As I Understand It

“With my hands folded, bowing my head I pray to them as I sing about the marriage of Sita and Rama in the way that I understand it.” (Janaki Mangala, Mangalacharana, 2) hātha jori kari binaya sabahi sira nāvauṃ | siya raghubīra bibāhu jathāmati gāvauṃ || The oldest scriptures in the world are known as the shrutis because they were originally passed down through a tradition of oral reception. Since these scriptures are replete with knowledge necessary for attaining life’s goals, they are known as the Vedas. As the attainment of the ultimate aim in life represents the pinnacle of achievement, other aims are satisfied through these scriptures as well. Therefore the knowledge system that is the Vedas is not limited in scope, not narrow in its objectives or influence. Whoever partakes of the ripened fruit of transcendental wisdom, hearing it submissively, absorbing the information into their consciousness and then acting upon what they have learned, finds the happiness that every living entity is so desperately searching after. The resulting ecstasy creates an invigorated life, where the same information that was heard then gets repeated, but not necessarily verbatim. The devoted soul repeats what they have heard in their own way, how they have understood the concepts. This is done to please both the instructor, the originator of the knowledge, and the person doing the explaining. Is there anything wrong with just repeating the information that we’ve heard? For instance, if in mathematics we learn that one plus one equals two, shouldn’t we repeat that same formula to those we teach? What need is there to present the information in our own way? With perfect information, simple repetition of the principles is sufficient for passing on the necessary knowledge. Devotion to God, however, is a dynamic activity. The static laws of math and the simple, cutting postulates of philosophy and logic are binding to a spirit soul that is looking for real freedom, one not bound by the inhibiting forces of material nature, which work at every second to check whatever happiness we find. How does this work exactly? Say that we’re playing sports for a team that just made it to the playoff round. Previously, this team looked like they had no chance of victory, and yet somehow, in the most dramatic fashion, they achieved their stated objective. The elation is checked, however, by the fact that another series of games needs to be played afterwards. Even if the season is over and the championship won, there is still next year, a repeat of the cycle of hope, work, and the potential for bereavement coming from loss. The same pattern applies to every single fruitive venture. The most blissful elation resulting from the birth of a child is matched by the tremendous sadness that occurs with death. In between there are the many ups and downs, such as the happiness over meeting with friends and family and the sadness over arguments resulting from impious behavior directed our way. The spirit soul is immune to these changes. The soul is eternally blissful and knowledgeable. These properties are the cause of the very vitality of the living being, his repeated venturing into new areas of happiness. Simple renunciation from material endeavors thus cannot be the true definition of liberation, and neither can the strict adherence to religious principles. In whichever direction we fly, whether it’s the denial of pleasure, the indulgence of sense pleasures, or the adherence to the strictest rules of spiritual life aimed at promising a better end in the afterlife, the soul retains its penchant to act on its desire for unfettered freedom. The spiritualist accepting the shrutis from a self-realized person, one who previously learned the ancient art of divine love, or bhakti-yoga, safely kept with the Vedas, does not just absorb the information and then sit on it. With theoretical knowledge, or jnana, comes the practical application, or vijnana. The practical application is more important, for in many cases someone who is an expert in the field might not even be able to explain why they are so skilled. A person may possess the knowledge that goes into performing surgical operations, but the person who actually carries out the surgery properly plays a more important role, for he puts the principles into practical use. The predominant message of the Vedas is that the spirit soul is inherently meant to be tied to the Supreme Soul, who is so respected, glorious and opulent that one name cannot suffice for Him. The term “God” just scratches the surface at addressing Him properly, for it says that He is a Supreme Being. To describe what “supreme” actually means is the business of the Vedas and their authors. How can the Vedas have authors when the information is purported to have come from the Supreme Being Himself? This is the hidden secret known to those who assimilate the knowledge gathered into their own lives. The Vedas were originally just one Veda, which was implanted into the heart of the first created living entity, Lord Brahma. He then subsequently passed it down to his descendants, of which there are too many to count. The Veda passes on supreme wisdom through hymns and prayers addressing God. The way to glorify someone is to speak about their attributes, using comparisons to known objects to show how the glorified person is superior to them. To follow glorification in this way, the Vedas also document the Personality of Godhead’s features and activities. It is through discussion and meditation on these areas that the living beings derive the most pleasure. With attention focused on God’s charita, or deeds, one assigns the Lord so many names. The activities of His personality of Lord Rama, an avatara appearing on earth during the Treta Yuga, are likely talked about the most, as they are documented in many Vedic texts, including the Ramayana and Puranas. Vedic literature includes the original Veda and any work expanding on the same truths. Since the Veda is about God, anyone who writes literature describing God and His glories, reaching the same ultimate conclusion of devotion to the Lord being the topmost engagement for man, adds to the massive collection of Vedic literature. Lord Rama’s activities were first described in the Ramayana, which was composed by Maharishi Valmiki, a contemporary of Rama’s. Just hearing the Ramayana makes one familiar with Rama and His divine qualities, which include His kindness, His mastery over archery, His promise to protect those who humbly approach Him in earnest, His dedication to piety and virtue, His beautiful smile, His love for His closest associates like Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman, and a host of other features. Indeed, God’s good qualities are ananta, or unlimited. We could glorify God from the time we are born through the time we quit our body and we still wouldn’t come close to sufficiently describing Him. If we take up an endeavor that we can’t finish, why even start it? Ah, this defect is actually known to be a precious gem by those who incorporate the shrutis into their every activity. Goswami Tulsidas, a celebrated Vaishnava poet, is one such knower. He originally heard the story of Rama’s life from his guru, or spiritual master. At the time he was a young child, so he couldn’t make much of it, but the seed of bhakti was implanted in him nonetheless. When he matured later on in life and became adept at writing poetry, he used his skill to glorify Rama, to describe the Lord’s life and activities in a language suitable to the time, words that would make understanding God easier for the people of his community. There are many accounts of Rama’s life, with Valmiki’s Ramayana being the most complete one. In addition, Rama appears on earth during each creation, which means that He has appeared many times in the past and will come again many times in the future. The Vedic seers of the past who were so attached to Rama have thus described His life and activities in their own unique ways. Tulsidas chose the version of Rama’s story told byLord Shiva to his wife Parvati as the foundation for his wonderful Hindi poem titled theRamacharitamanasa, which means concentrating the mind on the activities of Rama. The Lord’s acts are compared to a holy lake which the mind can swim in and feel the topmost bliss and comfort. In the Janaki Mangala, Tulsidas sings about the marriage of Sita and Rama, which again is described very nicely in the original Ramayana. Rather than present the same information verbatim, with a word-for-word translation, Tulsidas decides to sing about it as he understands it. This is revealed in the above referenced prayer, which forms the opening invocation of his wonderful, short work. In the verse preceding this one, the poet references the famous personalities responsible for his knowledge. They include his guru, Lord Ganesha and his parents Lord Shiva and Mother Parvati, Shukadeva Goswami, the Vedas, and the gentle saints who have made understanding the highest truths of spirituality easy for the poet. In this prayer, Tulsidas folds his hands and bows his head at these great personalities, for he is about to embark on the journey of singing about the marriage of Sita and Rama, an event which is indescribable. He is going to sing about the events as he understands them because this will bring great pleasure to both him and the people who will hear his song. This style of information transfer is preferable because it reveals and gives meaning to the dynamic nature of bhakti, how it is not a dry system of spirituality aimed at only providing benefits in the future. If we purchase a savings bond, we don’t gain any benefit until the date of maturity. Religion is typically viewed in a similar way, for the impetus for the initial plunge may have even been a desire to avoid a hellish condition in the afterlife. Following bhakti-yoga does indeed provide a glorious end, an afterlife full of delights, but since bhakti directly corresponds to the constitutional position of the living entity, its benefits are available immediately. The human being, during any stage of life, enjoys glorifying others. If this weren’t the case, newspapers and internet news sites would be empty every single day. Bhakti allows glorification to be directed at the person most worthy of it. The same material nature that was previously the cause of pain and bondage becomes an inexhaustible source of tools with which to practice divine glorification. The words used in communication become purified when directed at the lotus feet of Sita and Rama. The pages used to print books, poems and songs become valuable when they contain the glories of Sita and Rama. The humble sage, who patiently absorbed the highest truths of life passed down to him by the spiritual master, becomes the ocean of mercy, the friend of the distressed, the savior for those disgusted with the material existence and its perpetually swinging pendulum of acceptance and rejection, when he dedicates his life to describing the glories of Sita and Rama in his own way. The question may be raised as to whether or not describing the marriage of Sita and Rama in your own way can be harmful. If the information heard was not properly understood, then certainly there is the danger of contaminating others with faulty interpretations. But when there is pure love for God, no attempt made at glorifying the Lord and His associates can ever prove to be detrimental. Through His deputies, Rama controls speech and knowledge, so we are actually helpless in writing anyway. Shri Rama is the protector of the surrendered souls, including those who humbly accept the challenge of writing songs and poetry to describe Him. Though Tulsidas made sure to offer his obeisances to Brihaspati and Mother Sarasvati, the divine figures in charge of speech and learning respectively, the success of his work would come from Rama’s influence, which is profusely distributed through many different channels. The guru is himself a representative of the Lord, so if he is genuine in his devotion, his understanding will be perfect, and therefore whoever hears from him submissively will receive perfect knowledge as well. The disciple, wanting to keep the flame of bhakti well lit, becomes overwhelmed with the desire to continue to glorify God, to not let a moment go by without concentrating the mind on His lotus feet. By hearing of the wonderful marriage of Sita and Rama, the mind stays connected with God and His glorious devotees like Tulsidas who were kind enough to give us such wonderful Vedic literature, fresh and new and yet true to the ageless tradition that is bhakti. In Closing: From the guru sublime wisdom accept, Sanctity of bhakti principles to protect. But listener not to just absorb like a sponge, To describe glories of the Lord can one take the plunge. Story of Sita and Rama’s marriage already known, But extra pleasure in telling in way of our own. To speak about God is the source of supreme pleasure, The recorded songs and poems of saints life’s treasure. With folded hands and bowing down does Tulsi sing, Wedding of Sita and Rama, happiness to heart bring.

Shiridi Saibaba Song Pilisthey palukuthanani

Dennis Ritchie

 

Dennis Ritchie the the father of the C programming language, is no more. While Steve Jobs was the king of the visible, Ritchie was the king of what is largely invisible.

Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday. Says Kernighan “We’re all standing on Dennis’ shoulders.”….and that's very true.

The whole of the Internet world stands on C, it's variants and it's children.... RIP…one of the silent fathers of modern day computing. I really feel that he was not given his due.....

Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70

By STEVE LOHR

Dennis M. Ritchie, who helped shape the modern digital era by creating software tools that power things as diverse as search engines like Google and smartphones, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. He was 70.

Victoria Will/Associated Press Images for Japan Prize Foundation

Dennis Ritchie received the 2011 Japan Prize in May.

Mr. Ritchie, who lived alone, was in frail health in recent years after treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease, said his brother Bill.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.

The C programming language, a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation, is still widely used today, and successors like C++ and Java build on the ideas, rules and grammar that Mr. Ritchie designed. The Unix operating system has similarly had a rich and enduring impact. Its free, open-source variant, Linux, powers many of the world’s data centers, like those at Google and Amazon, and its technology serves as the foundation of operating systems, like Apple’s iOS, in consumer computing devices.

“The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,” said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.

Those tools were more than inventive bundles of computer code. The C language and Unix reflected a point of view, a different philosophy of computing than what had come before. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, minicomputers were moving into companies and universities — smaller and at a fraction of the price of hulking mainframes.

Minicomputers represented a step in the democratization of computing, and Unix and C were designed to open up computing to more people and collaborative working styles. Mr. Ritchie, Mr. Thompson and their Bell Labs colleagues were making not merely software but, as Mr. Ritchie once put it, “a system around which fellowship can form.”

C was designed for systems programmers who wanted to get the fastest performance from operating systems, compilers and other programs. “C is not a big language — it’s clean, simple, elegant,” Mr. Kernighan said. “It lets you get close to the machine, without getting tied up in the machine.”

Such higher-level languages had earlier been intended mainly to let people without a lot of programming skill write programs that could run on mainframes. Fortran was for scientists and engineers, while Cobol was for business managers.

C, like Unix, was designed mainly to let the growing ranks of professional programmers work more productively. And it steadily gained popularity. With Mr. Kernighan, Mr. Ritchie wrote a classic text, “The C Programming Language,” also known as “K. & R.” after the authors’ initials, whose two editions, in 1978 and 1988, have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born on Sept. 9, 1941, in Bronxville, N.Y. His father, Alistair, was an engineer at Bell Labs, and his mother, Jean McGee Ritchie, was a homemaker. When he was a child, the family moved to Summit, N.J., where Mr. Ritchie grew up and attended high school. He then went to Harvard, where he majored in applied mathematics.

While a graduate student at Harvard, Mr. Ritchie worked at the computer center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and became more interested in computing than math. He was recruited by the Sandia National Laboratories, which conducted weapons research and testing. “But it was nearly 1968,” Mr. Ritchie recalled in an interview in 2001, “and somehow making A-bombs for the government didn’t seem in tune with the times.”

Mr. Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967, and soon began his fruitful collaboration with Mr. Thompson on both Unix and the C programming language. The pair represented the two different strands of the nascent discipline of computer science. Mr. Ritchie came to computing from math, while Mr. Thompson came from electrical engineering.

“We were very complementary,” said Mr. Thompson, who is now an engineer at Google. “Sometimes personalities clash, and sometimes they meld. It was just good with Dennis.”

Besides his brother Bill, of Alexandria, Va., Mr. Ritchie is survived by another brother, John, of Newton, Mass., and a sister, Lynn Ritchie of Hexham, England.

Mr. Ritchie traveled widely and read voraciously, but friends and family members say his main passion was his work. He remained at Bell Labs, working on various research projects, until he retired in 2007.

Colleagues who worked with Mr. Ritchie were struck by his code — meticulous, clean and concise. His writing, according to Mr. Kernighan, was similar. “There was a remarkable precision to his writing,” Mr. Kernighan said, “no extra words, elegant and spare, much like his code.”

Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

• By Cade Metz 

Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. (Photo: Courtesy of Bell Labs)

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.

And then some.

“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, theprogramming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.

“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. “Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible,” says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.”

From B to C

Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. The original UNIX kernel was written in assembly language, but they soon decided they needed a “higher level” language, something that would give them more control over all the data that spanned the OS. Around 1970, they tried building a second version with Fortran, but this didn’t quite cut it, and Ritchie proposed a new language based on a Thompson creation known as B.

Depending on which legend you believe, B was named either for Thompson’s wife Bonnie or BCPL, a language developed at Cambridge in the mid-60s. Whatever the case, B begat C.

B was an interpreted language — meaning it was executed by an intermediate piece of software running atop a CPU — but C was a compiled language. It was translated into machine code, and then directly executed on the CPU. But in those days, C was considered a high-level language. It would give Ritchie and Thompson the flexibility they needed, but at the same time, it would be fast.

That first version of the language wasn’t all that different from C as we know it today — though it was a tad simpler. It offered full data structures and “types” for defining variables, and this is what Richie and Thompson used to build their new UNIX kernel. “They built C to write a program,” says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later. “And the program they wanted to write was the UNIX kernel.”

Ritchie’s running joke was that C had “the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language.” In other words, he acknowledged that C was a less-than-gorgeous creation that still ran very close to the hardware. Today, it’s considered a low-level language, not high. But Ritchie’s joke didn’t quite do justice to the new language. In offering true data structures, it operated at a level that was just high enough.

“When you’re writing a large program — and that’s what UNIX was — you have to manage the interactions between all sorts of different components: all the users, the file system, the disks, the program execution, and in order to manage that effectively, you need to have a good representation of the information you’re working with. That’s what we call data structures,” Pike says.

“To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consist and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge. They needed a way to group all that data together, and they didn’t have that with Fortran.”

At the time, it was an unusual way to write an operating system, and this is what allowed Ritchie and Thompson to eventually imagine porting the OS to other platforms, which they did in the late 70s. “That opened the floodgates for UNIX running everywhere,” Pike says. “It was all made possible by C.”

Apple, Microsoft, and Beyond

At the same time, C forged its own way in the world, moving from Bell Labs to the world’s universities and to Microsoft, the breakout software company of the 1980s. “The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground … C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened,” says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. “[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.”

As Pike points out, the data structures that Richie built into C eventually gave rise to the object-oriented paradigm used by modern languages such as C++ and Java.

The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published his research paper on the language, and five years later, he and colleague Brian Kernighan released the definitive C book: The C Programming Language. Kernighan had written the early tutorials for the language, and at some point, he “twisted Dennis’ arm” into writing a book with him.

Pike read the book while still an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, picking it up one afternoon while heading home for a sick day. “That reference manual is a model of clarity and readability compared to latter manuals. It is justifiably a classic,” he says. “I read it while sick in bed, and it made me forget that I was sick.”

Like many university students, Pike had already started using the language. It had spread across college campuses because Bell Labs started giving away the UNIX source code. Among so many other things, the operating system gave rise to the modern open source movement. Pike isn’t overstating it when says the influence of Ritchie’s work can’t be overstated, and though Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998, he still hasn’t gotten his due.

As Kernighan and Pike describe him, Ritchie was an unusually private person. “I worked across the hall from him for more than 20 years, and yet I feel like a don’t knew him all that well,” Pike says. But this doesn’t quite explain his low profile. Steve Jobs was a private person, but his insistence on privacy only fueled the cult of personality that surrounded him.

Ritchie lived in a very different time and worked in a very different environment than someone like Jobs. It only makes sense that he wouldn’t get his due. But those who matter understand the mark he left. “There’s that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants,” says Kernighan. “We’re all standing on Dennis’ shoulders.”

Editing Human Stem Cell Genes Could Let Patients Grow Their Own Cures

By Rebecca Boyle

Human Genome Sequence Editing the arrangement of a sequence of these letters corrected a genetic mutation in stem cells, a breakthrough combination of stem cell therapy and genetic modification.Wikimedia Commons

For the first time, scientists using a combination of gene-editing technologies have corrected mutations in a patient’s own induced stem cells. The breakthrough could pave the way towardreprogramming a person’s own cells to cure genetic diseases, rather than using transplanted organs and drug therapies.

Researchers led by two institutions in the UK corrected a mutation in cells derived from a patient with a metabolic liver disease.

Stem cells — embryonic ones and induced pluripotent ones — can turn into any type of cell, so they hold promise for treating a host of disorders. They can come with unwanted mutations, however. For one thing, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) would contain the same genetic defects as the rest of a patient’s body, so you’d have to remove those defects before you could treat a person with his or her own cells. But this removal can be imprecise; current editing methods can cause misplaced alleles or residual genetic sequences, which can lead to formation of cancer or other unwanted side effects. And recent breakthroughs in gene editing methods have not involved stem cells.

To work on stem cells, you would need a very careful editing method to snip out incorrect gene sequences in the stem cells and replace them with the correct kind. And that’s what these researchers have done.

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge worked with a mutation in a gene responsible for coding a specific protein in the liver. It’s a common mutation, found in about 1 of every 2,000 people of European descent, and it’s also a fairly simple mutation, with just one transposition of letters.

The team took skin cells from a patient and turned them into iPS cells. Then they used genetic scissors, zinc-finger nucleases, to snip the genetic sequence at the site of the mutation. They also used a piggyBAC transposon, which cuts and pastes genetic information. In this way, they were able to correct both alleles involved in the mutation of this liver gene.

Once the stem cells were corrected, the team induced them to become liver cells. These were transplanted in mice with the liver disorder. The cells restored the liver’s proper function, and were still working properly after six weeks, the researchers said.

This was an incredibly difficult maneuver, and it’s the first time anyone has been able to pull it off, the researchers say. Researcher David Lomas told the BBC it was “ridiculously hard.”

But it’s proof, at least in principle, that well-edited genetic sequences in induced human stem cells can provide new cells for a variety of clinical treatments. The paper was published in today’s issue of Nature.

[via BBC]

Growing Schizophrenic Brain Cells In A Dish Helps Neuroscientists Study Mental Illness Up Close

By Rebecca Boyle

Skin Cell-Derived Neurons Human neurons differentiated from skin-derived stem cells. Ji-Eun Kim and Anirvan Ghosh, UCSD/via Kavli Foundation

Studying mental illnesses involves complex brain-monitoring technology to watch how neurons and large-scale brain components are functioning or malfunctioning. But researchers are increasingly getting out of their patients’ heads, monitoring brain cells in petri dishes instead. This is possible with stem cells, and it could yield plenty of new avenues for psychiatric research.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind in San Diego are using skin cells from patients with schizophrenia, autism and other disorders, and producing induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells are then induced to become neurons, which are grown in a lab so the neuroscientists can monitor the cells’ development or test potential new drugs.

Initial studies using this method show that the neurons of schizophrenics look similar to normal neurons, but they have different synaptic connections. And it appears that some psychiatric drugs cause physical changes in neurons, an unexpected finding.

Neuroscientists Fred (Rusty) Gage and Anirvan Ghosh are both working on “disease in a dish” research, hoping to unveil the genetic basis underlying various mental illnesses. They describe their work in an interview with the Kavli Foundation, which supports their work; go here to read a transcript of the interview.

For now, the research has left the neurons to form connections unimpeded — they have not been induced to become specific neuronal subtypes, like dopamine neurons or cortical neurons. But future work will attempt to form those specific types so that their interactions can be studied — for instance, how dopamine neurons interface with the substantia nigra region of the brain, which affects balance and movement and is related to the development of Parkinson’s disease. Gage said that type of work would require some other technological advances, perhaps microfluidic chambers that will isolate different neurons from each other and regulate how their synapses form.

Without the stem cells in a petri dish, monitoring how human neurons grow and connect would otherwise be impossible, the researchers say. And understanding that development can go a long way toward treating mental disorders — not to mention understanding the physiological connections that define what it means to be human.

[Kavli Foundation]

Time to Invest in Africa and Africa’s Capital Markets, World Bank Vice President Says

The World Bank’s Vice President for Africa Obiageli Ezekwesili called Thursday from the London Stock Exchange for investors worldwide to invest in Africa and its budding capital markets. “Africa has taught the world a lesson in macroeconomic reform and stability,” Ezekwesili told the audience at an African Investment Summit hosted at the Stock Exchange. She urged investors who are in search of the right market at a time of growing fears of a global recession to “rediscover Africa”. “Africa’s fundamentals appear strong, and the continent’s outlook remains positive,” Ezekwesili said, pointing to the continent’s rapid rebound from the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, and its higher GDP growth rates projected to be 4.8 percent, 5.2 percent and 5.5 percent respectively in 2011, 2012 and 2013. It makes business sense to bet on Africa’s capital markets, she said, at a time when “global equity markets are headed for their worst quarter since 2008”, and returns on investments in Africa are among some of the best in the world. Ezekwesili cited a recent study by Oxford University Professor, Paul Collier, which found the return on capital for over 950 African enterprises to be on the average 11 percent higher than in Latin America and Asia, and 70 percent more profitable if compared against similar Chinese firms. Capital is flowing to Africa, the World Bank vice president explained, “because the continent has become a friendlier and more profitable market, about which businesses, consumers, investors and development partners are all bullish. Investors who joined the flight for quality at the onset of the 2008-2009 global crisis can now testify, Ezekwesili argued, that “Africa stayed stable” even as the global stock exchanges went on a wild roller coaster ride. Recovery on African stock markets came fast even though their limited liquidity and relative small size was amplified. While initial hopes that investors–weary of markets in developed countries–would seek opportunities in Africa and other developing regions were misplaced, most African stock markets with the exception of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange have grown robustly, doubling their market capitalisation between 1992 and 2002, from $113.4 billion to $244.7 billion. In a move that is likely to set a new record, the Lagos Stock Exchange, the region’s fastest-growing market, plans to increase its current capitalization from $40 billion to $1 trillion in five years. According to Ezekwesili, “one of the key lessons of the past global crisis is that Africa knows how to shrug off the impact”. “Been there, done that”, was the attitude she said African finance ministers who attended the September 23-24 Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund  in Washington, DC, had on being told that news of a potential global crisis meant even more reforms on their part. Policy reforms lead to positive growth One explanation for Africa’s success is the region’s sustained pace of meaningful reforms. As many as 36 of the 46 African countries surveyed by the Doing Business report have implemented major reforms over the last five years, including those whose ranking has slipped or has not improved. Ezekwesili said the continent of which she speaks is “an exciting, new Africa… on the cusp of an economic revolution similar to China’s and India’s”. She described it as a region of abundant opportunities in agriculture, agribusiness and agro-processing; with strong demand for capital in infrastructure development; but also a region in need of a second round of investments to upgrade the ICT sector, expand broadband use, mobile banking and Internet access. Ezekwesili called on investors to help themselves, by not focusing too narrowly on making the fast buck, but on building social accountability and transparency and fostering the fight against corruption, promoting social corporate responsibility by helping to develop the human capital and labor skills that will be needed if the “new Africa” is to lure some of the 85-to-90 million labor-intensive jobs in light manufacturing that wage pressures will force firms in China to off-shore in the next three-to-five years. Africa, Ezekwesili said, needs to replicate the knowledge that enabled policy reforms to precede efficient public investments before private capital helped turn a loss-making sector such as telecommunications into the ICT revolution the continent has witnessed. Strengthening Africa’s capital markets whose success is intrinsically linked to the economic success of the continent is essential if Africa is to fulfill its vast potential, said Bill Mills, CEO of Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Citigroup, one of the co-sponsors of the summit. Ezekwesili pledged World Bank support to continue to help African governments embrace the right reforms, build the right institutions, make the right public investments, build the resilience of their economies to shocks and make the right policy choices, including diversifying their economies, developing the private sector and protecting the poor and most vulnerable in a time of crisis.  Admitting that “nobody really knows for certain the extent of the effects of the crisis on the most fragile, debt-ridden and budget-strapped economies,” Ezekwesili said even when a global crisis hits Africa some of the most effective mitigating effects would come from leaders not taking their hands off the reins of reforms but also from stronger growth in countries like South Africa and Nigeria, as well as from a return to growth after violent conflicts such as in Cote d’Ivoire.