A Little Inspiration

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, It is between you and God;
It never was between you and them anyway.

Author Unknown

During the four years of my undergraduate education, I was fortunate to be exposed to various different areas in the field of biology. These were molecular biology, systems biology, structural biology, bioinformatics, biochemistry, biomaterials & tissue engineering, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, ethology, neurobiology, biomedical instrumentation, biomechanics, biomedical signal and image processing. Some of the areas which I find appealing are biochemistry, ethology, neurobiology, biomedical instrumentation and biomechanics. In particular, getting to know about and working at the confluence of different disciplines has been a pleasurable experience.

But, given an opportunity to identify one area, I will choose the area of designing point of care diagnostics – cheap, non-invasive, quick and sensitive so that they are accessible to the common man. Most of the villages in our country do not have pathology facilities; even if they exist they are far-off or are very expensive. One example where this is showing positive results is the pregnancy testing kit – no need of going to pathology, even the patients can use it on their own; all they have to do is to pour the urine sample and wait for 5 minutes to check the color. However, these on-the-spot assays have not been commercialized for blood-glucose level, WBC/TLC count, malarial parasite detection; stool and urine sample analysis.

One unsolved problem in this area is to design a cheap, easy-to-use assay system for diagnosing malaria; the current state of affairs is that diagnosis is symptomatic/ one needs to have a reasonably well-equipped pathology facility so as to just diagnose the disease. With the recent advancements in BioMEMS(which have led to ELISA, microPCR etc.), the task seems possible. Using immobilized marker molecules, immunochromatography or may be detecting a simple change in physical property (pH, viscosity, optical/electrical/thermal/mechanical properties) can be a solution. The ultimate dream is to make these tests as simple and cheap as using a thermometer.

PROFOUND QUOTES BY LEO TOLSTOY

"All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do."

"Boredom: the desire for desires."

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity."

"And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people."

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."

"Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible."

"All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."