selimut ajaib

sleep deprivation is anti depressant for nearly half of depressed patients

hola. welcome to my nocturnal diary and the playlist is playing songs from imagine dragon. my ideas are like flashes of smokes and mirror. bits and bops. waiting to explode.

i like my social media and spend my time browsing at family and friends' life and times to fill my boredom from sitting and staring too long at the computer. i hate seeing pseudoscience products with idiotic claims on biology, chemistry and physics when they are totally fraudulent. oi makcik, now hear the freedom of my frustrations.

turn off your halo light, your claims are totally bullshit. even though green energy generated from shit could light up a whole village, your halo light ain't one.  you questioned my path to heaven and hell when i busted your overpriced, bogus science products which you sold to low income families and those who do not understand science deeply - i made my choice, to burn your scam to the grave. and i don't need to answer your question.

when shahnon ahmad wrote shit in 1998, i was just 15 and read the copy from my dad. it was banned due to vulgar and derogatory "words" and comments about filth and misdemeanor among politicos  - although it was obviously a satire.

but i guess, tom lehrer was right that satire becomes obsolete when henry kissinger won the nobel prize. the kissinger scale kept increasing over time  when EU, perez and syu kii were named laureates.

i guess satire is already dead now.

8 years after shahnon ahmad's shit, henry frankfurt published a short essay "on bullshit" that was well received by academic audience. both books have similarities in their views on the danger of misinformation and brain washing of population by mass media to gain political control.

back to the sellers' claim that selimut ajaib can help stroke patients restore their neural functions and mobility. i find it amazing that a piece of cloth with wiring and sensors without proper technology and science could actually regenerate nerves - kau ingat ni iklan susu kanak kanak apa? sel-sel otak berkembang.

of course i am angry. it is offensive to my profession as tissue engineer. you just strike my bee hive and insult my work. also, the price is ridiculous thousands of ringgit. you scam the helpless and those who don't truly understand medicine and engineering. f. u.

why don't you just let the doctors get back to their job - and stop taking advantages from the vulnerable. maybe you should find other jobs. or sell different products like cupcakes. i like cupcakes. and maybe someday i will buy one from you.

escape velocity

sometimes the right thing is luxury and it can have profoundly dangerous consequences.

weekend at isabella stewart gardner - rekindle the story of thomas crown affair - the largest art heist - on 18th march 1990.

 samwell found the secret on how to kill the whitewalkers in this book.

hahvard square

cycling home from mass ave. sometimes i wish there is "pintu sukati hati aku lah" when i get too tired from the day. or whenever i feel like to eat and spend the whole evening sleeping until the next morning. sounds platonic, eh. my relationship with sleep is even worse than iceland prime minister's love hate relationship with pineapple pizza. i'd love to write about Murphy's Law but i am really lazy to think about it after spending hours reading on crystallinity and physics - oh god why i never paid attention to glass transition and melting temperature before. this behavior could be the answer for human tissue regeneration. reading Prof. yannas's paper, published in 1967 on gelatin glass transition and melting temperature - and corrected flory's work on the same topic - gave a hard bitch slap on my pretty face. i didn't know that this was important. i couldn't care less about dilatometer because we have TGA and DSC, and powerful 400Hz NMR machine - or matrix assisted laser dilapidated ionization time of flight to determine the crystallinity and molecular packing in the polymer. i wasn't paying attention to the physics - it was always someone else's job. i just wanted my number and get away with it. that was the reason why biomaterials do not work in organ regeneration. i admit, my ignorance failed me this time. Prof asked if i ever looked into the structure and understand the evolution of material (collagen) over thousands of years - making it stable and the best candidate for organ regeneration. the answer lies in the crystallinity, packing order, band formation and number of binding site for the protein (integrin) as many scientists in this era did not look into this and only replicate the morphology and structural features. 

that answer my ten year quest working with natural and synthetic polymers for organ regeneration - from alginate, to gelatin, glucomannan, xanthan, collagen, 9gag, chitosan and fibrin glue. i bought the idea that nature has abundance supplies for organ regeneration - due to evolution transcended over myr of years, we may share the same traits and structure that can be useful to treat organ defect and support human's ability to regenerate and heal. in fact, i only got it half right and it was not good enough for organ regeneration. 

the Murphy's Law - that anything could happen, and possible if you can think about it - doesn't really work. 

because  thinking without reasoning and understanding the fundamental physics can be futile and wasting time. (although you may want to think that time isn't real, it is just passing of events).

[the red thread. you, me at ten years.

stardust.. of a supernova blast of a universe trying to understand itself.

you and me are just chemical scum in a medium sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in outer suburb of one among a hundred billion other galaxies.

insignificant but means the world to me.

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quote: stephen hawking

the danger of eliminating rationale from safety, science and responsibilities.

someone told me to be careful to comment about the recent incidence in Kuala Lumpur for fear of being insensitive and getting derail from Islamic teachings for questioning negligence and parents' motivation to send kids at such young age.

before i let myself getting backlashes, let me put this in a nice sentence, the mindset to reject any idea or fact or criticism is not just disturbing, but also very dangerous. it's like the deniers of global warming. it is not us. it is You Know Who. huh?

so tell me who imprisoned Ibn Al Haytham for delivering his thought in scientific thinking and skepticism?

without his work we would not have camera or understand planetary system and discover wonders - we will not learn if we stop questioning and improvise ourselves.

we cannot simply discard people's dissatisfaction and angers from this tragedy by calling them unsympathetic.

the creation of the universe itself undergoes scientific process and law of physics, that always been challenged and questioned over and over again by scientists. a concept that not only borrowed by Ibn Al Haytham from the greek but passed down to John Locke and to today's generation. the same scientific principle should be applied when dealing with the incident in Kuala Lumpur. giving excuses to fate and dogma - are just lazy and un-Islamic.

think about the kids, we are not going to live for them, let alone face the challenges for them. they will live their lives in their time. our time is now - and it is our duty to prepare them for their time.

"our children is not our children, they are the sons and daughters of life, longing for itself, they came through you but not from you. you may give them your love, but not your thought, for they have their own thoughts" quoted from kahlil gibran.

i don't think by questioning the negligence and irresponsibility will make me less human. because God is All Knowing and Wise.

crimson love letter

watched detective conan on weekend's night, eating aVocado ice cream from fOmu, vegan dinner from grasshopper, wrote an article about yann martel's intestinal miraculous wonder, wrote letters to my nieces - cause they keep bothering my morning (when i had second sleep), the week was full on hajime kindaichi and detective conan - finally i ditched sherlock bbc and nyc elementary - to go back down to memory land when i was in korea and watching the series in korean language, so this experience watching in english is different. it is like reading virginia wolf's in england. or agatha cristie. still, i love the time watching murder, she wrote with mom almost every evening during my off days back in malaysia.

i got hit by an audi two days ago. i made a joke about wanting to get hit by an audi, driven by a tall, dark and handsome - so i get a replacement to my old peugeot bicycle (it's not a car - yes) i am too damn broke to get a decent prius with my research salary. all i got was bruises, the guy wasn't tall, dark and handsome, a complete opposite and probably blind - it was my road - the light clearly showed signal for crossing. i fell to the road, thankfully my bike was ok. i am really tired to get it back to the workshop because i spent one week to figure out why it kept getting punctured for the whole last week until i changed the tires. haa.. dad must be proud of me. i never put air or gas to my car - and i called my brother for a rescue when i accidentally let the air out. i guess this is the perk of living abroad - all by myself - i could sing yadda yadda..  like bridget jones' diary - only tonight, there is no ben and jerry - it is non-dairy ice cream. an avocado too.

i went rockclimbing last week at western massachusetts - been cycling along charles river almost every weekend for fun - and watching sunset. my sentimental mind is as cliche just like ten years ago.

books: there are plenty on my desk now. my current favorite is "the upright thinkers" by mlodinow - given by a good friend from hometown glory who is doing dissertation on landmines detection method for his phd.

urgh i don't like this episode of suits.
"regret" for not doing anything when given the slightest chance to be together.

that's idiot.

we are all idiot. 

Project: grateful 2014

I am thankful for the time, to be alive and back in Malaysia.

To meet the people i love and tell them i love them (which is cool) to meet new people that i am going to love, to see friends and tell them how much i miss them - and how i wish i could squeeze them in my purse so i can see them everyday.

I am grateful for the opportunities to mend broken friendships, to catch up with childhood friends, to laugh at the past and keep laughing to the drain. I am grateful to be 17 again, with curfews and dressing code - my mom just could not see me passing the age. I am grateful that I can't sleep past noon anymore, because mom wouldn't let me doomed to be a spinster. I am grateful that i drive more than two hours everyday to work, so I can sing in my car and no one bothers me. (Plus i dont hv to go to karaoke).

Two things: time and being alive, I thank God for everything. May we reach eternal happiness someday. I am thankful that I went to Central Perk Cafe with cool kids and living the life of F.R.I.E.N.D.S with silly jokes and rekindle memories from undergraduate years.

Favorite quotes were taken mostly from: The white chicks.

Open letter to secretariat.

Relatively the word tissue engineering and regenerative medicine is not new, it was officially coined at a National Science Foundation workshop in 1988 to mean ‘the application of principles and methods of engineering and life sciences toward the fundamental understanding of structure-function relationships in normal and pathological mammalian tissues and the development of biological substitutes to restore, maintain or improve tissue function’. 

To many Malaysians, the words are considered science fiction rather than amazing work in biotechnology. During my appointment at MIT and Harvard Medical School, I was overwhelmed with the advancement of work and technology in biomedical and bioengineering field. There were plenty of lectures, classes, forum and discussions around Cambridge that available for free and open to the public, regardless of age - and conducted by prominent professors and scientists in the field. The experience was an eye-opening, where school children and students gathered and participate actively during the sessions. Many of them displayed enthusiasm and excitement at learning new experience and information. I wish the same could be done in Malaysia too. We have a lot of scientists and engineers working in creative and advance technological field where public engagement with students and community will be the best way to nurture and instill love for scientific knowledge and humanity.

To quote Isaac Asimov, prominent science fiction novelist (I, Robot and Bicentennial Man) and also a Biochemistry professor at Boston University "the saddest aspect of life right now is the science gathers knowledge faster than the society gains wisdom". 

The same was also written by T. S. Eliot in "The Information Age", "With all the technological advances and change, Is mankind happier or wiser than he was 100 ... Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?"

Rapid acceleration of technological advancement is affecting human value, the rise of inequality need to be addressed and tackled if we are planning to build a nation that not only able to withstand enemy of a thousand fleet, but to live in harmony for a thousand years. As dramatic as it sounds, I believe that academicians, scientists and engineers need to be good investors with our public education system, especially for early-childhood education. 

Schools are the center field of our children's academic life and the pillar of nation building. Our education system today fail to inspire and educate the younglings to be happy, creative, innovative and empathy to the surrounding issues and environment such as refugee crisis and inequality. 

I strongly believe that we need to reinvent our education system through holistic mechanisms by working closely with academicians, professionals and the people from walks of life to nurture understanding and broaden their communications, social skills, emotional intelligence as well as curiosity. 

My hope for younger generation of Malaysia is they will love this country and live in harmony alongside others from diverse community, background, religion and social status. It is one thing to feel optimism when I am away from the country I love for a very long time (14 years) and sitting comfortably in ivory tower. My heartfelt love towards my country never falters. My experience volunteering for Medicines Sans Frontier with displaced community in a campaign "Forced from Home", shrugged me off the comfortable zone as it became unfathomable to ignore that there are wars happening around the world with more than 60 millions people are being displaced due to economic crisis, threats, climate change and health reasons.

I feel that it is the responsibility of academicians to not only deliver knowledge but to instill humanity and good values in every person. 

The future of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine could be dystopia if human lose its humanity and values. The tragedy of mankind could be averted if we start thinking about us as a whole community and global citizen and working towards equality and improvement of everyone's life.

Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and successful entrepreneur of Tesla, X-Space etc envisioned that for humanity to survive and become interplanetary species, we will need to integrate with artificial intelligence. 

The story of human creation and production of replaceable organs for human use was first written by Mary Shelly in her famous novel called "Frankenstein". It is called the Modern Prometheus for the ability of Dr. Frankenstein to steal secret from nature to create life. In the novel, she pictured the grim consequences of invention without installation of humanistic value.   

George Church, the prominent scientist behind GENOME and ENCODE project, genetic editing using Crispr-9 technology from Harvard University has recently established a start-up company and working in collaboration with Smithfield, the largest producer of pork industry with two billion dollar funding to transform pigs' genetic to be compatible with human for organ replacement. The deficit of human organ supplies are the main driver for this initiative. The subject of human organ transplantation and supply is dire. The idea that this project could avert problems and unethical work with human organ trafficking and killings is noble but would transplantation with animal organs make us less human and drive inequality gap even wider?

Should human resort to animals organ when there are avenues of tissue engineering and regeneration that can be used to bring quality of life?

These are the questions that I would like to address to the younger generation of Malaysians. 

I also would like the younger generation to enjoy reading works of classic novelist in science fictions such as Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melvin as well as our own Ramli Awang Murshid. 

Perhaps we need to read Yann Martel's "We ate the children last" to rethink and revalue of radical medical breakthrough and its possible consequences.

Alas, I feel that we need to contemplate long at this quote in the quest of the holy grail in human tissue engineering, science has made us god, even when we are not worthy as human" - unknown.

 

towerhill botanical garden, MA