an itinerant observer

" Guys Google #crisper baby", a young colleague texted the team. At first, I didn’t realize the misspelling. In the heat of the moment (no pun intended), I thought the term ‘crisper baby’ was referring to some burn-related injury. The fact that I’m a pediatric emergency physician likely informed that pseudo-deduction.   “Not only is the victim a baby, the ‘hashtag crisper baby’ meme is even more unfortunate”, I thought. Although I wouldn’t put it past social media or tabloids to come up with such cringe-worthy titles, I was intrigued.      Whenever I’m asked by my post-millennial team to Google something, I generally comply. Likely because of my #FOMO (and for the uninitiated in such 3-4 letter acronyms, that stands for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’).   The Googling didn’t take long to make me realize the spelling error. The word was meant to be CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) , alluding to the cutting edge genomic editing technology that had taken the...

  “If you ever had to adopt a baby then whom would you settle for?” This was the question that I posed to myself recently. Not that I had to nor wanted to adopt a child. I have two of my own (biological ones, so my wife tells me), and they are more than a handful. It all started in Karachi one fine morning while I was working in the ER. A young couple had brought a two day old baby girl to me. The ER triage slip simply stated “baby adopted” as the reason for coming to the ER. I had never come across that as a presenting complaint in the ER, so my curiosity was piqued, irrespective of it being early moments of my ER shift without adequate caffeine in the system. It turned out that the baby had been picked up half an hour before, from a major orphanage in Karachi. The baby had been delivered the day before, per the orphanage staff’s speculation, and she had then been left at the doorstep of the orphanage. Although babies being abandoned there might have been a normal occurre...

Do old people just wither and quietly pass away Or do they do so with a lot of fanfare Is it a slow symphony that dies Or an orchestra that climaxes and then doesn't really end How does one distinguish the drama from the real story What is the story between the lines of a grave Prolonged, painful illness or an exit in sleep And where do memories reside The past is irrefutable, unchangeable in its existence Yet completely malleable in its interpretation Where do memories reside Are they deep within, unstirred, or do they stir up like ashes when there is a breeze How much of the present includes the past How much of it indicates the future And how much of this is known to us And then there are genes [from rambling of an itinerant ] Acknowledgment: Drafted with Alya Mian. Inspired by T.S. Eliot's 'four quartets'.  

Around the turn of the century, Y2K was ushering in a doomsday scenario. I, on the other hand, as a young physician-scientist, was quite excited. You see, I was quite confident that knowledge of our genetic heritage would be the panacea that the world was seeking. I think the lure of genes and genomes was merely an obsession for me. However, once I realized that, on a global scale, sustainable health for kids was not going to come from the deciphering of genetic codes, I had to switch my trajectory. First came the awareness that I could no longer be an indefinite graduate student. That realization was made all the more potent when Ayesha, my wife, threatened to enroll in graduate school for English Literature in lieu of her relatively better compensated psychiatry residency. In order to determine what I wanted to do, clinically and academically, I remember asking myself a few hard-hitting questions. The most crucial was: “Where can I make the most difference or have the most im...