Life

When someone tells you that there is some chemistry between you, I want you to think about some things. What is life but chemistry. During our primary school science days the teacher once asked me what life was. I couldn't answer and he went ahead and read from a text book that life couldn't be defined, that instead we could talk about the characteristics of living things in an effort to  expound on what life was.
As I have grown older, and as recently as last night I have thought about how I could define life. The latest definition I have is : Life is a series of continuous, coordinated and complex chemical reactions whose aim is (a) to produce macromolecules that when combined and differentiated form tissues and organs, and (b) to produce chemicals to modulate the functions of these tissues and organs.
There are several reasons why I came up with this definition. Firstly everything on earth is made up of elements combined to form molecules of differing complexity and which further combine to form every physical thing on earth. As such if you were to go down to the most basic level, all structures within the body originate from some chemical reaction. Then it gets easy. The body has a template called DNA. DNA's chemical structure is given below:

The long and short of it is that from this amino acids are formed. These amino acids combine to form proteins. They can also combine to form other macromolecules like glyco-proteins etc. The other chemicals needed to form everything else in the body come from food, air or they are synthesized by the body. A dead organism's body cannot support any chemical reaction. Any chemical reactions after an organism dies can be traced back to colonization by other living things e.g. bacteria. Thus it would be correct to say that an animal which is not initiating and continuing any chemical reaction in its body is dead!
We say that we give life when we bear children but think about it. We just provide fully functional ova and sperm to combine so that the fetus can be made. A dead person cannot produce life. We are simply continuing a chemical reaction that started when the first atoms were formed!
I once said that the aim of life is simple; to produce offspring, to get nutrition and to survive. These are the important things that every organism has to do in order to survive. And its not surprising that only an organism whose chemical reactions are intact will accomplish this.
This brings me to a question; are viruses alive? For those not in the microbiological field a virus is a simple thing made up of a coat, nucleic acid and some chemicals. Outside the host cell the virus does nothing, it has no ongoing chemical reaction. It is thus dead. Inside a functional cell it  produces offspring by hijacking the host cells amino acid synthesis, it gets nutrition by utilizing the host cell's chemical constituents to produce offspring and it survives. Thus it is alive.
Please comment on my definition of life.

Learning From the Invisible World

We can learn a lot from the invisible world around us. The naked eye can only see so much but once you go to a microscope you begin appreciating the millions of tiny organisms that have the ability to kill us and which have for millions of years.
I want to tell the story of a very famous nasty microorganism; Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The organism is spread from person to person through infected aerosol droplets. One droplet may contain only a few of these bugs.
Once inhaled the bacterium are transported to the lung where they are released from the droplet. But conditions in the lung are not favourable for this bacterium for immidietly it is attacked and ingested by macrophages ( a white blood cell). Now the body may think that it is over. That the macrophage whose main work is to destroy microorganisms has done its job. Think again.
The macrophage then moves to the nearest lymph node. But inside it the bacterium is able to sabotage the main mechanism of its destruction (digestion by lysosomes) and thus this bacteria continues dividing inside the macrophage until it destroys it. The new bacteria invade other macrophages and continue the process of multiplication inside the macrophage and its eventual destruction.
Once the number of bacteria reach a certain level they spill over into the blood stream and cause a bacteremia. The body responds with vehemence using the T-cells (the same ones destroyed by the H.I.V. virus but that is another story) and most of the bacteria are destroyed.
The few remaining survivors travel to a well oxygenated portion of the lungs e.g. the apical lobe and here they wall themselves off and lay low. They lay low and wait. One day when there will be a physical injury to the body e.g. trauma, immunodeficiency e.t.c. these bacteria come alive again and now proceed to wreak the greatest havoc possible on the lungs. It is this stage where you have the coughs, the bloody sputum, granulomas in various body organs e.t.c.
So, compare this to how enemies may want to invade a country. First a few of them arrive with genuine refugees or emigrants and set camp in the country. At the camp they recruit and recruit until their numbers are more than the security apparatus can handle and they spill over into the country and set up bases countrywide.
The government then responds with vehemence and sets up elite units and such. This causes the imprisonment and extrajudicial killings of many of them. The few that survive go underground and lie low. Here they wait. They wait until a day when things go wrong with the country e.g. coups, election violence, riots, popular uprisings e.t.c
They then come out from hiding and ingratiate themselves into the people and consequently into positions of power from where they can control everything without the need for hiding!

Of Development

I was reading Miguna Miguna's book: Peeling Back the Mask: A quest for Justice in Kenya and a comment Raila made got me thinking. In the book when he was defending his choice in the ministries he got under the coalition government mainly water, health, roads, agriculture etc, he told Miguna that these ministries were closer to the people and it is these ministries that interacted with the mwananchi more. It got me to thinking about development in kenya.
Everywhere  we see projects being started and sometimes completed, from roads, classrooms, water boreholes, ports and others. This is well and good but I tend to wonder what will happen to all these nice things in 10, 20 years to come. Will it be the same same story of slow degradation of once new things until 20 years from now you will look at what was once new and shake your head in disappointment?
We have a poor record of maintaining things. An example is about a tree nursery started by a district in Kenya. In the beginning the tree seedlings were beautiful with their lush greenery and health. The soil was tended to every day and they were selling like hot cakes because of their subsidized prices. And then the person overseeing the project got transferred to another place. What happened then was that the nursery was totally abandoned. It was like the workers thought that the nursery could take care of itself because it was so beautiful. Today dried tree stems dot the once beautiful nursery and the greatest irony of it is that the sign board that announced the project complete with the ministry name still stands tall as if saying: "I am responsible for this mess you see here.
There is need for the government to set up a maintenance department in each ministry/department to oversee maintenance of everything that the ministry has done and is responsible of. Some fickle minded people may say that it is a waste of money when that money could be used to start newer projects! This thinking is like that of a man who was crossing a  river. He looked for two rocks and he placed one in front of him in the river and stepped on it avoiding the rushing waters. He then took the other rock and placed it in front of the other and stepped on it. He then took the rock behind him and placed it in front of him and so on and so forth until he was crossing the river at good speed. When he got to the middle he suddenly remembered that the had forgotten a most important thing on the bank he had just left! So in order to get back to the side he had come from he had to stop his forward movement and start moving backward again. That is how development in Kenya is, whenever anyone in the government wants to use a facility or institution that was built previously, he finds that it is gone and he has to build it anew.
The second issue I thought about was how we run development in this country. In this country it is easy to see super highways while on the other hand people are trekking 2 km to buy water in Nairobi. It is easy to hear that a railway line has been funded from JKIA to the city center yet the feeder roads deep in the country side that supply food to Nairobi are un-passable. These leaders are ignoring the basic needs of the citizenry like food, water, housing, health and clothing while creating development projects that even if completed will help the common mwananchi at a later date or never at all! I thought that first you build the foundation first; a healthy, satisfied citizenry, and then you built the ports and the Konza's? And to cap it all, aren't these the responsible ministries that Raila got as part of the coalition government? Do the people at vision 2030 see us achieving it without first catering to the basic needs of the populace?

Language

Today I woke up interested in words (duh). It started with a word that I encountered in a book I was reading. The word was 'Adroit'. I know many of you already know the meaning of this word and I was eager to join the community of the knowledgeable. To be one of those who say: pff, you mean you do not know the meaning of the word adroit? How nescient can you be?
Well I found out that it means adept but while I was leveling in my new found knowledge I found myself wondering at the origin of language.
When the brain capacity of humans increased enough to accommodate language, I bet the first thing those hairy ancestors of ours was use the sounds they were already making to point at objects in their immidiet vicinity. May be 'hool' was used to mean 'that tree over there.' and 'yaaa' to mean that animal over there.
Then as the number of objects to be communicated about increased, these ancestors began using sounds to point out things that were not in the immidiet environment of the communicator. i.e. the ancestor could use ýaaa' to describe the same animal but when the person he was communicating with couldn't see it.
Then using sounds wasn't enough and the artistic of them started drawing the things that he observed; the elephants, the hunts, the hunters etc.
At this time it became important to express the sounds they were making in a pictorial fashion and thus the drawing of a circle that the artistic ones used to show the moon became the pictorial symbol for the sound made to identify the moon. And so the the drawing of a tree became the symbol for the sound 'hool.' And thus written language was formed.
Then centuries came and went and the languages got refined. Different populations developed different languages after they became isolated from their mother population. Some languages became universal when they were taught to far off populations by travelers, colonialists etc. And today languages are still developing. Some are dissapearing and some are developing to incorporate new words and sounds.   
Please be aware that these are only my thoughts and I am no expert on linguistics.