Tag: Royal Society

Hail the Royal Society

It’s an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover when a body like the Royal Society appoints its first Brazilian member since 1871 (on May 13) and almost everyone including the appointee talks about why the Society continues to be great instead of facing it with hard questions over why it didn’t elect Brazilian scientists into its ranks for 151 years and rejecting the deceptive honour of its admission. It’s a similar story with the Nobel Prizes: no women or no non-white persons win one for decades on end, so when the first exception appears on the scene, it’s because the prizes are great – not because the scientists were perfectly able to labour without the incentives presented by the prizes and certainly not because the prizes are an assertion of colonial power.

Why don’t the Royal Society or the Nobel Prizes – and for that matter any award-giving entity in India that coasts for decades without acknowledging the work of scientists of non-Brahmin caste denominations – suffer a reputational crisis when their prejudice is spotlighted by their own feeble and frequently meagre attempts to rectify it instead of enjoying a rhetoric suffused with praise for “doing the right thing”?

Prestige-awarding institutions like the Royal Society must be torn down as a rule of thumb – and we must simultaneously also strive to move past the idea that such institutions are necessary to move the needle in a world that will ultimately only perceive another reminder that prestige is relevant and valuable. This particular brand of iconoclasm is not easier to say and significantly more not-easier to do in our era of crises, when outspoken scientific consensus is a triply valuable thing and bodies like the Royal Society are seen as being necessary to birth, hold and present that consensus to the elite cadres of both science and society – the movers and shakers, as it were. “Hail the Nobel Prizes,” we say – “Raman has won a Nobel Prize” – “the state listens to Raman” – “let’s let Raman run a science institute” – “the institute is producing good work!” – “hail the Nobel Prizes,” we repeat. For example, the new Brazilian appointee to the Royal Society, climate scientist Carlos Nobre, told Reuters: “The Royal Society is giving international recognition to the risks that the Amazon faces. It’s an enormous risk that we could lose the greatest biodiversity and the biggest tropical forest on the planet.”

But from where I’m sitting, it’s easier to feel the weight of a history that precipitated the need for a Royal Society to return to the climate scientists of Brazil the self-evident relevance of their voices – as well as an elite institution piggybacking on the urgency of the defining crisis of the Anthropocene epoch to right a wrong that should, in fairness, have destroyed it long ago. Then again, I can’t fault Nobre himself because from his point of view he has acquired access to one more pedestal – one to which no other compatriot of his has access – from which to bring the world’s attention to the ruin of the Amazon. Or maybe I do, but not Nobre himself as much as the community of all scientists for not unionising (whether or not in the traditional sense) against the arbitrary selectivism of the Royal Society, et al.[1] and their campaigns of piecemeal restitution.

[1] It inherits the problems of everything from admission to well-funded science institutes to one’s ability to publish in ‘top’ journals to appointment in senior positions at research centres.

Curious Bends – macaroni scandal, bilingual brain, beef-eating Hindus and more

1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala

“‘Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wheat flour and looks like bits of onion leaves, reedy, hollow, but white in colour.’ This paragraph appears in a piece titled: “Ta-Pi-O-Ca Ma-Ca-Ro-Ni: Eight Syllables That Have Proved Popular In Kerala”. Readers, I am not making this up. For a few years, from around 1958 to 1964, food scientists in India were obsessed with tapioca macaroni. Originally called synthetic rice, it was developed by the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) in Mysore as a remedy for the problems of rice shortage, especially in the southern states.” (4 min read, livemint.com)

2. China is using Pakistan as a place to safety test its nuclear power technology

“Pakistan’s plans to build two nuclear reactors 40 kilometres from the bustling port city of Karachi, a metropolis of about 18 million people has become a bone of contention between scientists and the government. They are to be built by the China National Nuclear Corporation. Each reactor is worth US$4.8 billion and the deal includes a loan of US$6.5 billion from a Chinese bank. These reactors have never been built or tested anywhere, not even in China. If a Fukushima or a Chernobyl-like disaster were to take place, evacuating Karachi would be impossible, says a leading Pakistani physicist. He argues that building these nuclear reactors may have significant environmental, health, and social impacts.” (6 min read, scidev.net)

3. Speaking a second language may change how you see the world

“Cognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you think since the 1940s. The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number of studies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certain features of the world. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers, for example. And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by material rather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Still, skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect cultural differences between speakers that are unrelated to language.” (4 min read, sciencemag.org)

4. Nobel-prize winning biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan named president of the Royal Society​

“Ramakrishnan grew up in India and has spent the majority of his research career in the United States, moving to the United Kingdom in 1999. He has a diverse scientific background: he switched to biology after a PhD in physics. “That breadth is something I hope will help me,” he says.” (3 min read, nature.com)

5. History is proof most Hindus never had any beef with beef

“To achieve this goal, the RSS has, among other things, turned beef into a Muslim-Hindu issue. So the ban on beef is a device to create a monolithic Hindu community? Yes. You also have to ask the question: When did the idea of not eating beef and meat become strong? Gandhi was essentially a Jain; he campaigned for cow protection as well as vegetarianism. It was Gandhi’s campaign that took vegetarianism to non-Brahmin social groups that were meat-arian. The only people who were not really influenced by Gandhi’s cow protection campaign and vegetarianism were Muslims, Christians and Dalits. If the Dalits were not affected, it was because Ambedkar immediately started a counter-campaign.” (8 min read, scroll.in)

Chart of the week

“Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking.” (4 min read, economist.com)

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