproducing (if available) on our website and on our social media platforms in an effort to create an appreciation of science stories beyond the ones we have been able to afford.

On this note: please also donate a sum comfortable to you to support our work. Even an amount as little as Rs 200 will go a long way.

The Wire
December 26, 2019

TIFR’s superconductor discovery: Where are the reports?

Featured image: The Meissner effect: a magnet levitating above a superconductor. Credit: Mai-Linh Doan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

On December 2, physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) announced an exciting discovery: that the metal bismuth becomes a superconductor at a higher temperature than predicted by a popular theory. Granted the theory has had its fair share of exceptions, the research community is excited about this finding because of the unique opportunities it presents in terms of learning more, doing more. But yeah, even without the nuance, the following is true: that TIFR physicists have discovered a new form of superconductivity, in the metal bismuth. I say this as such because not one news outlet in India, apart from The Wire, reported the discovery, and it’s difficult to say it’s because the topic was too hard to understand.

This was, and is, just odd. The mainstream as well as non-mainstream media in the country are usually quick to pick up on the slightest shred of legitimate scientific work and report it widely. Heck, many news organisations are also eager to report on illegitimate research – such as those on finding gold in cow urine. After the embargo on the journal paper lifted at 0030 hrs, I (the author of the article on The Wire) remained awake to check if the story had turned out okay – specifically, to check if anyone had any immediate complaints about its contents (there were two tweets about the headline and they were quickly dealt with). But then I ended up staying awake until 4 am because, as much as I looked on Google News and on other news websites, I couldn’t find anyone else who had written about it.

Journal embargoes aren’t new, nor is it the case that journalists in India haven’t signed up to receive embargoed material. For example, the multiple water-on-Mars announcements and the two monumental gravitational-waves discoveries were all announced via papers in the journal Science, and were covered by The Hindu, The Telegraph, Times of India, Indian Express, etc. And Science also published the TIFR paper. Moreover, the TIFR paper wasn’t suppressed or buried in the embargoed press releases that the press team at Science sends out to journalists a few days before the embargo lifts. Third, the significance of the finding was evident from the start; these were the first two lines of the embargoed press release:

Scientists from India report that pure Bismuth – a semimetal with a very low number of electrons per given volume, or carrier concentration – is superconducting at ultralow temperatures. The observation makes Bismuth one of the two lowest carrier density superconductors to date.

All a journalist had to do was get in touch with Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, the lead author of the paper as well as the corresponding author, to get a better idea of the discovery’s significance. From my article on The Wire:

“People have been searching for superconductivity in bismuth for 50 years,” Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, the leader of the TIFR group, told The Wire. “The last work done in bismuth found that it is not superconducting down to 0.01 kelvin. This was done 20 years ago and people gave up.”

So, I’m very curious to know what happened. And since no outlets apart from The Wire have picked the story up, we circle back to the question of media coverage for science news in India. As my editor pointed out, the major publications are mostly interested in stuff like an ISRO launch, a nuclear reactor going critical or an encephalitis outbreak going berserker when it comes to covering science, and even then the science of the story itself is muted while the overlying policy issues are played up. This is not to say the policies are receiving undeserving coverage – they’re important, too – but only that the underlying science, which informs policy in crucial ways, isn’t coming through.

And over time this disregard blinds us to an entire layer of enterprise that involves hundreds of thousands of our most educated people and close to Rs 2 lakh crore of our national expenditure (total R&D, 2013).