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Rethinking Intelligence in Academia: Are Our Metrics Outdated?

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As an extracellular vesicle (EV) researcher, it’s literally my job – and, I’ll admit, a serotonin boost – to keep learning and reading widely. Over the years, I’ve realised that how I think about life often mirrors how I think about my work. Studying EVs as potential biomarkers, a field both innovative and full of caveats, has made me reflect on the idea of “markers” themselves – especially the ones we use to define intelligence. We like to believe that academia is where intelligence is most rigorously defined and fairly evaluated. Yet if we look closely, many of the traits we celebrate as “markers of intelligence” are not only narrow—they’re increasingly obsolete. For decades, certain signals have been consistently rewarded: speaking fluently in jargon, responding quickly under pressure, publishing frequently, affiliating with prestigious institutions, confidently defending established ideas, or asking endless questions in a seminar. These have become shorthand for brilliance – but th...
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Extracellular vesicles and why I love them (Part 1)

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 Sometimes, small is big  Fig: biogenesis of extracellular vesicles in the three domains of life. Vesicle budding indicated with arrows. (a) TEM showing hypervesiculation in the bacterium S. typhimurium. Image kindly provided by Mario F. Feldman (University of Alberta, Canada). (b) SEM showing microvesicles budding from the eukaryote Leishmania donovani. Image reprinted from Silverman et al. (2008). (c) Cryo-TEM of vesicle budding from the archaeon T. kodakaerensis. The protrusion of the S layer can also be observed clearly. (d) TEM of ultrathin cell sections of vesicle budding from T. kodakaerensis. Figures (c) and (d) provided by the authors (Gill, S., Catchpole, R. and Forterre, P., 2019. Extracellular membrane vesicles in the three domains of life and beyond. FEMS microbiology reviews, 43(3), pp.273-303.) I first encountered the term “extracellular vesicles” during a cell biology lecture wherein the lecturer droned on from Alberts, about various organelles being present in...
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The Modern Mute

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Image: A digital artwork from my archive There are silent moments of speculation and wonderment that sift through my mind at its quietest, some pass through the complex maze of thoughts, others either push out shards of creativity and tranquillity or sink me deeper with melancholic musings. Simple observations of mundane details, peculiar questions, strange habits, lost feelings, and oddities all filed away in the crevices of my mind often resembling an antique shop and this week’s addition to the assortment of ‘items’ would be me questioning the power of words.  In a generation that relies on highly digitized platforms claiming to have ‘hacks’ to successfully communicating, I wonder how much of actual human communication much less with words remain in the world.  Why use words when one can easily express the same with emoticons or emojis or e-stickers? Having my own collection of choice stickers and emojis, I too indulge in the modern yet lackadaisical form of communicati...
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The Overthinking Oddity

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  Image: An excerpt from a conversation with a friend A cursory Google search will tell you that anxiety is your body’s response to stress and overthinking a mere side effect or symptom — a statement that may seem astute for your average reader but churlish for someone with the disorder. An entire disorder watered down more than a tall glass of squash for easy understanding or lack thereof. Of the many things that one has learned to normalize in our modern world, awareness about patient dealing with people with such mental health issues haven’t seem to have made the list yet and is still viewed with notoriety instead of reciprocating kindness.  A generation of sufferers focusing too much on the optics of being imperfect social preachers but never owning up to their faults or working on their flaws. WE are a generation obsessed with the idea of positive change yet never having the will or courage to work out the kinks in ourselves and instead choose to live oblivious lives bla...
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Ethics: Mankind's obsolete currency

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  Image Credit:  David Teniers the Younger,  Monkeys in school  Imagine a world without ethics; a world without the weight of the metaphysical morals weighing on our conscience; a world where the repercussions of our actions equate to only fulfilling our needs, with anarchy and acquisitive forces drive the society.   A true dystopian nightmare shearing and pulverizing humanity and with itself the animal kingdom, the ecosystems and the planet. The discourse on ethics often stems from a fundamental understanding of reason; whether a particular set of actions is practical or idealistic or feasible in a given situation often influences the course of ethical action being taken. Eminent 18 th Century philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative binds us to our desires with a sense of moral duty regardless of our desires; a thought experiment that eventually evolved into what a layman would call ‘ethics’. A similar take on moral duty and obligation can be seen ...
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Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

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Picture Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee   My first experience with wildlife was through the pages of a book, ‘The Man Eaters of Kumaon’ written by the eminent hunter, writer and naturalist, Jim Corbett. A second hand, hard-bound with yellowing pages that still remains nestled in my bookshelf, passed down by my father during one such summer vacation as an attempt to make me read anything other than the Harry Potter books. The mesmerizing, tranquil beauty of Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal and the gripping adventures with a tinge of mystique and suspense made an inexplicable narrative for a child who had only witnessed these magnificent feral cats as emancipated and indolent beings in various Zoological Parks over the years.   The vibrant cover image of a feral tiger, our national animal, in its very element, dredging up goosebumps is what I then longed to experience in reality— an opportunity to witness these glorious and feral felines in the pristine wild. In 2015, the opportunity pre...
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A binding tale of dogs, humans and a virus

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  Picture Courtesy: Swagatama Mukherjee Modeled after a soldier’s canvas gown, the image of the Plague doctor, from 17 th Century France & Italy comes to mind during a discourse on fatal zoonotic diseases— a wisp of a shadow of the true carnage caused by elusive microscopic viruses and their infected hosts. Many zoonotic diseases have notoriously plagued and infected various humans and animals since decades. Zoonotic Influenza, Plague, Lyme disease and many more have individually recorded high mortality rates contributing to a sense of paranoia and general fear of stray animals especially bovines, rodents, stray felines and canines. A perspicuous paranoia and fear, keeping us on our toes so as to not contract a possibly deadly disease but often resulting in forming a warped outlook towards these very animals by viewing them all as vicious and feral is something we are familiar with as a society. A very common occurrence of this thought can be seen in the case of dogs who are c...
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