On Gaiman and a logic of compassion

That Vulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.

One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.

In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”

It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.

Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.

I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.

In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.

To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.

Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.

Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.

Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.

Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:

Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”

Later:

When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”

…

Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.

More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.

Later:

Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.

While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”

You’ve got to look.

Posting stats — 2024

When I joined The Wire in 2015, the average length of my blog posts increased from around 700 words to around 850 words, and over time to 1,000 words. This wasn’t forced so much as a natural reflection of the average length of pieces that worked on The Wire, also around 1,000 words. The trend held through 2018 and 2019 as well: the average post length dipped in these years because I published a very large number of posts and many of them were short, vignette-like. The same ‘natural forcing’ happened when I joined The Hindu in January 2023, with the average blog post length matching what worked at my workplace. I don’t understand exactly how this happens but I’m glad that it does.

On a related note, I recently discovered this amusing snippet in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969) by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero. Now I like to imagine I keep writing to prevent the monkey from drinking whatever is left of the ink…

New science pages in The Hindu

The Hindu has a new print product out called ‘Surf & Dive’ (S&D), whose first edition the editor Suresh Nambath and MP Shashi Tharoor launched at the group’s ‘Lit for Life’ event in Chennai on January 18. We’ve been working on this for quite some time and are thrilled it’s finally out. S&D will be fortnightly with 76 pages, priced fully — without any part of it being paid for by ads — at Rs 99 per edition. It will present long-form reads on a variety of topics. Each edition will also feature a special cover story: the first one is an extensive analysis of what the world can expect during Trump 2.0.

One of the topics is science — and in fact it’s the single largest section in S&D, accounting for around 20 pages in each edition, around 24 if I include health. Since which pieces make it to the printed edition is a function of quality alone, I’m hoping to expand the room for science journalism in S&D over time. I’m already given to understand The Hindu’s science journalism output is among the highest in the country; I also know the diversity of topics is fantastic and that science-related articles already enjoy a lot of breathing space online and in print, commensurate with audience engagement. S&D expands this place of pride.

I’m sharing some of the pages from the first edition below. Get your copy here.

Pick up your copy here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Hindu’s science and environment sections, please write to mukunth dot v at thehindu dot co dot in.

The news exists to inform, not to educate

I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going to disagree with my reading. The letter is entitled ‘Beyond misalignment of science in the news and in schools’.

What scientists want to get out of science journalism is not the same as what journalists want to get out of journalism. One symptom of this confusion — which is also what I’m disagreeing with the letter about — is that the authors of the letter use the terms “science journalism”, “science writing”, and “science communication” interchangeably. They’re really three distinct enterprises with distinct purposes. Science writing is a subset of science communication and science communication isn’t science journalism.

Science communication is concerned with faithfully communicating the structures and practices of science and their outcomes. Science journalism on the other hand is a branch of journalism focusing on science, which is as much about scientific ideas as the social, political, economic, demographic, etc. dimensions of science as well.

Importantly, science isn’t at the centre of the universe of science journalism: as with the other branches of journalism, public interest is. This means the object of science journalism is the public understanding of science — including its demands of governments, place in society, effect on public welfare, and so on, read together with our constitutional ideals, principles of justice and humanitarianism, the law of the land, and so on. It also includes scientific ideas but I think it’d be more useful if scientists understood the clear elucidation of those ideas is the beginning, not the end, of science journalism’s practice.

Saying we have a problem because the practice of science journalism somewhere by specific people hasn’t conveyed what scientists would like to have conveyed on that topic — as the authors of the letter write — is like complaining a film journalist didn’t review a film exactly how the director would have liked or a business journalist didn’t assess the prospects of a company in line with its shareholders’ expectations. Here’s a particularly disagreeable expression of this notion from the letter:

Stakeholders of science communication and education can learn from each other and address the misalignment of science in the news and in schools.

The news exists to inform, not to educate. I find the conflation so disagreeable because, considered cumulatively, news determines whether the education we’re providing/receiving is adequate or if it leaves students out of step with the way the world works. To belabour the point: education is the controlled dissemination of knowledge synchronised with the psychological and political development of society’s members while journalism, whose product is news, is a “history of now”*, capable of surprising us by virtue of being a record of the world’s shared-lived reality, i.e. something we don’t control as much as effect together.

On a somewhat related note, the letter begins by invoking Carl Sagan’s comment 40 years ago that newspapers ought to have science columns as often as they have astrology columns — which strikes me as a very convenient example that says nothing about what the study described in the letter is concerned with: how the press covers science. As the excerpt from the letter below indicates, Sagan’s problem is currently outdated: the press, mainstream or otherwise, covers science today to a much greater degree than it did in his time. It also covers a greater variety of topics. Thanks to the lower costs of publishing on the internet (as opposed to newspapers, which the letter is particularly concerned with), many magazines focused on specific topics have survived for longer than they would have if they were restricted to the printed medium.

… how newspapers projected the nature of science to the public during the [COVID-19] pandemic and on what aspects of science did they focus remain questions. To address such questions, we investigated 1520 news articles from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom for their coverage of different aspects of science during the omicron variant phase. Our analysis was guided by a broad account of science that includes the cognitive (i.e., thinking and reasoning), the epistemic (i.e., knowledge and methods), the social (i.e., values and norms), and the institutional (i.e., organizations, politics, and economics) aspects. An underlying assumption of our analysis was that public understanding of science would be better served through a holistic coverage of science that does not miss out on vital elements of the scientific enterprise. For example, although scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

This said, the conceptual framework the researchers developed to analyse the scientific contents of the four newspapers and their 1,520 articles — especially once it’s shorn of its relationship with science education — could be useful for science journalists to understand how their priorities may have ‘drifted’ during the pandemic, the consequences of their time-varying access to experts and/or expertise in different areas, and the place and value of the (free) press during public crises.

The overall findings from our study showed that the social and institutional aspects of science were emphasized to a greater extent than the cognitive and the epistemic aspects in all the newspapers. When we unpacked each aspect to examine the details, different patterns emerged. For example, within the institutional aspects, the political dynamics of science were covered to a greater extent in all newspapers than any other aspect. Some of the social aspects were downplayed in all newspapers. There was hardly any coverage of scientific ethos that would capture scientific norms. … Likewise, social aspects of science that involve peer review processes in the validation of scientific knowledge were mentioned to a limited extent in all newspapers. When we examined the cognitive and epistemic aspects, we observed that there was hardly any reference to scientific methods.

… in a related study in which we used the same sample of newspapers and focused on nonpharmaceutical interventions, our findings suggested that it was neither the number of COVID-19 news articles nor the actual number of cases and deaths, but the treatment in newspapers of specific aspects of science, particularly scientific knowledge and methods, that was associated with mobility change during the pandemic. The way that newspapers discuss epidemics may potentially influence changes in human mobility, a key factor in containing the spread of infectious diseases.

I’m also gladdened by scientists’ interest in such exercises and hope they engage directly with journalists to develop conceptual frameworks that aren’t susceptible to misunderstandings of what science as well as journalists are or aren’t capable of. For example, here’s a short excerpt from a conversation I’d had last year with IISER Bhopal philosopher Varun Bhatta about the problems with invoking ideas from philosophy in a journalistic article, which I think is also implicated in the letter’s authors’ argument that while “scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.”

… all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all. …

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need … to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now … If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

Against this background, in fact, it will be useful if scientists’ efforts to improve science education — by examining what students are taught and how that relates to the “public understanding of how science works” and its effects on people’s choices — focused instead on the genesis, constitution, and evolution of public interest. This is because the public interest, apart from railroading what narratives ought (or ought not) to be present in the news, has a strong influence on which combination of business models and ideologies a news publisher can adopt in order to have both a persistent readership and a sustainable revenue stream.

* As a professor of journalism once put to me.

The fever dream of ‘technological sovereignty’

I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off.

I found on LinkedIn that “Industrial47” is a fund with the aim of “backing the forerunners of India’s Industrial Revolution”. I must say it’s quite dubious to read about a country-specific “industrial revolution” more than two centuries into a global post-industrial era. But maybe historical accuracy isn’t the point here so much as the josh elicited by those words. By this time, another member of the group had pointed out that all of India’s nuclear tests had been underground and that the one in the image depicts an American test.

Where technology meets people

According to its official website, Industrial47 currently funds companies developing technologies of the future. Why then did it have the image of a nuclear weapon going off? And why is there to be an Indian “industrial revolution”? *scrolls down the website* Here’s an answer — what looks like a mission statement. Let me annotate it.

We believe India’s moment is now.

Okay.

Our engineers aren’t just coding software anymore – they’re designing satellites, building robots, revolutionising agriculture, reimagining defence and rethinking energy.

There are five items listed here. The first two are factually accurate, the last two are unfalsifiable, and the third one is misleading. There’s no agricultural revolution. Let’s talk when it happens.

They’re tackling challenges that will define the next century of human progress.

Okay.

The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives.

The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.

It’s not clear where “here” is, but okay. Also there’s a grammatical problem: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons” seems to say the problems will ripple across eons, not the solutions.

This is more than a story of one nation’s rise. This is about humanity’s next giant leap.

…

When software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms – therein the future is forged.

And Industrial India will build out the next century.

See, now there’s a problem.

Since listening to a talk by Gita Chadha in 2020, I’ve been wary of the idea of “genius”. Among other things, I’ve noticed that there aren’t nearly as many “geniuses” in the social sciences and humanities as there are in the natural sciences. All these enterprises are littered with very difficult problems waiting to be solved but the idea of “genius” — as and when it is invoked — seems to apply only to those in the natural sciences. Even in the popular imagination, a “child prodigy” is expected to become a gifted mathematician or scientist, not a gifted poet or anthropologist. Great intellectual ability is preordained to be devoted to problems in science. Sometimes I amuse myself with the idea that problems in the social sciences and humanities simply overwhelm this “genius”.*

If the “future” of a country is to be “forged” at the moment “when software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms”, and without room for where technologies meet people — which technologies, which people, when, how — it sounds like a project that expects the socio-economic and the political pieces of the “future” to fall in place in accordance with the engineering goals alone.

You’re reading it wrong, you say. The fund only claims the future will also be forged in the solutions to engineering problems. We shouldn’t overlook these problems. I reply: Are you sure? Because I don’t see a fund to solve problems like increasing people’s trust in EVMs, changing the government’s mind on MRPs for farmers or ensuring machines, not people, clean sewers (and I mean everywhere and in practice, not just in isolated pilot projects). How about putting the best minds together to work on the problem of developing a socio-political ideology to ultimately restore a politics of dignity and common welfare? It’s nasty, arduous, wicked work but it’s also the ultimate challenge — one that, if it succeeds, would obviate the need for most of these other interventions. But if you’d rather begin with a specific one: did you know there still isn’t a smokeless stove for rural India’s millions, leaving the country the world’s largest consumer of fuelwood for household use? Here’s a summary of Shankar Nair’s pertinent comment in The Hindu in February 2023 by ChatGPT; I hope it encourages you to read the whole thing:

The launch of Indian Oil Corporation’s solar cook-stove at India Energy Week 2023 casts a harsh light on India’s ongoing efforts to transform household energy consumption. While promoted as a low-carbon innovation poised to reach three crore households and save costs, its steep price of ₹15,000 raises concerns about accessibility. This initiative echoes past efforts like the National Physical Laboratory’s solar cooker in the 1950s and the 1980s’ “improved chulhas” program, both of which failed due to poor design, high costs, and ineffective implementation despite government subsidies. The historical parallels underscore a recurring gap between state-led energy innovations and practical adoption, as well as the lack of focus on improving rural incomes, which strongly influence energy choices.

This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.

Social ignorance is social harm

Projects that offer new technological solutions these days to old problems almost never account for their social dimensions. They are instead left to the state. Isn’t this cynical? Last year’s controversy about using satellite data to track farm fires offers another good example — as does the overarching endeavour to stamp these fires out. When a new project starts up, it may advance the technology, have some companies make money, and they all move on. The socio-political and socio-economic needles almost never move. The problem of scale matters as well because of the financial implications inherent to the economic relationships between people and their technologies. At this stage of development, it is hard to give every new scheme and fund the benefit of the doubt when it ignores the question of minimising social harm and maximising social welfare. In fact, it seems like an expedient exclusion.**

Air-purifiers come to mind. Researchers have found links between air pollution on one hand and biological and psychological development on the other. (Update, 9.10 am on January 15, 2024: Nature has just published a news feature entitled ‘Air pollution and brain damage: what the science says’.) In New Delhi (or any city with foul air for that matter), clean air is becoming increasingly vouchsafed for those with air-purifiers, which cost a good deal of money, require constant power supply, and of course owners that can pay these bills. The better and the more numerous the air-purifiers around you, the cleaner the air around you is, and the lower your risk of impaired biological and/or psychological development. Over time, people that can afford these living conditions — typically the “upper class” and, almost inevitably, “upper caste” lot — accumulate the benefits of clean air whereas those that can’t accumulate the ill-effects, and thus the gap between their fortunes slowly but inexorably widens. Every time the AQI crosses some headline-worthy threshold, New Delhi breaks out the “smog towers” and the “mist cannons” and home-appliance companies advertise newfangled air-conditioners and air-purifiers whereas state-led attempts to move towards a future in which no one needs air-purifiers flop. If I’m cynical to doubt initiatives like Industrial47, what would you call this?

Technologisation isn’t implicitly virtuous: to succeed in the fullest sense of improving the quality of life of all Indians, it needs specific social and political conditions as well. “1947 marked our political independence, 2047 will mark our technological sovereignty,” Rahul Seth, the person behind the Industrial47 fund and “an Infantry Officer with the Indian Army Reserves” with the rank of major, wrote in a LinkedIn post (whose card displayed the nuke test). His comment and its rapturous reception assume a clean break between political and technological achievement when in fact there’s no such thing.

Indeed, the comment is reminiscent of China’s rise as a “scientific superpower”. Part of this supposed achievement is founded on the slew of sophisticated and expensive scientific experiments it has executed, often in collaboration with other countries; its accelerating space programme; and its rapid industrialisation of the energy sector. The country is now planning to build the world’s largest hydroelectric-power dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it subsequently enters India. Until this new dam takes shape, China’s Three Gorges dam will continue to hold the torch of physical magnitude. I hope by now the dangers of building dams in the Himalaya should be clear enough to discourage unbridled enthusiasm for projects of this nature. This said, many have marvelled at the Three Gorges dam and what they claim it says about China’s ability to plan and execute such projects: as if flawlessly.

But the country’s surveillance and censorship apparatus hampers us from knowing how people on the ground suffered as they were forced to make way for the monstrous facility. Attesting to such concerns are anecdotes that have managed to escape plus informed scholarship (see here and here, for example). Frankly, I prefer the amount of friction local movements in India have brought to bear on new “development” projects in the country. Friction is good: it ensures project proponents think twice about what they’re doing if they already haven’t. And increasingly often, they haven’t, and why should they when the current national government seems to be doing its damnedest to dilute the friction? The LinkedIn post goes: “You can be the right person, in the right place, at the right time – and yet have a few key pieces missing. Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici. Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore. Chandragupta Maurya had Chanakya.”* To this I’d add: India once had friction, then squandered it.

When do we become scared?

The quip about “technological sovereignty” rankles in this regard. On any day ‘sovereignty’ is a powerful word, not one to be invoked in vain. Here, the term fantasises a future in which technology reigns supreme, but its framing also leaves open the question of India’s place in the comity of nations, which the country has worked hard to attain, continues to build on even today, and will for the foreseeable future. Recall that obnoxious piece on NASA Watch where a former JPL science-worker called NASA’s decision to downsize JPL’s workforce — due in part to budget overruns by the Mars Sample Return mission — the “fall of a civilisation”. It was reckless fear-mongering: among other things, NASA, and the US by extension, are currently more beneficiaries of an international collaboration than patrons of the spacefaring world. “In this milieu, harping on sole leadership because it’s the ‘American way’,” as the science-worker insisted it was, “is distasteful” (source). In the same vein, consider the example of ISRO’s forthcoming space station and Indian-on-the-moon plans. Its scientists and engineers are working hard but what are they working towards? Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued orders from on high to ISRO to build the ‘Bharatiya Antariksh Station’ by year X and land an Indian on the moon by year Y. And then what? We wait for the next diktat?

Imagine a future 50 years from now when it’s possible there are a few space stations in orbit around Earth and maybe even the moon, and when it’s plausibly (and relatively) more affordable, and not just in economic terms, to send people to stay and work there than to build a station of one’s own. Imagine if India owned and operated one of these stations instead of Indians having to lease time on another, you say. I reply: Sounds good, but where’s the cost-benefit analysis to this plan? Because unless you can demonstrate the benefit, we’re riding the coattails of speculation here and, importantly, you’re motivated by little more than the idea of Indian leadership rather than a proof of leadership de facto.

It’s reminiscent in turn of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955: it was chaired by Homi Bhabha, a representative from India, then a country that didn’t have nuclear power of its own. Conferences are not countries, you say. And leadership doesn’t demand “steel”, “craft” or “atoms”, I reply. This is in fact what the comity of nations allows us: leadership in various forms, and freedom from the tunnel vision that condemns the country to just one. The aspiration to “technological sovereignty” rankles specifically because, taken together, it offers one pointless pinnacle at the expense of others, and without the requisite justification of its presumed supremacy.

The image of the nuclear weapon slips back into view. It’s from a promotional video in Seth’s LinkedIn post. It opens with a staccato montage of the Indian flag atop a temple tower, atop a mountain (Kargil?), atop the Red Fort, atop a glacier (Siachen?), and atop the moon.*** Perhaps the fund’s ultimate priority is national security, yet “technological sovereignty” implies even greater ambitions — as do other visuals in the video**** and the enterprises Industrial47 has already invested in. National security also exists today in a baleful avatar. Rather than inculcate something the armed forces deem worth fighting for, the government’s narratives have often attempted to cast soldiers’ “spirit and courage” themselves to be the objects of desire, the thing citizens at large must prove they deserve. The government has also invoked national security as a spectre, bolstered by periodic allegations of threats to Hindus, disinformation about the intentions of Muslims, and in general the communalisation of public life, to deny requests under the RTI Act about information as benign as the designs of scientific spacecraft. Unspecific appeals to national security have also become the basis for jailing students and academics for indefinite periods of time, expel foreign journalists, rebuke foreign governments’ comments on the country’s “internal affairs”, and deny the findings of international democracy and welfare research organisations. If this is national security, I sincerely dread a deeply technologised form.

It’s just a video, you say, and you’re seeing meaning that isn’t there. Most of you must’ve watched Oppenheimer by now but let me call your attention to something Leona Woods asked Enrico Fermi after the world’s first nuclear reactor went critical: “When do we become scared?” Call it the naïvety of eggheads or political premeditation, Oppenheimer et al. had control of the Bomb until suddenly they didn’t. Its very existence reshaped the world order. Whether or not it actually went off was secondary. This is scope creep: when the parameters of a project are changing so slowly as to not be threatening, until one day you realise they’ve crossed some threshold, an unforeseen tipping point, and significantly altered the scope of the project. You thought you had a hand on the wheel, and maybe you did, but the car’s almost imperceptible drift to the right now has you endangering oncoming traffic, and yourself, on the other lane. Call it pithy, call it a cliché, but science and the technologies that follow need a hand on the wheel to adjust the course of their fantasies every now and then instead of going with the flow. Politics needs your other hand on another wheel to do the same thing, considering science is already a reason of state in India. Otherwise, we’re left staring at “technological sovereignty”.

Or maybe these are all just words trading in josh on an investment fund’s webpage — although it does alert us to one particular plausibility and renders the words more potent: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives. The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.” When do we become scared? I don’t know, but when you do, don’t ignore it. That’s all I’m asking.

* “Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici” and “Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore” — and of course a wider socio-political environment that they navigated as well, but this aside: notice the distinctive singularity of “genius”, its manifestation with problems amenable to being solved by individuals, often working alone, as was once the case in some of the sciences but hasn’t been so for more than a century — and as has more rarely been the case in the social sphere, virtually by definition.

** I can seem like a habitual naysayer but I assure you I’m not. I can’t get onboard with new technology + business ideas if they’re ill-conceived or if their social and political implications haven’t been thought through. If I keep saying ‘no’, it’s because I’m being met with a continuous stream of half-baked ideas. I have no obligation to put up with one every now and then.

*** The video includes footage from Associated Press. I hope it was licensed properly.

**** The video’s theme seems to be masculine middle-class fever dream. The scenes of its montage go space, space, sport, space, cricket, space, EV, sport, sport, a CEO, software code, sport, a CEO, a CEO, automation, an award, music, the stock market, Rajpath, military, Taj Mahal, IT, IT, a CEO, a CEO, space, space, mountains, tigers, IISc, IISc, metallurgy, military, Mahabharat on DD, space, some nuke test, polio vaccine, Shah Rukh Khan, Modi performing aarthi like a priest, AR Rahman, cricket, military, military, a CEO, automation, the “shayari jugalbandi” in Parliament, CV Raman, an Amul ad, military, that nuke test, military, military, Parle G biscuit dipped in tea, military, metallurgy, military, space, and finally Nehru hoisting the flag in front of a crowd of thousands.

A tale of two awardees

In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of successful companies that build valuable products that a lot of people need, that the world needs. But while Elon Musk continues to be a despotic techbro, Krishna Ella is just a fellow who’s made some poor decisions.

Recently, both men were also in the news for honours they’d received.

The Royal Society in the UK continues to remain under pressure to rescind its fellowship of Musk, which it granted in 2018, owing to his attacks on free speech (ironically in the guise of protecting an absolute right to free speech), support for pseudoscientific ideas (including his antivaccine sentiments and support for climate denialism), and generally being unable to tell profundity from horseshit.

At least one other fellow has resigned to protest the Royal Society’s unwillingness to suspend Musk’s membership: retired University of Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop. She wrote in November 2024 on her blog:

There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August [2024] to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was “a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society”. The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK. 

Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. … And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct.

According to Bishop, Musk is in breach of sections 2.6, 2.10, and 2.11 of the ‘Code of Conduct’:

2.6: Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards.

2.10: Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public.

2.11: Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Seems fair. I reckon that together with the possibility of the unspecified “consequences” for the Royal Society Bishop has speculated, the body will also be mindful of being obligated to reassess the fellowship of many other individuals on its roster should it remove Musk on these grounds. (To be clear, this isn’t a defence of its position.)

I’ve always held that awards are distinguished by their laureates and not the other way around. Fellowship of the Royal Society isn’t technically an award but for the most part it operates with the same incentives. Its code is thoughtful enough to not be limited to one’s conduct as a scientist. Just as the Millennium Plaque of Honour wouldn’t make a dent on the reputation of any scientist who wins it because it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile in 2017 — after he let police personnel lathi-charge the students in his care at the University of Hyderabad — it must be difficult to count Musk among one’s peers as fellows of the Royal Society.

Consider Krishna Ella now. As part of its annual routine, the Indian National National Science Academy (INSA) handed out 61 fellowships last week, Ella among them. It’s the first time INSA has included industry leaders for this recognition. According to a statement on the INSA website:

Dr. Krishna Ella, a prominent Indian scientist and entrepreneur, leads Bharat Biotech in ground-breaking vaccine development. His achievements include India’s Covaxin, the world’s first clinically proven conjugated Typhoid Vaccine, ROTAVAC, and the first preservative-free vaccine, Revac-B mcf Hepatitis B Vaccine. Bharat Biotech also introduced India’s first cell-cultured Swine Flu vaccine and manufactures the world’s most affordable Hepatitis vaccines. Additionally, they were the first globally to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.

Impressive achievements, right? But to me, Ella will equally be the man who filed defamation cases against me and many of my fellow journalists for publishing evidence-based articles critical of the manner in which the Indian government approved Covaxin for COVID-19 (with emphasis on the Indian government, not Bharat Biotech).

I’m not at liberty to quote from these articles as Bharat Biotech was able to obtain an ex-parte injunction to take them offline until the proceedings concluded. But as with Bishop vis-à-vis Musk, here’s an instructive passage from the INSA ‘Code of Conduct’:

All people associated with INSA are expected to adhere to certain minimal standards of ethical behaviour which include but are not limited to, honesty, integrity, and professional (sic). Integrity in the context of scientific research means trustworthiness of the data collected/presented, their interpretation, and the soundness of methodology/protocol followed in carrying out the research.

At the time the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) signed off on the use of Covaxin and Covishield in “clinical trial mode” on the cusp of India’s drive to vaccinate against COVID-19, in January 2021, the country’s medico-legal doctrine didn’t recognise the term “trial mode” and phase III trials of both vaccines hadn’t been completed.

To make matters worse, the DGCI said the vaccines were “110% safe” when the safety data hadn’t even been collected. AstraZeneca came through later with the complete safety and efficacy data for Covishield. In July 2021, Bharat Biotech researchers uploaded a preprint paper reporting safety data for only 56 days following vaccination with Covaxin. To this day, Bharat Biotech and the Union health ministry have yet to release the long-term safety data collected during Covaxin’s phase-III trial. Instead, both the company and the national government have simply expected people at large to trust them. Irrespective of whether the vaccine is safe, these actions are inimical to trustworthiness.

I’m not opposed to Ella becoming an INSA fellow because I don’t care. Instead, my concerns are about INSA: I know it focuses on a prospective fellow’s scientific work at the time of granting the fellowship (see link below) and I suspect the Royal Society does too, but the latter also has a code of conduct that extends to fellows’ conduct beyond the scientific enterprise and other fellows who find value in all their peers adhering to it.

The Royal Society fellows’ protests against sharing the honour with Musk is of a piece with his increasingly rightward turn in recent years being met with scientists speaking up against him in various fora. While there isn’t a correspondingly objectionable scientist in India, I also don’t recall members of the Indian scientific community speaking up in defence of science journalists who are speaking for science when they’re harassed by other members of the research enterprise, at least beyond the constant few I remain grateful for.

The HMPV cascade

I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time in which basic public health literacy would have made a big difference. Clearly such literacy is still quite low in the country.

I also don’t know why it became such a panic at all. As an editorial in The Hindu noted, the outbreak was a problem only insofar as the Indian media made it out to be: it didn’t hit the headlines anywhere else (except perhaps some Sinophobic outlets in the US). It made me wonder what exactly we learnt from COVID-19: wear masks, wash hands, maintain social distancing, and consult your physician, yes, but seemingly not that the COVID-19 pandemic was troublesome because SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus. This novelty made a world of difference.

The whole thing was constantly reminiscent of a 2014 Tamil film called Vaayai Moodi Paesavum (‘Speak With Your Mouth Shut’). In the film, there’s an outbreak of a previously unknown virus and medical researchers are slowly elucidating the full range of its symptoms. But even before they’ve learnt anything about whether it’s deadly or requires drastic action to protect against, the state health minister (played by the well-cast Pandiarajan) — desperate to quell the media outcry and to pacify a worried local populace — declares the state government will manufacture masks en masse and hand them out for free. Good call, right?

The fellow’s unscrupulous: he means to have a relative receive the government contract and take a slice. But his statement feeds the real panic: while until then neither the people nor the journalists knew whether the infection was communicable, his implication that masks are necessary suggests it does, and they’re all in a tizzy.

It was the same way with covering HMPV stories as journalists: all the experts to whom journalists spoke, irrespective of their location in the public or private sectors or their ideological tendencies, said HMPV wasn’t cause for concern. At the same time, local and hyperlocal media outlets were reporting “First HMPV case reported from X city” or “X number of people dead due to HMPV”. Those publications that did have a functional science/health journalism department would’ve been caught in between: they couldn’t deny HMPV’s existence nor leave it out of the front pages, so they had to acknowledge its existence in a way that didn’t also inflate the hype balloon.

Another problem we came across showed up the piecemeal nature of India’s pathogen surveillance programme. Many headlines simply said “X agency detects Y HMPV cases”. Since HMPV has been around for a long time, and hasn’t exactly been hiding, it was a truism that if we went looking for it, we’d find it. And the ICMR did, repeatedly, but when it put out press releases to that effect together with statements asking for the people at large to not worry, just the fact that the agency had picked up on those cases further fuelled concerns.

Public outcry is a dangerous animal. It forced the government’s hand and, in a bid to be seen to be acting, the government instituted the same sort of response measures it would have if there had been an outbreak with real cause for concern. Whatever blew the HMPV outbreak out of proportion, a cascading lack of tact — if not courage — was part of it.

Rescuing superconductivity

From a paper in Nature Reviews Physics, December 19, 2024:

One of the forefront fields of modern superconductivity research is that on hydrides at high pressures. Over the past few years, this research has attracted considerable publicity, of which a substantial fraction has been negative. Scientific fraud has been committed and exposed, and arguments continue about specific aspects of data presented in some other papers. Among all the noise that is being generated, one might lose sight of the big-picture question of whether the field is on solid foundations or not, that is, whether high-pressure hydrides host superconductivity at all. Here, we readdress this central issue. We select and critically examine what we identify as six key papers on the topic. We have all spent substantial portions of our careers working on superconductivity, so hope that the conclusions that we reach will carry at least some weight. We also decided to include among our authorship team only people who have never worked directly on hydride superconductivity, so that our examination of the scientific facts can be as impartial as possible. We conclude that it is overwhelmingly probable that the phenomenon of hydride superconductivity is genuine.

It’s intriguing such an exercise had to be undertaken. It’s yet another reminder that practising science isn’t simply a matter of following the facts. Science is part of the world, not separate from it, and is affected by what others think of it, especially based on perceptions of trustworthiness, self-correctability, and integrity. Self-correctability in particular went out the window the moment the holes in the Dias/Salamat saga became clear, followed by integrity. Imagine discovering a groundbreaking new natural phenomenon: usually such things revitalise fields looking for a breakthrough, but here, the field became marred by a slew of bad papers that shrunk funding opportunities and rendered young researchers trying to enter or already in the field nervous about their future.

In fact the self-correctability and integrity issues were compounded by the actions of the journals that published the problem papers. Nature and Physical Review Letters both have submissions peer-reviewed. The process of peer review is designed to check whether the data provided match the conclusion provided, not the integrity of the data. However, the data the journals reviewed before publishing the papers was also the data independent experts reviewed to find flaws, consequently leading to the retractions. What explains this? Further, one of the papers, purporting to show superconductivity in LuNH and published in Nature in March 2023, didn’t contain enough evidence to support the conclusion, which the journal’s review missed as well. A Nature news feature reported in September that year:

Critiques started appearing as soon as the Nature paper was published. One major line of criticism is that the Rochester team didn’t provide enough evidence to show that resistance does go to zero in its material. Dias and his colleagues state in the paper that they removed “small residual resistance” from some of their electrical measurements, but critics argue that it should not be necessary to remove background for these types of measurements, given clean readings of both a sample’s current and voltage. The problem with removing a background, says Sven Friedemann, a physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, is that it implies that the raw data do not go to zero — and therefore don’t show superconductivity.

The same feature also quoted two scientists saying Nature’s retraction of a carbonaceous sulphur hydride paper in 2022 was “not strong enough”.

The names of many of the authors of the review should be familiar to people who have been following the Dias/Salamat saga, including Peter Hirschfeld, Steven Kivelson, Andrew Mackenzie, and Subir Sachdev. The review reportedly began with the two possible outcomes — hydrides display superconductivity versus hydrides don’t — being equally probable and concluded in favour of the former after assessing the results reported by multiple groups. While the nominal definition of superconductivity alludes only to the fact that a material’s electrical resistance drops to zero, condensed-matter physicists perform four tests looking for different features. One is zero electrical resistance; another is that the material’s magnetisation varies through a particular pattern. On this count the reviewers assessed data from only one group, that of Mikhail Eremets & co. in 2022.

Yet another familiar name, Jorge Hirsch, has already expressed his disapproval towards the review. “I was surprised and disappointed to see this. I speculate [they wrote] it because hydrides being superconductors would establish the validity of BCS theory, in which they firmly believe,” he told Physics. A bit of relevant background here is that Hirsch is a detractor of the popular BCS theory of superconductivity and a proponent of his own holes theory. While Physics writes that he’s already flagged some problems with the Eremets et al. paper, it doesn’t say the Eremets et al. paper raised significant doubts about the validity of his holes theory — which is to say both the study and Hirsch’s idea could be flawed rather than the study alone. Overall, if science is to remain trustworthy, scientists need to undertake exercises like this, conducting — while being seen to be conducting — impartial reviews of the prevailing evidence and considering whether it makes sense to continue working in fields beleaguered by the influence of some dishonest exponents.

I only hope reviewers will also take a closer look at the roles journals and their misguided incentives — and the still largely blind trust the global scientific community places in them — play in sustaining scandals in science.

The SARS-CoV-2 red herring

From my piece in The Hindu today:

We don’t know where or how the virus originated. If it did in a lab, we would have to re-examine how we regulate research facilities and their safeguards and the manner of political oversight that won’t curtail research freedom. If the virus is au naturel, we would have to institute and/or expand pathogen surveillance, eliminate wildlife trafficking, and improve social security measures to ensure populations can withstand outbreaks without becoming distressed. But even as these possibilities aren’t equally likely (according to scientists I trust), the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is less important than it once was because the COVID-19 pandemic caused us to implement all these outcomes to varying degrees.

Not many people I’ve encountered seem to harbour the view that the origins question has become irrelevant. I sincerely believe there are many things we just can’t know. They’re easier to find in science but they’re likely there in all domains. The origin of SARS-CoV-2 has become one of them. The virus could have been entirely natural or it could have been engineered in a lab. This means we need to establish a clear and straightforward genetic link between two species: SARS-CoV-2 and its ancestor, a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. We haven’t yet. Even when we do, we’ll have to find a way to prove that the evolution from the in-between species to SARS-CoV-2 was natural, not engineered. As for the second possibility, we simply need China’s cooperation whereas China hasn’t been cooperating. But as I’ve written, we’ve already done what we’d do if either of these possibilities is established without doubt. It’s time we move on.

In fact, one thing I’ve left unsaid in the piece — mostly because of the word limit — speaks as much to the origins of the origins question as to the sort of people who continue to keep these concerns alive. (My piece itself was motivated by the US Select Subcommittee Report, a Republican-led effort that earlier this month concluded the lab-leak theory remains plausible and worthy of investigation.) The origins question is no longer about science when it’s on the big stage. Instead it’s an excuse disguised as scientific inquiry for the US to punish China. Both the US and China didn’t help the cause of working together during the COVID-19 pandemic: one reduced funding for the World Health Organisation, actively spread misinformation, and hoarded vaccines and the other limited scientific access to medical data and used it to curry favours. Now, with Donald Trump a month away from his second term as the US’s nincompoop-in-chief, the origins question is being used to set the stage for the US to smack down a challenger in the global world order.

This hasn’t been about science for sometime. If science is why you’re interested in the origins of SARS-CoV-2, I suggest switching from either hypotheses to the eternal third possibility — “I don’t know” — while keeping in touch with scientists you trust.

Visual science journalism’s DNA problem

Your left hand and right hand are mirror-images of each other. You can’t superimpose them completely even after all manner of rotations and translations. Only mirroring them works. The same thing can happen to some molecules. When two molecules are identical in every way except their geometric structure in space is such that one is a mirror-image of another, they’re said to be enantiomers. These molecules have a chirality, or handedness: like your hands, one is left-handed and the other right-handed.

On December 3, an international group of scientists published a technical report and commentary in Science warning against work to develop “mirror life”: cells whose chiral molecules are replaced with their complementary enantiomers. To quote from the commentary:

Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria could broadly evade many immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants. Chiral interactions, which are central to immune recognition and activation in multicellular organisms, would be impaired with mirror bacteria. This could result in weakened immune recognition, a weakened response by innate immune systems, and (in vertebrates) limited downstream activation of adaptive immune functions. For example, experiments show that mirror proteins resist cleavage into peptides for antigen presentation and do not reliably trigger important adaptive immune responses such as the production of antibodies. We are thus concerned that the function of many vertebrate immune systems against mirror bacteria would be severely impaired. Invertebrate and plant immune systems are less well studied but appear to suffer analogous limitations.

Given the potential for severe immune evasion, mirror bacteria might not require host-specific factors to invade hosts and cause infection. In animals (including humans), bacteria regularly cross barriers in the skin, mouth, gut, lungs, and other mucosal surfaces because of routine damage and intrinsic leakiness; mirror bacteria would be expected to do the same. In healthy animals, translocated natural-chirality bacteria are typically cleared by immune defenses. However, if the immune response against mirror bacteria is sufficiently impaired, translocated mirror bacteria might replicate within the host and establish an infection. Unchecked replication of mirror bacteria within internal tissues is likely to be deleterious to the host organism and may be lethal.

While this is very intriguing, the report/commentary reminded me of another problem I’ve been noticing in the science journalism press, especially these days when we’re all writing and publishing more articles about genetics.

Stock images and illustrations are an important resource both for small newsrooms that can’t hire their own designers and for all newsrooms — including those with designers — lacking the skills to create (even partially accurate) scientific visuals. Articles of science journalism about genetics require such visuals more than others because, while the subjects of these narratives are physical entities, they’re too small to be seen by the naked eye as well as whose visuals as seen through microscopes aren’t particularly visually captivating. Instead, stock images have done the trick.

Pixabay, Getty Images, and other libraries of such assets are choc-a-bloc with 2D and 3D (or 2.5D?) illustrations of the DNA double helix. But I’ve noticed that a great number of them have a common problem — curiously, in a specific way, echoed in the objection the scientists’ group has expressed against “mirror life”: many of these illustrations show the DNA helix twisting to the left. In all our bodies, DNA virtually always twists to the right. That is, the right-handed enantiomer is what animates our bodies whereas the left-handed enantiomer is absent, but which hasn’t stopped it from dominating stock images of DNA.

I realise most people don’t care and/or that the image is captioned to be “for representative use only”. DNA of other configurations, including a left-handed one, exist as well to be fair. And most of all, DNA’s chirality has almost never been the narrative subject. But today it is, as the scientists have so clearly articulated, and the visuals of science journalism need to buck up as well.