Consider-It Opinion

Mayor's comment "unsettling"

2011-12-23T10:58:00.004+08:00

According to a BBC report following today's earthquake at Christchurch, Mayor Bob Parker said the quake had left people shaken. Ya gotta admire anyone who can keep their sense of humour in a time of crisis.

Wow!

2011-12-08T22:31:00.013+08:00

A breath of fresh air called Cultriot.

And this video. Warning: Are you bothered by heights?

The good, the bad, and the blogly

2011-12-07T18:43:00.006+08:00

Some more great blogs debunking bad science:

RationalWiki
The Biology Files
Science-Based Medicine
Science-Based Pharmacy
Project Reason

Abercrombie & Fitch....David & Michelangelo

2011-11-20T00:44:00.006+08:00

The delicate sensibilities of some good citizens of Singapore were offended recently by a store-front advertisement for Abercrombie & Fitch. It showed the naked torso of a young man in rather good health, as shown below. (Photo from the Straits Times.)

While the young man's genitals were not on display, the righteous watchdogs of the nation felt that there was too much suggestion that he did, in fact, possess such an organ. I wonder whether these same guardians of virtue would object to the exhibition of Michelangelo's David in public view on the same sidewalk. Great art, but -- tsk tsk -- those genitals! Perhaps the young man in the ad could lend David his pants?

TED & Richard

2011-11-07T20:45:00.009+08:00

It's been a while since I've looked at any videos from the superb TED lecture series, but I did recently watch a few, including one by the always-provocative Richard Dawkins. In this video, Dawkins argues for not just atheism, but a vocal, impossible-to-ignore, in-your-face, activist atheism.

Some semi-random browsing then led me to Atheist Movies, and finally Atheist Pictures & Cartoons on the same site. Two of the cartoons I enjoyed are below. (They are free for copying and posting.)

The first is dedicated to evangelicals who insist that the Theory of Evolution is "only a theory".

And the second goes out with all my love to those evangelicals who insist that creationism, or "intelligent design" as it's now called, should be taught alongside (or instead of) evolution.

Sometimes, it's all worthwhile :-)

2011-09-23T15:09:00.005+08:00

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"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

2011-08-30T08:12:00.007+08:00

This paper by John P A Ioannidis came out in 2005, but it's only recently come to my attention. The sobering conclusion of the paper is given in the title, and it has received a fair bit of attention. My first take is that this depressing statement is probably much more true for patient-based studies than for hard-core experimental or "wet bench" science. A more digestible summary of the paper can be found here.

But all is not lost. Some feel that Ioannidis' paper is itself false! Check it out here and here. Ioannidis responds here.

As pointed out by others, perhaps the real take home message is that a simple reliance on p values, especially the enshrined "0.05" cut-off, can be hugely misleading. Remember: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Homeopathy has no clothes

2011-08-29T23:05:00.007+08:00

It boggles the mind that anyone believes in homeopathy. But perhaps those believers don't understand the impossibility of homeopathic principles. Here's a great video clip from Ben Goldacre describing how homeopathy is supposed to work. I found it through another great site on homeopathy hosted by ebm-first.

Bad Science

2011-08-29T21:19:00.007+08:00

A great blog on bad science called....Bad Science. It's hosted by Ben Goldacre who writes the Bad Science column for the Guardian newspaper. I've just finished his excellent book of the same name. Here's a link to his pretty funny talk on the placebo effect.

Evident mistake

2011-06-23T08:50:00.012+08:00

The advertisement below appeared in this morning's issue of the Today newspaper.

Referring to the beautiful and slim creatures in the photograph (who most definitely have relied on the advertised product to achieve their alluring profiles), the caption confidently proclaims, "Our evident. Your assurance." Well, at least the mistake is evident. The advertisement should have said, "Our evidence".

The Today newspaper aspires to be a major English-language daily. Shouldn't it therefore assure that grammatically correct English is used throughout its pages?

In fact, we have a striking irony here. Singaporean newspapers regularly "prettify" so-called quotes from local citizens to transform Singlish into correct English, meaning that the so-called quotes are not quotes at all and should not be placed in quotation marks. By contrast, glaring mistakes like the one in this advertisement are allowed to pass. Something's amiss.

Civilized society?

2011-06-20T12:06:00.011+08:00

I try hard, at least sometimes, to think well of us human beings. Problem is, we don't help our case. Take a smattering of residents of Vancouver in the oh-so-civilized country of Canada. Some people riot because of years of brutal aggression by secret police. Some riot to gain democratic freedoms, or in the hope of a better future for their children. Last week, however, these Canadians found a much better reason to flout the law, vandalize property, and make general asses of themselves: they lost a hockey game. See here.

I could go on, but nobody does contempt better than Canada's veteran political commentator, Rex Murphy. I promise you, it's worth the effort to download and watch this podcast (episode 20) but you can also read it here.

O, would that Singapore's righteous cane might find just application on the backs of hockey hooligans, preferably in the hands of Gordie Howe in his glorious prime.

Baker zu Googleberg

2011-06-14T22:31:00.007+08:00

Well, Germany is not the sole proprietor of high-profile plagiarists who really should know better. The Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Alberta, Philip Baker, has been caught in flagranti. Read here and here.
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20 June 2011

The universe is unfolding as it should. See here.

Science blog "DC's Improbable Science"

2011-04-11T22:17:00.002+08:00

Another great blog. Anybody who skewers (acupunctures?) homeopathy is a friend of mine!

Science blog "Retraction Watch"

2011-03-19T13:26:00.005+08:00

Stumbled upon a recently started blog that tracks retractions of scientific publications. The authors provide some interesting commentary. It's called Retraction Watch.

Warning: This research may be hazardous to your long-term interests

2011-02-13T21:16:00.004+08:00

A colleague alerted me to this web site. It compiles much of the argument against goal-directed research, the kind of government-restricted research which expects you to be able to reply to directives like, "Explain how your research will improve the health of Canadians".

HarmonyWorks!

2010-07-18T12:46:00.030+08:00

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking at the HarmonyWorks! youth conference organized by OnePeople.sg. The text of my talk (which I more or less followed) is given below.

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The question that headlines this conference is, “How will you embrace diversity?”. You may not have noticed, so I will point out to you that I am white, but married to a wonderful Chinese woman. I am therefore pleased to say that I embrace diversity every night! In addition, my parents-in-law live above us, and we have supper together most evenings. My daughter is, of course, a Chinese-Caucasian mix.

That is already a good start toward multiculturalism, but I would also point out that I have two sons from a previous marriage who are a blend of me (very white) and their mother (very Indian).

I guess I inherited a liking for ethnic diversity from my parents. Although they are both white, my mother is a French-Italian Catholic, and my father is an Irish-English Protestant. That makes a real mess of my own heritage, and my poor children are therefore French-Italian-Irish-English-Indian-Chinese-Catholic-Protestant-Buddhist-Hindus.

So my own case exemplifies the largely multi-cultural nature of Canadian society. But it would be a mistake to say that Canada has got cultural integration all worked out. For example, in my parents’ day, it was not looked upon favourably for a Catholic to marry a Protestant. My mother remembers being told as a child not to play with Protestant children or else she would go to Hell.

Given that my mother was exposed to this kind of sentiment, it is all the more remarkable that she grew up to be a genuinely good person with a fervent belief that all people are equal and fundamentally good. The first lesson she delivered to me on this subject was when I, as a small boy, came home one day saying that a store owner had cheated me. However, I didn’t use the word “cheated”. Instead, I used a word that referred to the store owner’s ethnic group. I was about 7; I had no idea that this word referred to an ethnic group, and therefore actually meant that people from this ethnic group are cheats. All I knew was that this word, which was common in my neighbourhood, meant “cheated”. And so I used it.

Now, my mother has a very expressive face. Mother’s do have expressive faces, don’t they? I think if a woman does not start with an expressive face, she acquires one during pregnancy. How else would she be able to torture her children with the merest glance? Now, the facial expression of my mother’s I always liked the least was horror. But that is the expression I brought to her face that day. I learned very quickly and emphatically that I was never to use that word again in that way. It was only some years later that I understood what lay behind that word: feelings of superiority, hatred, bigotry, cruelty and ignorance.

Thirty years later I was raising my own children, and I guess I had some sense that as a society Canada had moved on, and it was very unlikely that I would hear my own boy say something similarly horrifying to me. I was wrong. Lo and behold, my young son was playing with his friend one day and, to my shock, insulted him by saying, “Oh you’re so gay!” After I picked up my jaw from where it had fallen, I took the occasion to drill into my son's head that the word “gay” was not an insult and was not to be used in that manner.

There are other ways I have seen that cultural tensions are alive and well in Canada, some of them I find simply perplexing, while others are tragic. This is well demonstrated by the attitudes to marriage of many ethnic communities in Canada.

Take the young, modern, highly educated woman I know who was born and raised in Canada surrounded by cultures from all over the globe. But her parents were Greek, and she grew up in one of the typical Greek neighbourhoods that are dotted across the country. Despite all her education and all her exposure – at least superficially – to other cultures, she is adamant that she will never marry outside the Greek community. Or take another young woman whose parents are from Hong Kong: she likewise is dead serious that she will only marry another Asian.

Another example concerns one of my graduate students and her fiance. She was a beautiful, kind and charming white woman of Hungarian descent, and he was a handsome man from an Asian community. Both of them were born and raised in Canada. They fell in love and got engaged, but never married. Why? His mother was bitterly opposed to her son marrying a woman who was not from their ethnic community, and put unrelenting pressure on the son to break off the engagement. And so, although he loved his fiance very much, he broke off the engagement to please his mother. Now I’m not here to say the young man was wrong or right. But I am pointing out that the level of racial integration that we seem to see in Canada is, to some extent, illusory.

My last example is a tragic one, this time from the Canadian province of British Columbia, near Vancouver. A young woman with Asian parents but born and raised in Canada fell in love with a young white man. Not long after they started living together, her father stabbed her to death. Such murders have the twisted name “honour killings” and there have been 12 of them in Canada since 2002. We see here the fierce emotions and sometimes deadly consequences brought about by a clash of cultures and cultural values.

So why, with so many different cultures living side by side, does Canada produce people and communities which have much stronger ties to the cultures of their ancestral homelands than to Canada itself. The problem with Canada is that successive governments have stressed the acceptance of immigrants while ignoring the integration of those same people. The product, instead of an easy mixing of different ethnic groups, is a mosaic of “ghettoes”. There are Italian neighbourhoods, Jewish neighborhoods, Greek, Indian, Haitian, Jamaican, Chinese, black, English and French neighbourhoods, etc. As a result, people do not mingle as much as they could, and the values of the motherland or fatherland tend to be propagated, and the emotional ties are to the local cultural community. In fact, immigrants may become even more tenaciously attached to their traditional values and customs in a new country because they feel threatened by the large sea of alternative cultures around them and in which they are a minority.

This brings me to the wonderful, inspiring success story of a small island-country in South-East Asia by the name of Singapore. Now, I am not naïve. I know that there have been terrible, even bloody, confrontations over race and religion in this region in the past. And we only have to look at some of our neighbouring countries to realize that peace between ethnic and religious groups continues to be a highly fragile entity in this part of the world. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Singapore has managed to achieve a robust and lasting peace between its different communities.

Now I am not an expert on Singapore, but let me tell you what I think are measures taken to achieve racial harmony that border on genius:

● The first and by far the most important is the integration of communities at the level of HDB housing estates. The vast majority of Singaporeans live in HDB flats. The government controls who buys or rents such flats, and has imposed a quota of different ethnic groups living in such public housing on a block by block basis. The policy is known as EIP, the Ethnic Integration Policy. The EIP ensures that you cannot have enclaves of largely Malay, or largely Indian or largely Chinese inhabitants. This has three brilliant consequences: Each ethnic community becomes and remains accustomed to the others; and what becomes familiar is no longer threatening. Second, if tensions rise, or if someone wishes to cause trouble, they cannot do mischief to the neighbourhoods of the “other” communities, because those ethnically defined neighbourhoods don’t exist. The third brilliant consequence is that in the same wet market right beside my home, I can eat roti pratha for breakfast, nasi lemak for lunch and fried dumplings with hot-and-sour soup for supper. Life is good!

● Singapore has also done very well in establishing religious harmony, largely by insisting that devotees practice their religion in private, refrain from proselytizing and, above all, never denegrate another person’s religion. This has worked very well so far, and I find it curious that it has. For example, Singapore has an extraordinarily large number of evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christians are very serious about their religion, and something they take seriously is Jesus’ instruction to “make disciples of all nations”. So, on the one hand, Christians have it from Jesus that they are to encourage people to convert to Christianity, and on the other hand they have it from the government that they should practice their religion in private. These instructions are in direct contradiction, but so far, at least, Singapore’s Christians seem to have worked out a compromise. The success of Singapore’s compromises are nowhere better seen than on South Bridge Road in Chinatown. Where else in the world could you line up, one after another, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, the Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, the Masjid Jamae mosque and then, just a little further down on North Bridge, Saint Andrew’s Cathedral.

While Singapore has had extraordinary success in achieving an enviable degree of racial harmony, improvements are necessary. How do we know this?

● In August of 2008, as part of the Straits Times reflections on patriotism, a Malay-Singaporean journalist by the name of Nur Dianah Suhaimi published a beautiful, articulate and poignant article in which she expressed her feeling that to be a Malay in Singapore is to be a second-class citizen, or, as she put it, the least favourite child. She wrote movingly of the issues facing Malays in Singapore, including deep-rooted prejudices and stereotypes. Clearly, if Nur Dianah Suhaimi is speaking for the majority of Malays in Singapore, then the country has work to do to better integrate the Malay community. I would love to read the views of someone from the Indian community on the matter.

Well, in closing, I thought I might reflect on a couple of my experiences of Singaporean culture.

● "Have you had your lunch? Chi bao le ma?" That’s how you can tell a cultured people – how they treat the important things in life, like food. The French wish someone well at the start of the meal – bon apetit. Singaporeans wish them well at the end. What do Canadians say? “Pass the salt.”

● Funnily, this same kind of courtesy doesn’t seem to be extended by Singaporean drivers to pedestrians. I’m not defending jay walkers, but thinking of places like car parks where pedestrains must necessarily share the same “road” as drivers. In such places, there are no zebra-stripe crossings and pedestrans are obliged to cross “roads” to get from A to B. It is here that Singaporean drivers seem to be ruled by the law of the jungle that goes something like, “I am in a big powerful car that can crush you flat, so I have the right of way. I drive. You wait.” To mitigate this unfortunate bullying, I suggest that every time a driver forces a pedestrian to wait for them to cruise on by, they should lower their windows and call out, “Have you had your lunch?”

Sticky accelerator pedal in Singapore

2010-04-02T16:28:00.014+08:00

One morning in early January of this year, I was driving my 2008 Toyota Corolla Altis to work, heading west on the AYE. At one point I wanted to pull out and pass, so I pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor. To my horror, when I removed my foot from the accelerator pedal, it stayed firmly on the floor. The car continued to accelerate rapidly and only by strongly applying the brakes did I avoid slamming into the vehicle ahead of me. For several seconds I had to steer an accelerating car while applying the brakes -- not trivial, as it turns out. It was only after several kicks at the stuck accelerator pedal that it finally released and I regained control.

It took me an amazingly long time to bring the car into the service station (that's me), but when I did, they performed a careful check and gave me two expected answers: First, none of their tests, neither the test drive nor the computer analysis, showed any sign of a problem. Second, my Toyota was assembled in Thailand and therefore did not carry the faulty mechanism responsible for sticky accelerator pedals in Japan and North America.

To the Toyota representative's credit, he did not in any way suggest that I had accidentally kept my foot on the accelerator pedal or some such thing. We can also rule out that the pedal was trapped by the car's floor mat.

I have driven on the expressway many times since then and, when the road is quite clear, I have tried putting the accelerator pedal to the floor. The problem has never been repeated. But this is not unexpected based on the accounts of others who have undergone similar scares.

Nonetheless, the disturbing thing is that it happened. I would be greatly interested to know if anyone else in Singapore has had this rather terrifying experience.

A tough time to be gay in Uganda

2010-01-04T19:56:00.006+08:00

The American evangelical church has implicated itself in proposed legislation in Uganda that seeks the death penalty for homosexuals.

And this.

Protections still needed

2009-09-02T20:41:00.003+08:00

A New York Times editorial brings to light some surprising facts. Some basic protections for gays and lesbians are still lacking from American federal law.

Gay men and lesbians still largely stand outside the [civil rights] division’s protection. If a hate crime law covering them is passed soon, as appears likely, the division should use it aggressively. Mr. Holder should also press Congress to pass the first federal law against job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

If you'd asked me to bet, all my money would have said that these federal laws were already in place.

Need I say more...

2009-08-20T08:19:00.009+08:00

Took this photo from a car while on Bukit Batok West Ave 5. In case you can't make it out, the sign on the back of the truck reads, "Safety First." Whose safety?

Unlikely writer

2009-08-19T21:59:00.003+08:00

A very interesting guy and enjoyable blog here. So, Billy, you want to be a scientist?

Unlikely advocate

2009-08-19T21:49:00.008+08:00

This article from the New York Times describes a surprising advocate for same-sex marriage.

I had written about this, too

2009-08-09T21:48:00.006+08:00

Interesting that another Singaporean touch also involves the verb "to have". I have noticed that it is remarkably common for undergraduates to use the past perfect tense in a context that requires the perfect tense instead. Both tenses use the auxiliary verb "to have", but the meaning conveyed by one vs. the other is quite distinct.

For example, say a student has just left an assignment in my pigeon hole and wishes to notify me of this fact. More often than not, they will express themselves by saying, "I had left my report in your pigeon hole." What they should have written is, "I have left...". But from what I can tell, for many Singaporean undergrads, the perfect tense (I have left; I have washed; I have written) just doesn't exist.

By the way, I like English grammar. Consequence of getting old, I guess. But I'm no whiz at the nomenclature. I can hear that something is wrong when someone uses the past perfect when they should be using the perfect. But to identify each of these tenses by name? I had to look them up.

I've to write about this

2009-08-08T20:29:00.008+08:00

Every now and then I'm reminded of a word-use or phrase that I only stumble upon in Singapore. In the last hour, I've twice come across the use of the contraction "I've" used in a way I haven't seen anywhere else but here or in old English. For example, "The list offers both comfort and security but at perhaps 1/3 or even 1/2 the price I’ve to pay in S’pore."

Certainly in North America, and I'm pretty sure most anywhere in the Commonwealth, this sentence would have been written, "...I have to pay in Singapore." In other words, when "I have to" is being used in the sense of "I must", it is always written out in full. Except in Singapore.

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Well, a quick Google of "I've to" retrieves early hits in Africa and India. I wonder if this represents the independent misappropriation of the contraction in each country, or whether it's a carry over from colonial-era English.

Fitting In

2009-08-07T21:00:00.008+08:00

This one appeared in the Sunday Straits Times on July 7th, 2009, and was my last column for the Ex-Pat Files. Just too many other demands between parenting, professoring, and husbanding. It would be nice to come back to it some time, if ST will have me.

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I moved to Singapore in the last days of July, 2006. Nothing prepares you for living in a place except living there. And you only get to know people by working with them and, at least in the case of a professor, teaching them.

It’s been three years now. If you’ve read any of my previous columns, you’ll know that I have enjoyed much about life in Singapore. I know I complain, but that’s somewhat tongue in cheek. (Why let the facts spoil a good grouse?)

My enjoyment of Singapore comes in no small measure from a sense, however tenuous and fragile, that I have made a home here. I’m not fooling myself. No Singaporean will ever see me as “one of theirs”, regardless of citizenship. But there are areas in which I have made connections that are important to me.

I suppose most of us like to fit in. Some do this by imposing their wishes, standards and behaviours on those around them. They don’t fit in so much as force others to fit them. That’s something I was never good at, though life would be easier if I could. Instead, I naturally try to accommodate.

This motivation to accommodate is assisted -- and I would guess this is true for many ang moh. –by a feeling, close to guilt, that I must make amends. On one hand, I must atone for the injustices wrought by the white colonial imperialists who are my forbearers.

On the other, I must counter the perception that the boorish hoards of over-paid ang moh enjoy The Good Life on the backs of hard-working Singaporeans. I’ll leave it to you to decide how much of these feelings is justified and how much should be treated by a qualified professional.

I have already written about how the birth of my daughter here in Singapore has given me a personnel stake in this country. My work has also provided another couple of opportunities for true engagement.

One such opportunity involves the people in my lab, a team of technicians, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students and undergrads. They come from Singapore, China, India and Malaysia, and together make it a pleasure to come to work each day. Although they may see me as “boss”, they are the ones who have given me the gift of acceptance.

Another area is in my teaching of this country’s children (and, no less important, those from abroad). Of course, university students are young adults, and most of the Singaporean guys in my courses will have done two years of National Service, meaning they have seen more of adult life than I have. But each gal and guy is also somebody’s child.

Like mothers and fathers everywhere, Singaporean parents want the best for their children, and that includes the best education. So whether a student has freely chosen to come to NTU or has felt the heavy hand of parental authority pushing them there, I have been given a trust. That trust is one motivation to try to teach well.

The other motivation is pure terror. If you think I want to suffer the derision of a theatre full of pretty young women and cool guys, you don’t know me very well. Maybe that’s why I try to inject humour into my lectures. Better to have the students laughing at something on the projection screen rather than at me.

But the humour really does serve a purpose. Any teacher faces – or should face -- the problem of keeping their students focused on what is being taught over a grinding two-hour lecture. Very few students can do it without some help. I certainly couldn’t when I was an undergrad.

That’s what the humour provides – a bit more oxygen to the brain at the right moment so that the student is actually awake when you deliver the important stuff. The real trick is to make the humour reinforce what is being taught. When I can make that happen, it’s quite a rush.

The students have responded with great generosity and real appreciation. They have allowed me, a foreigner, to tickle their collective funny bone and, more importantly, allowed themselves to partake in my enthusiasm for science. That doesn’t make me a local, but it sure helps.

And just in case you think I’m a softy: No talking in class!

Two for Thio

2009-07-24T20:32:00.012+08:00

What a relief that Dr. Thio Li-Ann has cancelled her plans to teach a course on human rights in Asia at New York University's law school. The drawn out brouhaha would have been to Singapore's lasting embarrassment.

I find it remarkable that Dr. Thio, like many others in Singapore opposed to rescinding the law criminalizing homosexual acts, invokes the argument that the views of the majority within a society must prevail. The argument is so unsound, so demonstrably flawed, it is astounding that anyone would be brave enough to use it. A couple of examples:

1. In neighbouring Malaysia, the majority would consider the "bumiputra" policy, which gives preference to Malays over their fellow citizens of Chinese and Indian descent, to be justified. How many Singaporeans would consider the policy to be morally defensible, despite the views of a majority of Malaysians?

2. In 1861 in the Southern United States, a majority within society approved of the practice of slavery. That same year saw the outbreak of a terrible civil war between the forces of the Confederacy and those of the Union over this issue. History now judges harshly that majority of Confederate society that sought to maintain slavery.

Dr. Thio and her society might like to consider on which side of history they will come down.

Larry Kurdek

2009-06-13T20:19:00.005+08:00

Gregory Herek has just posted on the passing of Larry Kurdek, an influential researcher whose work focused on gay and lesbian couples.

Driving me nuts

2009-06-13T18:14:00.007+08:00

After two-and-a-half years of taking public transport to and from NTU campus, I broke down last December and bought a car. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I couldn’t see myself driving on the left side of the road and living to tell the story.

Surprisingly, it really wasn’t that hard. I would like to think that this means that I am an excellent driver and am not - contrary to all indications – a closet dyslexic. But it may simply be that my driving is so bad, it just doesn't matter where on the road I’m supposed to be.

The good thing about driving in Singapore is that no one will ever notice. My fellow motorists are just as bad.

My most ironic driving experience in Singapore took place on Bona Vista North, not far from Biopolis. A white van coming toward me in the opposite lane performed an illegal, James-Bond-like U-turn into my lane right in front of me, forcing me to slam on my brakes and review my last 52 years of life. With my right eye plastered against the windshield, I could easily read the exhortation printed on the looming back of the van: “Drive green. Drive safe.” I wasn’t safe, but I was definitely green. I wonder if that counts as an eco-friendly driving experience.

That was unusual. There is another threat to my well-being that occurs regularly: lane changing. You’re supposed to signal before you change lanes, right? And the driver behind you in the next lane, upon seeing your courteous flashing light, is supposed to be equally courteous and allow you to merge into traffic ahead of them.

I haven’t made a scientific study of this, but my impression is that signaling to change lanes will instead induce the driver behind me to accelerate, thereby squeezing me out and blocking my lane change. I’d say this happens to me 5 times out of 10. Who knows what quivering maniacal brain cell provokes a driver to do this. Maybe it’s the ugly face of kiasu once again. The driver cannot bear to “lose” the space ahead of him and come in second, or so it seems to him.

But even if most of us car drivers should have our licenses revoked, we are no match for Singapore’s motorcyclists. Maybe because my nose was usually in a newspaper in the blackened depths of a taxi, I never really paid much attention to motorcyclists. Now, having experienced the driving habits of thousands of them, I have been given a startling insight into the psychology of a broad swath of this country’s society.

Here’s the scoop: While I can comfortably surmise that many Singaporeans would prefer to postpone their deaths as long as possible, I can tell you that motorcyclists in this country are a breed apart. They have a deep, festering, devilish, death wish. How else can you explain their driving habits?

For example, I am regularly forced to be an unhappy participant in the following scenario: Imagine that I am driving down the middle lane on the PIE at 80 to 100 km per hour. There is a car on my left and a car on my right. And what happens now? On both my left and right, between my car and the cars on either side, I am passed by motorcyclists.

Let me repeat that: I am passed – passed! -- on both sides! The space between my car and the cars around me is only slightly wider than the dashed line dividing the lanes. The bikers have about 10 centimetres between their handlebars and the cars that flank them.

Does this perturb them? Do they think twice? Do they worry that a driver might veer by a few centimetres as they pass, perhaps startled by the bikers themselves? If we but graze each other, my car will suffer a little smudge that I can remove with a bit of spit and my shirtsleeve. But the biker will be reduced to a thin red slick, long enough to be seen from outer space.

I guess human beings have a need for some form of Russian roulette. For some, it’s smoking. For others, it’s motorbikes. For me, it’s trying to change lanes on a Singaporean expressway – without hitting a motorcyclist.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University. He has lived in Singapore for almost three years. Be careful. He’s on the road.

The Science of Cowboys

2009-06-07T12:44:00.010+08:00

I have come to accept ants as a part of my life. I meet them in my kitchen, my living room, my bathroom. At work, I wonder why my cursor is moving by itself across the computer screen, until I note that it has six legs. And when I go to the hot water dispenser, a battalion of them is waiting to walk away with my coffee cup. The bright side to this forced sharing of living and working spaces is the opportunity to contemplate the extraordinary organization of ant societies: multiple individuals with defined roles toiling together for the good of the whole.

Like ants, my body is a community (and not just for germs). It comprises trillions of microscopic living entities called cells, which work together in a hierarchical, coordinated, and interdependent fashion for my wellbeing. It is this same cellular nature that underlies the promise of stem cell therapy.

The cells of the embryo have an ability to divide and grow to produce all the organs and tissues of the body, a capacity that cells lose long before adulthood. (An exception is the liver whose marvelous regenerative ability has kept our bars and pubs a little fuller than they might be otherwise.) When in need of new organs, therefore, we must turn to transplants and the attendant miseries of finding suitable donors, surgery, and tissue rejection.

But a change is in the works. Last year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded, in part, for the discovery of embryonic stem (ES) cells, which, like the cells of the early embryo, have the ability to produce all of the body’s tissues and organs. Until recently, ES cells could only be obtained from embryos. Now, however, methods are in place to obtain ES cells from an adult.

One such procedure involves nuclear transplantation. Let me illustrate using the humble but honourable bao zi (Chinese steamed bun). For the uninitiated, bao zi are white roundish buns stuffed with one of various fillings. Imagine inserting a syringe into the centre of one bao zi, extracting its red-bean filling, and then injecting it with green-bean filling.

The bao zi structure roughly resembles the cell, whose outer cushion of cytoplasm occupies the same peripheral position as the white bready portion of the bao zi, and whose inner nucleus is like the bao zi filling.

The production of ES cells by nuclear transplantation is similar, using fine needles to remove the nucleus of a one-celled embryo (the fertilized egg) and replace it with the nucleus of an adult cell. Remarkably, the environment provided by the embryonic cytoplasm reprograms the genes within the adult nucleus to an embryonic state. The result is an ES cell whose nucleus and cytoplasm are from different sources. My illustration breaks down, since the ES cell multiplies, while the bao zi gets eaten. Well, every model has its limitations.

Still, at the end of the day you have adult-derived ES cells and a full belly, so everyone’s happy, right? Not so fast. There is strong resistance from some quarters to “destroying” a human embryo by removal of its nucleus. In addition, the very early one-celled human embryos required for this technique are in drastically short supply.

So how can we get around these ethical and practical concerns? British scientists reported last week that they had successfully combined the cytoplasm of an early cow embryo -- a fertilized cow egg, to be precise -- and an adult human nucleus to generate “almost human” ES cells called cytoplasmic hybrids. While this process does not destroy any human embryos, it raises ethical problems of its own, since this human-cow ES cell may be capable of developing into a person. And if forming an entire individual is not likely for the moment, the ultimate goal is to use such cells to regenerate tissues for human recipients.

So what’s the big deal? While everything else in these cow-human hybrids may have a human identity, there is one component that will always retain its “cowness” - the mitochondria. These structures, which bear a passing resemblance to the Indian sweet jalebi (my mind is never far from food), serve a variety of important functions, not least of which is to provide energy from respiration. Mitochondria inevitably come along with the cytoplasm, like your mother- and father-in-law come along with your spouse. Thus, these recently created hybrid ES cells have cow mitochondria.

It could be argued that we have already used baboon hearts in transplant operations, and anyone who could gain 10 extra years of good living at the cost of carrying around a few cow mitochondria in their heart or pancreas might be happy to stick a finger in the eye of some arm-chair ethicist who would deny her or him the added days to walk the Earth.

But do we know whether such cytoplasmic hybrids will behave fully like human cells? The mitochondria are now known to control many more functions than previously appreciated. Perhaps most interestingly, mitochondria seem to influence longevity. Now, the natural life-span of a cow is around 20 years, and there is evidence that this limit is partly determined by the mitochondria. This then raises the possibility that cow mitochondria could affect the life-span of an organ, tissue or recipient.

Human-cow cytoplasmic hybrids will not enter the clinic any day soon, and further experimentation will address these concerns. In the interim, we can give some thought to a catchier name for these cells. Hu-Moo deserves some consideration, as does Cow-Boy. And what about turtles? They live for hundreds of years. I think I’ll take some of their mitochondria, thank you very much! But I’ll have to defer further, uh, ruminations. About two million ants are ferrying my bao zi to the windowsill.

The Pecking Order

2009-06-04T21:16:00.019+08:00

Whenever I step into an elevator, I’m careful to say hello. There’s an awkward silence if nobody’s actually in the elevator, but otherwise my fellow ascenders or descenders will usually respond in kind.

Saying hello is an easy gesture. Giving a kiss is not. A peck on the cheek is a common greeting in some cultures, but virtually absent in others. And among its practitioners, there is remarkable variation. Consider:

North Americans – One kiss on one cheek. A quick hug is more likely. The peck can be given to very close friends and family, but is never exchanged between acquaintances or heterosexual guys (unless, as in my case, you have finally learned that it’s OK to show your father that you love him).

The French and Québecois – Two kisses, one on each cheek. These are exchanged between friends and family members, and even strangers of the opposite sex when, say, introduced at a dinner hosted by common friends. Less often between guys, but by no means unheard of. (Alert! As the wife points out, in some areas of France, the obligatory number of kisses can jump to three or four.)

Germans – Not much kissing here. If a German has his lips moving toward your cheek, he has probably tripped. No wonder they hate the French. And vice versa.

The Swiss – Three kisses, one on each cheek and then back to the first. This involves a lot of coordinated head bobbing. If you’re inexperienced, you risk a concussion.

Argentineans – The true egalitarians of the kissy greeting. Everybody, but everybody, gets a kiss.

Things work pretty smoothly if you know the expectations of the person you’re greeting. But in cross-cultural settings, it can get tricky. A North American male living in France will pick up the habit of kissing on each cheek. For example, he will kiss the French hostess when arriving at a dinner party in her home. But what does he do when introduced to a North American woman at the same party? Shake hands? Kiss once? Kiss twice?

This can lead to some awkward moments, like when you decide to lean forward to give a woman a peck on the cheek, but she extends the five fingers of death into your solar plexus. Or when you commit yourself to kissing both cheeks, but she stops at one. Then, your puckered lips, carried by the momentum of the premature launch of the second kiss, go hurtling into the void above her shoulder with some chance of achieving escape velocity and orbiting the Sun.

So where do Singaporeans fit into the world’s pecking order? As in all the other Asian cultures I know, Singaporeans do not normally greet with a peck on the cheek, though Malays may respectfully kiss the hand.

There are consequences to plopping a kissy Canadian into Singaporean society. A while ago, an Italian friend came to my office to bring a gift for my newborn daughter. On such a warm occasion, she and I did the natural thing (for us) and kissed on each cheek. However, my Singaporean technician was in my office at the time, and she looked like she would rather have a tooth extracted than witness this unseemly breaching of personal space.

Another time, two Chinese Singaporean students, a guy and a gal who had gained some work experience in my laboratory, brought me a little gift of appreciation. Now, I lived in France and Quebec for 26 years before moving to Singapore. On such occasions during this time, nothing would be more natural than an innocent exchange of cheek-kisses (as opposed to cheeky kisses) between a male professor and a female student.

So my reflexes kicked in and I went to give the young lady a peck. I leaned toward her. She leaned away. I took one step forward. She took one step back. I raised an eyebrow. She further recoiled, her eyes now filled with something that looked exactly like horror. Being a perceptive fellow, I recognized this as a sterling opportunity to be more sensitive to the local customs, mumbled an explanation, and shook the guy’s hand.

OK, so I have to learn to be a little more reserved. No point in scaring people or inviting a lawsuit. From now on, the only kisses I give will be labeled “Hershey’s.”

Mark Featherstone is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, and has lived in Singapore for almost three years. He is accepting kisses.

Straits Times pushes back

2009-05-30T19:46:00.013+08:00

Although I was disappointed that the Straits Times decided not to run my article on the science of homosexuality, today's editorial by Straits Times' Editor Han Fook Kwang reveals the kind of reaction (and here) the newspaper has to anticipate when it publishes on such issues. It is more than a little brave of Mr. Han to upbraid Thio Li-Ann, a Member of Parliament, since it is my understanding that any employee of the Straits Times serves at the government's good pleasure.

By felicitous coincidence, Thio Li-Ann is the daughter of Thio Su-Mien, the "feminist mentor" behind the AWARE takeover. The reporting of the facts of the AWARE imbroglio led some Singaporeans to see Thio Su-Mien's actions in a negative light. How fortunate for her that her daughter has access to such a high-profile podium from which to chastise the media for their "biased" coverage.

If anyone knows where to get the full text of Thio Li-Ann's speech, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Lassie go clone

2009-05-30T09:03:00.010+08:00

This one appeared in the Sunday Times in February, 2009, under the title, "An exact clone? There's no such thing."

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Culminating what we might call the, ahem, dogged persistence of scientists to expand cloning technology, a Korean company has announced its first order for the cloning of a pet. More precisely, a Californian woman has contracted to pay US$150,000 for the cloning of her dog, the now-departed Booger. Knapping the cloning debate in delicious irony, Booger was a pit bull terrier, perhaps the most unattractive dog breed on the planet, except, of course, to their owners. (I mean socially unattractive. I’m sure the deceased is – uh, was – um, will be -- a handsome dog.)

The company in question, RNL Bio, made headlines in 2005 with the production of the world’s first cloned dog, an Afghan hound by the name of Snuppy. This was a remarkable feat but should be kept in perspective. A number of mammals have been cloned, including mice, rabbits, cats, cows, goats, and sheep. Remember Dolly? Cloning is difficult, but so are in vitro fertilization and the production of transgenic animals. With the right equipment, facilities and personnel, they are all doable. And with customers willing to drop a cool $150,000, they are affordable to some, kind of like tourist trips to outer space. (With increasing orders, RNL Bio expects the price for cloning your furry friend to drop to a bargain-basement figure of US$50,000. Personally, I’ll wait for a company with a name like Canadian Cloners that offers 2 for 1.)

In terms of the animal that is the end result, cloning bears some resemblance to the twinning process by which cow embryos are halved to produce identical twins. Cloning is just at the far technologically-assisted end of the continuum. Unlike twinning, in which the duplicates are born at the same time and are clones of each other (just as for identical twins in humans), pet cloning involves the establishment of a new creature that is genetically identical to an existing one. This is an unnerving departure that sparks passionate debate in the pro and con camps

What leads someone to clone their pet? Is the goal the resurrection of a loved companion? If so, the buyer may regret their $150,000 purchase. A clone is no more an exact replica of the “parent” than are identical twins truly identical. The clone will not undergo embryonic development within the same mother, it will not experience exactly the same environment within the womb, and the owner will be older and will necessarily interact with the new pet differently. The caregiver may have more or less time to spend with the animal, may be in different life circumstances, may have changed domicile, city or country, may now have greater or fewer children in the house, may have other pets, etc. In addition, the life of the maturing clone will be subject to chance events that may be quite different from those experienced by the first animal, say a house fire, a nasty neighbour, or an infection. Together, such variations will ensure that the cloned pet will not be a reincarnation of the old one, but will rather have its own distinct character.

In fact, all of this is borne out, no pun intended, by experience. We know from studies of identical twins separated early in life that DNA alone does not exclusively determine personality. These twins, who are Mother Nature’s clones, have distinctly different characters despite sharing exactly the same DNA. More to the point, we now have an example of a cloned cat named cc (for carbon copy, though I prefer copy cat) who is not in the least interested in living up to her name. While cc is a svelte extrovert, Rainbow, the calico from whom cc was cloned, is an introvert in need of a calorie counter. Cc does not even have the same markings as Rainbow, since the establishment of coat pattern in calicos is inherently variable. There is thus every reason to expect that a doting owner hoping to regain a lost pet through cloning is in for a let down.

Having said this, we live in a world where some human beings go to bed hungry each night, while some canines are provided coifs, pedicures, and the latest doggie fashions by their beaming caregivers. Seen in this context, pet cloning will not go away. There is a market, and the market will win in the absence of legal constraints.

Is Singapore a potential sector in this market? Why not? We have a rich biological and biomedical industry in this country (much better than in Canada, for which I am truly grateful), and some residents who could afford the service. Moreover, Singapore is a leader in stem cell research, which is to say, the science of cloning. And if pet cloning is not done in Singapore itself, well, South Korea is not so far away. Of course, all such ventures will rightly come under the purview of the Singaporean government, but it seems unlikely that pet cloning would pose an ethical or political problem for the powers that be. Clones, after all, are not genetically modified organisms.

Is this the start of a slippery slope? Only the most alarmist would fear an easy slide from replicating dogs and cats to replicating people, however much we may enjoy movies like Bladerunner. But other issues of lurid interest will arise. For example, we can envision dog shows in which every trainer would have started with genetically identical puppy clones. Since all would begin with the same raw material, the individual talents, or bank accounts, of each trainer could be better revealed through the results they produce with the “same” dog.

Or imagine an industry based on a popular TV show starring man’s best friend, the modern day equivalent of Lassie. I can see the advertisements now: a 1 800 number scrolls across the bottom of the screen while a feverish announcer barks that the first 10 callers will receive a $10,000 discount on their purchase of a real Lassie clone. (You too can own Lassie! Available at a veterinary resort near you!)

And what about insurance for cloned pets? Would any company provide it? Would any owner be willing to pay the sky-high premiums? Would the “parent” animal’s complete medical history be mandatory? Would the cloned dog be required to undergo monthly trips to the vet, or have its genome sequenced to reveal genes predisposing to this or that disease? It seems that all the commercial and ethical woes surrounding insurance and the genetic testing of humans would swirl around cloned pets as well, with the added complication of a considerably shorter life span. For how many years can you insure a dog worth $150,000? Considering that the premature death of Dolly the sheep may suggest less-than-perfect health for cloned animals, insurance companies may choose to wait for many years until the effects of cloning on an organism’s health can be anticipated.

For the moment, we are still in the early stages of pet cloning, and Booger’s replicant has yet to be born, let alone named. Since almost anything would be an improvement on Booger (in Canada, at least, the term refers to thick, greenish emanations of the nose), and since the true spirit of Booger will not be resurrected, even in a clone, I think a name change is in order. As a great lover of Korean food, may I suggest Kim-Chee?

Postscript
Booger was indeed successfully cloned. And how! Here are all the little mini-Boogers with their foster mom.

But soon it wasn't just the pups who were getting a lot of media attention. Booger's former owner, the woman who paid for the cloning service, was recognized by a British journalist as being none other than the infamous Joyce McKinney.

The Genome Debate

2009-05-29T11:22:00.016+08:00

Singapore has invested heavily in modern biomedical sciences including genomics, so when Prof Steve Jones, a highly respected geneticist at University College London, dissed a major (and expensive) type of genomics study in Britain's Daily Telegraph, it grabbed the attention of my editor. At his request, I supplied the article below.

In the closing paragraph, I allude to a public feud that got some ink a few years ago. The spat was between Mr. Philip Yeo, then the Director of A*STAR, and Dr. Lee Wei Ling who is the Director of the National Neuroscience Institute. The exchange between the two was carried in Singapore's newspapers, and was granted extra titillation quotient by Mr. Yeo's most un-Singaporean bluntness, and Dr. Lee's blue-blood pedigree. (Dr. Lee is the daughter of the nation's founder, Mr. Lee Kwan Yew.)

Dr. Lee decried the vast sums of money being funneled toward molecular genetics studies at the expense of other clinical issues that were just as pressing. The example she gave was head injuries, hence my closing comment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I once got a book of poetry as a birthday gift. When I couldn’t find a poem listed in the table of contents, I realized the book was missing about 70 pages, and about the same number of pages were duplicated.

Don’t put the newspaper down. I promise not to talk about poetry. The real subject involves DNA, genes, genomes, and a recent controversy that has pitted some big names in science against each other; people like Professor Steve Jones of University College London and Dr. Mark Walport, Director of the enormous UK-based charity Wellcome Trust. The controversy reverberates in Singapore, given our extensive investment in genetic research and some high-profile figures on opposite sides of the divide, including Dr. Lee Wei Ling, Director of the National Neuroscience Institute, and Dr. Edison Liu, Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore.

The controversy focuses on whether the vast sums of money invested in one avenue of genetic research, broadly known as genomics, have yielded a reasonable bang for the buck.

To understand the debate, we should have a sense of what we mean by the terms genome and genomics. Genes are made of DNA. Because the 4 building blocks of DNA -- abbreviated A, G, C and T – are arranged in a string one after the other, we often use the analogy of the sentence. Every gene is a sentence composed of four letters repeated in a way that is unique for each gene.

If genes are sentences, then genomes are books. The complete set of DNA, carried by each cell of your body, is known as the human genome. It is our book of life.

Each of us has our own copy of this book (the genome), but my copy is not identical to yours. There are small changes and mistakes in each person’s copy of the book. Some mistakes are shared by many books, while others are rare. Some books also have pages repeated or missing, like my poetry book

A major goal of genomics (the study of genomes) is to find which mistakes are responsible for disease. For example, we could ask, “Which mistakes are responsible for increased risk for diabetes?” But to determine this, we would have to compare the genomes of healthy versus diabetic individuals.

This creates a problem. It has been very expensive, time-consuming, and labour-intensive to read even one complete genome. But it takes the comparison of thousands of genomes to locate the mistakes that are the cause of a disease. So how do we get the answer minus the expense?

Well, there’s a trick. Instead of reading the entire genome – the whole book – from thousands of individuals, scientists have instead just sampled every page. This way they have built up a collection of mistakes that might be found on any given page. For example, they may have found 3 mistakes that can occur on page one. Many people will have the first mistake on page one in their copy of the book. Others will have the second. Still others, the third.

Now researchers can get a much quicker and cheaper answer to a different question: “Which kind of page one do diabetics have?” And they can do this for every page in the book. Once they are confident that diabetics have, say, a different kind of page 204, they can be reasonably sure that one of the sentences (genes) on that page is the actual culprit. They can then focus their efforts on getting the full sequence of just that page, and pinpoint the change that causes diabetes. It’s like narrowing the criminal’s whereabouts to one block before starting a door-to-door to search. The technical name for this approach is Genomewide Association Study (GWAS).

Fantastic, right? So what’s the problem? First of all, I have to clarify that “cheaper” doesn’t ‘mean cheap. A recent GWAS funded by Wellcome Trust involved 120,000 patients and cost many millions of dollars. So, if that kind of money – much of it raised through taxes and charities – is disappearing into GWASs, there is an expectation that the research should deliver.

And there’s the rub. Some scientists feel the work has paid off and should be continued. Some feel it has been a good ride, but now a strategic change is required. And still others feel that the whole thing has been a wasteful much ado about nothing.

Prof Jones has caught international attention for a letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he laments the “waste” of money on GWASs. He argues that GWASs have identified very few genes that play a major role in human disease. Instead, many implicated genes make only small contributions, and there are scores or hundreds of such genes for each disease. You can develop a drug to help someone if their disease is caused by one defect. But you cannot do so if it is caused by hundreds.

The quibble with Prof Jones is that he does a good job of dramatizing the disappointments of the GWAS approach without giving sufficient weight to its successes, and without genuinely evaluating the future for genomics research.

First, the successes, as pointed out by Dr. J. N. Hirschhorn in a recent commentary: GWAS has provided major breakthroughs in our understanding of a form of adult blindness (age-related macular degeneration), Crohn’s disease (a debilitating inflammatory bowel disease), the determinants of height (relevant to problems of child development). And just this week we have learned that we can add autism to the list.

Second, even where GWAS does not reveal a gene with a major effect, it can tell us which biological process is at fault. This is beautifully validated by the observation that GWASs have identified genes already known to be effective targets of drugs currently on the market.

Third, as argued by Dr. David Goldstein of Duke University, the next-generation approach in the genomics arsenal is, in fact, whole-genome sequencing of healthy and sick individuals. Yes, I know I said it was too slow and expensive. But that was then, and this is now. It took years to complete the first human genome. Now, one person’s genome can be sequenced in a day. Yes, it’s still expensive, but the time and cost are dropping dramatically. With whole-genome sequencing, the key genes will stand out like an ang moh in Ang Mo Kio.

Last, it is important to note what Prof Jones does not disparage. He does not in any way suggest that molecular genetics, molecular biology, drug discovery and other areas of genomics – the kind of research in which Singapore has invested so handsomely – is a waste of money. His beef is strictly with GWAS and its offspring. Of course, if you ask me whether Singapore has done the right thing – I’m glad you asked – my answer is an unqualified yes.

This is not to devalue other areas of research in human health. Whether my little daughter succumbs to a genetic disease or suffers a head injury, I want well-funded research to bring her the best treatment possible. After all, I have a lot of bedtime stories to read her, preferably from books with all their pages.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He acknowledges a useful article, “Genes show limited value in predicting diseases”, by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times (16 April, 2009).

The Avoid Deck

2009-05-25T22:07:00.001+08:00

A term that I have added to my vocabulary since arriving in Singapore is “void deck.” For you newcomers, this is not what you might think. A void deck is not the level on a ship where you find the toilets. Nor does the term derive from Star Trek: “What it’ll be today, Scotty -- the holodeck or the void deck?” Rather, it is the name for that breezy expanse that is the ground floor of many HDB apartment blocks.

I may be mistaken, but I believe the motivation for creating such open areas was to provide a meeting place for the local community. There may have been a concern that when people moved from kampongs to HDB flats, there would be less contact and a consequent deterioration of social life. The void deck would then provide a place for people to hang out, meet and mingle.

Whatever the reason, I know for sure that void decks are regularly called into service for that great rite of passage -- The Wedding.

My condo is bounded on three sides by HDB flats, and a morning walk will sometimes take me past a void deck bustling with much unloading, cooking and arranging in preparation for a wedding reception or some other celebration. I’ve noticed that the sound system is set up and tested early, reflecting the importance of music for the festivities.

That’s because, as I’ve learned the hard way, Singaporeans love to sing. Which is great in itself. Most people in the West don’t sing enough. Singing per se is not my problem. My problem is volume. Loudness. Decibels. The unremitting pounding on my eardrums unleashed by singer after singer from the reverberating void deck, now transformed into The Boom Box from Hell; The Concrete Concusser; The Impossible to Avoid Deck.

So far as I can tell, the music at a Singaporean wedding is considered a flop unless it can be heard in Johor Baru. I’ll bet that one or two hours before the celebrations begin, an uncle, brother, cousin or friend heads over to sit on the shore on the Malaysian side. Someone back at the void deck cranks up the music to an ear-splitting blare, and then phones the relative across the Strait.

“Can you hear it?”
“Mmm…nah.”
“Wait…OK, I doubled the volume. Can you hear now?
“Yeah! Great!”
“What? Say again? I can’t hear you! The music’s too loud!”

Having determined the appropriate assault from the loud-speakers, the party can begin. The nice thing about Singaporean weddings is that it's a time to make the tone-deaf members of the family feel accepted. So for the next four or five or ten hours, no one between Johor and Bintan can escape the off-key warblings of every musically challenged relative, right out to 14th cousins.

This may be useful in helping ships to navigate through fog in the Strait of Malacca, but because my apartment is a lot closer, I feel like I’m at the wedding myself. More accurately, I feel like I’m inside a loudspeaker at the wedding. Since this makes me a de facto participant, I think I have the right to head over and say, “Gosh, all this singing’s given me an appetite. Any left-overs? Can I kiss the bride? Strangle the karaoke guy?” But I don’t. Nobody would hear me anyway. Instead, I take it for a while, then barricade myself in the living room, shove towels under the door, plug my ears, and sing anything I can remember. Probably "Silent Night".

Something similar happens at West Mall when the floor of the cavernous central space is turned over to a stage from which one man -- a lone, sadistic singer -- attempts to render hundreds of shoppers permanently deaf. I’m never sure what the occasion is, though I suspect there is at least one national “Make the Customer Suffer Day.” Being inside the shopping mall, it’s more difficult for the sound to reach Johor. That little problem is easily overcome by turning up the volume even louder than at the wedding. As a result, the singer’s voice now batters the walls and balconies at every level with an atomizing barrage that makes you long for the peace and quiet of a jack-hammer at a rock concert.

At first glance, you think some shoppers are enjoying it, because people on all four floors are leaning over the railings and looking down toward the stage. But I think they’re desperately warning the guy that if he doesn't stop, they’ll jump.

I pity the store clerks who are bound to stay at their posts while their eardrums turn to tofu. I wonder how they restrain themselves from lynching the malicious crooner. Maybe they console themselves with the thought that it’s only a matter of time till they exact their revenge. At the next wedding, they are the ones who will be holding the microphone.

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Nanyang Technological University. He will come to your wedding if you let him sing.

Singapore hairlines

2009-05-25T22:05:00.001+08:00

Hair cuts used to be cause for great anxiety. When I was a teenager, like most of my friends, I didn’t want my hair cut at all. When, at a parent’s insistence, we had to get a haircut, the deepest hope was that the barber would spend 20 minutes spraying, cutting, combing and fluffing, and leave our hair looking just as it was 21 minutes earlier. It never quite worked out that way.

During graduate school, I let my hair grow long and wild. This was great, except on one or five occasions when I was addressed as “mademoiselle”. That may explain the beard I grew not long thereafter.

At some point, I lost this concern with my hair. I am now much more adventurous (read: lazy) and will let anybody have a go at it. If the barber gets it wrong, well, as my mother always said, the nice thing about hair is that it grows back.

Here in Singapore, I have tried a few barbers/hair stylists, usually on the spur of the moment when the need for a haircut coincides with the appearance of a barbershop in my field of vision. I’ve tried the 10-minute haircut express types, the 20-minute wet market types, and the 40-minute shopping mall types.

They have a lot of things in common. Scissors, for example. And radios playing songs with incomprehensible lyrics, whether in Mandarin or English. And they all have my face in the mirror in front of me. I think that’s why they give me magazines to hide behind, assuming that the constant sight of my face must be tough even for me.

I’ve kind of settled on one of the shops in the wet market near home. I never remember what it’s called, but I know how to get there, and have finally committed to memory the owner’s name. That would be Pauline, a pleasant and professional woman who knows more than enough English to understand my few instructions. Pauline is, I believe, Singaporean. Some of her staff are homegrown, and one or two are from China.

I now ask for Pauline specifically, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I went there in November of 2007 for my pre-wedding haircut, I walked in and announced my usual no-strings-attached reason for invading the premises: Is anyone free to give me a haircut? Two pretty stylists in skin-tight jeans (not that I noticed) figured out what the ang moh wanted, got over their shock, and put me in a chair.

Through a combination of mimes and the frequent repetition of “short” I conveyed the full extent of the plans for my hair. This quickly prompted looks of consternation and a rapid-fire exchange of Mandarin between them. I watched the three of us in the mirror, while listening to the debate rage behind and above me -- a kind of out-of-body experience. My wife, who is also Chinese, then came in, and soon the three women were firing volleys of dangerously pointy Chinese characters over my uncomprehending and vulnerable Canadian head.

Only late in the conference did I understand that the fuss concerned the irreconcilability of my wish to have a short haircut with the stylists’ conviction that one should never expose the hairline above the temples. Clearly, neither Sting nor Bruce Willis had ever made it big in their part of China. I let them have their way. Our wedding photos show a happy bride and groom. She looks stunning. He looks…odd. But it’s often that way, isn’t it? The ugliest guys get the most beautiful women.

After a few more tries at Pauline’s salon, I’ve realized that she is really the only one who knows what to do with an ang moh’s mop. I now stick my head in the door and quickly glance around for Pauline, while tossing a non-committal smile and nod at the pretty stylists who are as anxious to avoid me as I am to avoid them.

If Pauline is busy, I come back another time. I never phone ahead. That would violate Featherstone’s First Law of Hairodynamics: a barber’s suitability is inversely proportional to the need for an appointment.

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He should really do something about his hair.

Raising a stink

2009-05-25T22:00:00.000+08:00

When you’ve had about a thousand years too much civilization, you develop some strange eating habits. That’s what happened to the Chinese. The list of their unusual culinary preferences reads like a buffet menu on Noah’s Ark.

At the insistence of my wife, who is Chinese, I have promised not to mention the really eccentric stuff, like scorpion, dog, and that restaurant in Beijing entirely devoted to male organs of reproduction. So I won’t.

Instead, here are some of the regulars: chicken feet, black fungus, jelly fish, sea cucumber, bird’s nest (the saliva of swifts), century egg (egg cured in tea, wood ash, quicklime and salt), snake, chick fetus cooked in its yolk, fish head, swim bladder, and fermented tofu. And don’t forget that medicine made from a parasitic fungus and the caterpillar that is its home and lunch.

I’ve eaten many things from that inventory, and they’re either pretty good or curiously innocuous. Fermented tofu, affectionately known as stinky tofu, is addicting. If you’ve always wanted to try mixing dark chocolate with Roquefort cheese but never got around to it, just give stinky tofu a try.

Now, you’d think with a palate as varied and courageous as that, your average Chinese citizen could eat and enjoy anything, right? Wrong. In my experience, most of them share a deep repugnance toward Indian food.

On one occasion in Singapore, we had gone out for steamboat (Chinese fondue) with a Chinese friend. When the after-dinner conversation turned to Indian food, a look of mixed fear and disgust came over his face, and he spoke these immortal words: “The thing about Indian food is, you just don’t know what you’re eating!” I wish I had thought to chirp up with, “Hey, wasn’t that pig intestine delicious!”

Now, don’t think I’m beating up the Chinese. I’m beating up Indians too. I’ve never seen a people so cruelly enslaved by their own cuisine. If an Indian doesn’t get curry for two or three days in a row, it’s really not safe to be around him or her. She’ll start to acquire a haunted, crazed look in her darting eyes as she plots who she has to kill to escape from this hell that doesn’t serve Indian food.

You can offer an Indian a choice of 200 of the tastiest dishes from around the world, and they will still ask for their own food, even if the only Indian dish is dal chaval (curried lentils and rice).

Till the last two words, his eyes will be glazing over and his face going slack with resignation. But when he finally picks up the name of that most humble of all Indian meals, he will break into a wide smile, wag his head, and ask for the dal-chaval.

But in multi-cultural Singapore, everything is different. Here, the Chinese love Indian food, and the Indians love…Indian food. And I love it all. It will be a sad day when I run out of new dishes from Singapore’s opulent culinary scene.

To my astonishment, I have even started to like durian, the smell of which I once described as three-days-under-a-hot-sun road kill. Actually, “like” is not the right word. It’s more like indulging a perversion.

Just this evening, I did what I swore to my wife I would never do: under the cover of darkness, I smuggled some durian into the apartment, ran to the open-air nook behind our kitchen, and devoured the flesh around one seed with what I would call guilty and masochistic lust.

With a deviant’s cunning, I then sanitized the scene of the crime. I tossed the gnawed pit down the garbage shoot, and wrapped the rest in 200 plastic bags, stashing them in a deep, dark corner of the fridge.

Now I’ve washed my hands, brushed my teeth, gargled, opened every door and window, and am waiting in a white-knuckled sweat for my wife to come home. Problem is, I keep emitting great, foggy burps of durian. I’m dreading the moment she steps through the door, wrinkles her nose, and says, “What’s that smell?” Then I’ll have to shrug my shoulders and tell the truth: “It’s your stinky tofu.”

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian, and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He’ll pay you to empty his fridge.

Peanut Butter Olympics

2009-05-25T21:58:00.000+08:00

The Olympics that have just passed gave me a great opportunity to identify with the country I live in. When Li Jiawei, Feng Tianwei, and Wang Yuegu were battling toward the finals against South Korea, I was riveted to the television set. And there was no way I was going to miss them play against China, even though their chances of winning were remote. My enthusiasm must have been partly spurred by the fact that, at the time Singapore played South Korea, I don’t think Canada had yet won a medal. Being a deeply patriotic and loyal nationalist, I immediately started cheering for Singapore.

The success of the women’s table tennis team has validated Singapore’s investment in foreign-born athletes, and will surely encourage similar efforts for additional sports. At the same time, the powers that be will be looking to cultivate sports that are appropriate for native-born Singaporeans. They should choose wisely. Fortunately, table tennis is something to be proud of. Not so for all Olympic events.

It boggles the mind - at least my mind -- that certain competitions are in the Olympics. At the tippy-top of my Ridiculous Olympic Sports list is beach volleyball. If beach volleyball qualifies as an Olympic event, then there should also be medals for best beer drinking, best barbeque, and, of course, best tan. Singapore would be a strong contender for all three, but our successes would only add to the glamour of beach volleyball. Big mistake.

The next on my list is synchronized swimming. I think the first question that people should ask themselves when deciding whether a sport qualifies as an Olympic event is, “Do the competitors look hilariously funny?” Clearly, nobody asked themselves this question regarding synchronized swimming. Whether it’s their cute little feet poking up and down through the water, as if their heads were stuck in underwater buckets, or those nose pins that make them look like piglets recovering from plastic surgery, synchronized swimmers are a hoot.

If synchronized swimming can be an Olympic sport, then so should synchronized table clearing. Imagine a women’s table clearing event. Singapore already has thousands of aunties training day and night in hawker centres and food courts across the island. And what about synchronized shopping? If Singapore is looking for a home-grown gold medal, then synchronized shopping is where the smart money goes.

The bronze medal for ridiculous sporting events is tricky. It’s so difficult to choose between steeplechase, race walking, and hammer throw. For sheer guffaw value, race walking reigns supreme. Singapore should not even think about investing in race walking. But if slow-walking could be introduced, then we’re unbeatable.

As for steeplechase and hammer throw, I just don’t get the point. Right now, many readers are saying, “But those events are really difficult!” I’m sure they are, but many things are difficult. Does being difficult really warrant a slot at the Olympics? I find it difficult to get up in the morning, but nobody gives me a medal each time I do it. Likewise for walking up or down an escalator (see a previous column), or trying to exit an MRT train while 200 people insist on entering through the same door at the same time.

What is it about putting puddles of water on the track that makes steeplechase such a compelling sport anyway? Don’t children run through puddles all the time? If difficulty is what elevates all these sports to their revered status, then I have a great idea for steeplechase. Instead of puddles of water, try peanut butter. It is definitely harder to run through peanut butter.

In fact, peanut butter could be used to raise the difficulty of many sports. Let’s see if those buff bodies look so cool on the beach volleyball court when the sand is gone and they are ankle deep in peanut butter. Now that would be a breakfast of champions.

And if it’s difficulty we want, steeplechase events could be held at Boon Lay MRT station during evening rush hour. The competitors would have to begin at the 179 bus stop, dodge the usual two million commuters till they reach the kiosks outside the station, buy -- and eat -- one sticky rice dumpling wrapped in lotus leaf, bound up the stairs, jump over the uncle or aunty singing to music from a boom-box while accurately landing a one dollar coin in their cup, leap over the ez-link gates and sprint for the escalator.

At this point, most competitors will still be stumbling, battered and bruised, toward the sticky rice dumpling stall. But it’s the escalator which will eliminate all but the truest Olympians (you really must refer to the earlier column). The first one to finally enter an MRT train would be the gold medal winner. Extra points would be awarded for preventing alighting passengers from exiting, and double extra points if that passenger is a pregnant mother pushing a baby stroller. Singaporean steeplechasers would hold the record for centuries.

In the meantime, I’m thrilled that we have Li, Feng, and Wang. Canada did manage to pick up several medals, I’m pleased to say. To boost their standings in future Games, I’m considering a few events tailor-made for Canadians. Peanut-butter hockey has a certain appeal.

Mark Featherstone is Canadian, and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He loves peanut butter.

More better next time

2009-05-25T21:56:00.001+08:00

It happened. No matter how much I want to deny, bury, erase or repress, it happened. A few days ago, my wife and I were choosing between shades of yellow paint, when I casually blurted, “I prefer the more darker one.”

Even as the defiling words were leaving my lips, there was a crazed shriek from whatever part of my brain holds grammar dear. The ground shifted under me, the room began to spin, and my left eyelid started to batter my cheek with maniacal convulsions. I, me, moi, had said, “more darker.”

With the possible exception of the Bee Gees, there are few things as noxious to my ear as that particular grammatical pollutant that makes an unholy alliance of “more” and a comparative adjective ending in “er.” You know, things like more longer, more easier, and -- that crowning heresy -- more better. As a result, I’ve got used to being the one that corrects this abomination, not the one who inflicts it.

One of the great pleasures of my career has been to interact with students from all over the world. However, this pleasure comes with an evil twin: having to bear with English spoken to varying degrees of proficiency. Over the years, my unfortunate students and I have suffered together as I have corrected their oral and written presentations. They all learned that there is one error that makes me writhe in pain: let’s call it the “er-gregious” fault.

While at McGill University in Montreal, I confronted the er-gregious affliction often enough to recognize its potential to sneak up behind and insinuate itself into my speech. But I kept vigil over my linguistic landscape and had been successful in beating back its onslaughts.

Alas, with my move to Singapore, I have lost my equilibrium. The er-gregious fiend has assaulted me so relentlessly, my grammatical immune system has been permanently compromised. Yes, I have Acquired Grammar Deficiency Syndrome. Hence, choosing the colour of my daughter’s bedroom became the occasion for the full manifestation of the depths my English has sunk to. I mean, to which my English has sunk.

Do I have a right to be so viscerally repelled by the er-gregious miscreant? Absolutely not. My English has never been perfect. I regularly muddle who versus whom, and have only recently learned how to pronounce “concomitant” correctly. Perhaps more relevant to the Singaporean situation, although I’ve been studying French for 50 of my 52 years, I still make hopelessly basic mistakes. But I just can’t help it; the er-gregious fault makes me wince. That little twinge caused by the confusion of “loan” and “borrow” is but a distant second.

Other turns of phrase common in Singapore are innocuous, pleasant or entertaining by degrees. The ubiquitous “lah” doesn’t even register anymore. I don’t think I’ve used “lah” myself, but felt a weird sense of belonging when a friend caught me replying in the affirmative with, “Can.” A Singaporean’s use of “fanciful,” where I would say “fancy,” is charming. And hearing a crowded bus described as “squeezy” is great fun. I can live with “last time” as a term for “in the past,” but I would rather not go to the cinema to see a “flim.”

Now, before I am inundated with hate mail telling me that I should go back to Canada -- the more sooner, the more better -- let me affirm my great admiration for the many citizens of this country who speak three, four or five languages: Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, English and others. To take a small example, on a flight to the States, I once sat beside a Singaporean who was a native Tamil speaker, and who addressed me in perfect English while correcting and expanding the list of Chinese characters I was studying.

With that in mind, I, with my one-and-a-half measly languages, have no business complaining about people not speaking perfectly what may be their third, fourth or fifth language. In future, I’ll be more circumspecter.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, and has lived in Singapore for two and a half years. He does not want to know how many grammatical errors you found in his column.

Of Goddesses and Grandmothers

2009-05-25T21:09:00.001+08:00

While the differences between East and West may be diminishing, especially in this consumer paradise called Singapore, there is one stark disparity that I expect will never go away: the quality of the airlines.

Not long ago, I flew to Los Angeles via Hong Kong. The first leg of the trip was with Singapore Airlines and was wonderful, not least because I had the choice of 40 or 50 movies to watch on the screen built into the seat-back in front of me.

In Hong Kong, however, I had to board a United Airlines flight for the trans-Pacific marathon. When I sat down, the only thing facing me was a tray table. A quick and horrified glance around the cabin identified a single, postage stamp of a screen located on the ceiling, a screen that would display a single movie for the entire cabin at a fixed time. And it was sure to be -- shudder -- a family film.

I sensed a primal scream gestating somewhere deep in my throat. I felt I must have stumbled through a portal into a nightmarish dimension consisting solely of ancient aviation technology. This was a biplane.

From that trip onward, I vowed that I would NEVER cross an ocean on anything except a Singapore Airlines flight. To my everlasting sorrow, however, flying with them is not an option once you’ve touched down in North America. Hence, for my recent trip back to Canada, I booked with Delta for the 90-minute hop from New York to Montreal.

The journey from Singapore through Frankfurt and on to JFK had been great. Good food, lots of movies and those exquisite gifts of God to Man - the Singapore Girls. Singapore Girls are especially appreciated by a Canadian male since, through no fault of his own, he has often been obliged to fly with Air Canada.

Air Canada, following some misguided, politically correct, non-discriminatory policy, employs flight attendants from all walks of life. By that I mean that many of Air Canada’s stewardesses are “lifers”, grandmothers who have long since stopped caring about your in-flight comfort, and are just counting the peanut packets to retirement. There are no Singapore Grandmothers, for which I bow my head and give thanks.

Anyway, I arrived at JFK in good time for my connecting flight. I cleared customs, collected my bag, changed terminals and, after a lengthy check-in, reached the gate and waited for Delta’s boarding call. At about 2:20, well past the expected boarding time, a Delta employee announced that because a crew could not be located -- what?! -- the flight to Montreal would be delayed until at least -- AT LEAST -- 3:30 pm.

That was OK. No need to get upset. I was exceedingly jet-lagged, and could use the time to catch 40 winks. So that’s what I did, rousing myself around 3:00 pm and inquiring whether the Montreal flight was ready for boarding. The answer was that the flight had already boarded and taken off.

Feeling like I had woken up in an episode of the Twilight Zone, I gaped, stammered, and then babbled that the flight was not supposed to leave till 3:30. All the answer I got, from a woman who did not take the trouble to look at me, was that I would have to re-book.

It’s never pleasant when a grown man cries, especially when I am the grown man, so I swallowed hard and spent the following two hours re-booking onto the next flight. After endless pacing, standing, sitting and pacing again, Delta called us for boarding almost an hour late. We then sat in the plane for another hour while they searched for a pilot to fly the damn thing. I’m not making this up.

I finally reached Montreal 12 hours after landing at JFK. My bag was not so lucky. It arrived another 24 hours after that, just in time for me to hand out Christmas gifts.

As I write this from my hotel room in Montreal, I am acutely aware that I will have to face Delta one more time before sitting down on a Singapore Airlines flight back home. Oh Singapore Girl, West never seemed so far from East.

The writer is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, and has lived in Singapore for two and a half years. He stays in Bukit Batok. His luggage stays where Delta sees fit.

iPhone iDiots

2009-05-25T21:06:00.000+08:00

We have become cell-phone slaves, hand-phone handicaps, mobile morons, Blackberry boobs, iPhone iDiots. No matter how intelligent, how schooled, how full of common sense, we are incapable of judging when it is appropriate to accept a call on our cell phones.

The topic of cell phones and the movie-going experience would illustrate nicely, but I am devoting a whole column to this particular fount of inspiration. In the meantime, how about our willingness to talk on cell phones while driving? People who phone and drive are convinced that their skills are unaffected. This is a powerfully persuasive state of altered consciousness that can be achieved with three beers, two martinis or one mobile.

There is a less dangerous but more brazen use of the cell phone. A few times now, I have been dumbfounded to walk into a public toilet and hear one side of a conversion echoing from the porcelain depths of a cubicle. You know, most of us like to pretend that we’re not really in the cubicle. We stay nice and quiet and hope that other people who come into the washroom will also pretend that we’re not there, even though the cubicle door is closed and our little pigeon-toes peep out from underneath.

But not everyone is like us. There are people who will actually take -- yea, make! -- calls on their cell phones while sitting in a public john. And if that goes on, imagine the extent to which the more discreet permit themselves some surreptitious text messaging. Think about this the next time you go to touch somebody else’s mobile.

But then there are the rarer, unique incidents that make you say, “I can’t believe he’s talking on his cell phone while …..” Not long ago, I approached an automated teller at the Bukit Gombak MRT station and took a position several feet behind a well-dressed business type who was already at the machine.

I had waited a minute or two when the man’s mobile squawked. Lo and behold, I was ushered into my latest epiphany in the form of, “I can’t believe he’s talking on his cell phone while trying to operate the ATM.”

The fella talked non-stop while furiously punching buttons, apparently at random, on the ATM display. The minutes dragged. Thrice his card was ejected as his divided attention led to an electronic breach of protocol, and he had to start over.

Not once did he look back to see whether his mobile dysfunction was delaying anyone behind him. When he finally finished his conversation, he still had a few more beeps to coax from the machine before his money and receipt were regurgitated. With cool nonchalance, he then took his wallet from his pocket, stowed his bills (ensuring that all the edges were trimly tucked and even), returned the wallet to his pocket, and then began to study his receipt.

He remained transfixed. The seconds added up. Finally, I grew terrified that his cell phone might ring and induce him to start all over again with the ATM. So I pointedly stuck my nose in his face (my nose is very pointy) and asked, “Are you FINISHED?” in that clever and superior way that is a substitute for a kick to the privates.

But I had met my match. He immediately drew himself up to his full height (he was pretty tall) and spat out, “You should wait your turn!” There is no good comeback for such gall extraordinaire. I tried to sputter a quick retort, but it was something as lame as, “Oh yeah? Well…well I hope you drop your cell phone in the toilet!”

Anyway, the point is that we just cannot not answer our cell phones. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Singapore’s falling birth rate is due to a chronic inability to ignore a mobile no matter how passionate the moment, a form of contraception that we might christen “call interruptus.” I don’t think there’s any remedy fo... Um, excuse me. It’s my cell phone.

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He’s lived in Singapore for two years. Don’t phone him after 10 pm.

Tanjong Burger

2009-05-25T14:00:00.000+08:00

My congenital lack of a sense of direction is rendered all the more stark by my wife’s prowess in this domain. I’m not complaining (much) because she has led us on some wonderful expeditions in Singapore and abroad. Just recently, she guided me through a four-park hike from Kent Ridge to Mount Faber. If I had been reading the directions, the government would now be telling its troops to keep on eye out for me while they beat the bushes for Mas Selamat. I can hear the officer apprising his men: “Don’t worry. You won’t confuse him with the escapee. He’s white, and according to his wife, will insist that he’s not lost.”

I have lived in Singapore for almost two years now, and am amazed at how slow I have been to orientate myself on scales large and small. At home, it took me 6 months to learn which way to turn after exiting the elevator so as to avoid walking into the swimming pool. My success rate is now a comfortable 70%.

After a year of bafflement, during which I concluded that my wife’s patience is endless, I have finally figured out how to negotiate our local wet market, using the now-familiar hawker stalls as points of reference. Yes, I often take a route three times longer than needed, but I assure you that I am canvassing the menus.

In my own defence, Singapore is not entirely accommodating to an ang mo with a spinning internal compass. Place names continue to be tongue- and mind-twisters. Oh, the unfortunate cabbies who have been struck dumb as I pronounced my intended destinations as Butik Gambok, Loon Bay Way, Ang Mo Kill, or Tanjong Burger.

And for someone raised on designations such as Saint Catherine Street West and Saint Lawrence Boulevard East, it is a formidable challenge to put that “East” or “West” at the middle position in something like “Bukit Batok East Avenue 5.” How many times did I tell a cabbie to head to “Bituk Ballok 5 Avenue East. Or is it 3?” Ah, just take the average and go to 4.

And who decided that the Ayer Rajah Expressway should be abbreviated as AYE instead of ARE? Or that the Kranji Expressway should be KJE rather than KE? Don’t they know I have enough trouble already?

Taxi drivers can tell instinctively that I don’t really know where I’m going. No matter how confidently I tell them which way to turn, they verify obsessively:
“Which way, Mr. Mark?”
“Turn left, please”
“Turn right?”
“No, please turn LEFT.”
“Turn left, ah?
“That’s right.”
“Turn right?”
“NO!”

Perhaps they’ve heard about that famous incident my wife loves to recount at dinner parties. Returning us home one day, the taxi driver asked for directions. Quite sure that I recognized the terrain on my left and right, I beat my wife to the punch and commanded, “Go straight!” I gave her a look, fed by equal parts disdain and chagrin, when she pointed out that “go straight” would put the car into an HDB living room.

I have persevered despite such discouragement, and was recently heartened by my discovery of a quicker route from NTU campus to home. A clever taxi driver confided that we could skip from the PIE to the KJE and take a new exit, avoiding the rush-hour congestion at Bukit Batok Road. Imagine. Me. The possessor of an insider’s knowledge of a shortcut home. I NOT STUPID!

I used the route successfully a number of times, even introducing it to poor, ignorant cabbies who were not as street-savvy. It was somewhat disconcerting, then, when I learned that all the while I had been mispronouncing the name of the new exit, calling it “Brick Lane” when, in fact, it is “Brickland.” Did I mention that my wife was the one to bring this to my attention?

Only mildly chastened -- after all, my “Brick Lane” had got me home, hadn’t it? -- I resolved to memorize the correct name. “BrickLAND, BrickLAND, BrickLAND,” I intoned to myself the next day as I waited for a cab. When it arrived, I delivered the instructions with aplomb, enunciating “Brickland” with such clarity as would bring tears to a speech therapist’s eyes. Then, with a warm glow suffusing my body, a warmth that could only be understood by those confrères who had similarly battled for orientation in a foreign land, I sat back to read my newspaper.

So confident was I, so self-assured in my hard-won mastery of Singaporean topography, that I didn’t look up again until we were on the exit ramp. I searched for the sign bearing the exit’s name, spotted the gleaming, crisp, incontrovertible letters, and called my wife.

“I’ll be a little late, darling.”
“Why? Where are you?”
“Woodlands.”

The writer is a professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, and lives somewhere in Bukit Batok, when he can find his way home.

Escalator Paralysis

2009-05-25T13:52:00.001+08:00

My undercover work began at 6:18 PM, Saturday, July 4th , 2008, at the IMM shopping mall. I was disguised as a pot-bellied, past-middle-age, and overpaid ang moh with nothing better to do (disguised, I tell you), and therefore blended in seamlessly with the unsuspecting locals. My mission? To analyze the behaviour of shoppers using that miracle of modern technology, the travelator -- a contraption more typically seen in airports, essentially a conveyor belt for human beings and their baggage (the difference between the two not always apparent).

IMM’s five stories are connected by four sets of travelators. On previous visits, it struck me that these conveyances provided the most extreme example of a phenomenon I have observed in public places throughout Singapore: Escalator Paralysis (EP). Time and again I have witnessed seemingly healthy individuals rendered immobile the moment their feet come into contact with the escalator stairs. When this happens to a couple who step onto the escalator side by side, not only are they themselves riveted in place, but they block the passage of those lucky few who have retained the use of their legs.

For two reasons, I suspected the full devastation of EP was most starkly revealed at IMM. First, the travelator is very gently inclined and involves no stairs. Second, it takes forever -- OK, it takes 59 seconds, which is damn close to forever -- next time you’re at work, just try standing on your desk and looking straight ahead without moving or talking for 59 seconds -- yes, forever to get from one floor to another. For both reasons, I was sure that only paralysis could force someone to fritter away precious moments of life on this mechanical tortoise.

And so there I was on a Saturday night, surreptitiously collecting data to pass on to the Ministry of Health (MOH). Positioning myself on the second floor, I observed just over 200 people as they came down the descending travelator. I then did the same for the ascending one. For both groups, I scored the number who remained stationary versus those who walked. I did not count people with shopping carts, strollers, or babes-in-arms, nor those who were hopelessly impeded by the corpses ahead of them.

The results? For the “up” travelator, 96% didn’t budge once they set foot on the paralyzing black belt. Now, if shoppers had the full use of their limbs, this number would decrease for the “down” ramp, right? After all, gravity does most of the work. Nope. Same number: 96%. I note that this scourge is race-, age- and sex-independent. People from all, um, walks of life were well-represented by both climbers and comatose. In fact, among the sprightliest were an auntie and uncle well into their 70s, and some kids who figured out how to stay in one spot by walking up the down ramp. (It did look like fun.)

By contrast, the most striking paraplegic was a young man in his early twenties who strolled smoothly onto the belt and then, without a soul in front or behind, calmly endured his 59 seconds of solitude without twitching a muscle.

With my observations duly recorded, I girded my loins and set out to test my ability to march up a travelator peppered with inert beings. I did well for the first five excuse-me’s, simply earning looks that oscillated between shock and sneering contempt. However, two thirds of the way up, I was confronted by a couple and their shopping trolley. The man and trolley occupied two thirds of the passage. There would have been room for me to squeeze past on the left, but there the woman was securely wedged. I’m sure they dearly wished to leave room for the blessedly mobile, but were prevented by EP.

Now keep in mind that some people use the travelator to float past all five floors of IMM. Including transit time between ramps, we are talking about the better part of 5 minutes in which shoppers are idle and defenseless. This is a wasted opportunity whose advantages have been lost on Singapore’s merchants.

Here’s a sampling of the retail bonanza to be reaped by marketing on travelators and escalators: (1) Sushi, except in this case the plates would stay still, and the people would move past them. (2) Haircuts, manicures and shoe-shines. (3) Special extra-slow travelators for fine dining, something like the gastronomic experience on the cable car between Sentosa and Harbour Front.

But there are more sobering concerns. I am particularly worried about a wide-scale and simultaneous break down of escalators and travelator acrosss the island during peak shopping hours. Imagine the trapped thousands requiring air-drops of food, water, medicine and blankets, and the erection of precariously balanced portable toilets.

There is an ironic counterpoint to EP. Although my research shows that most people are prisoners of travelators and escalators (with one exception -- the morning sprint at the MRT station, high-heels no impediment), one hears nary a word of complaint from the afflicted. By contrast, most of us rant bitterly about wait times at taxi stands. It follows that many of those who protest about waiting for cabs are curiously complacent about the hours lost drifting between the floors of our shopping malls. This is a particularly perverse symptom of EP, and one I intend to raise with MOH. Just as soon as I can get out of IMM.

The writer, a Canadian and Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, was last heard to be stuck in an elevator.

Made in Singapore

2009-05-24T23:30:00.000+08:00

My daughter, Sophie, was born on March 3, 2009.

-----

I have needed the attention of Singapore’s health professionals on several occasions. Like that time I cut my finger. I won’t describe my suffering in detail. Suffice to say that this and other close encounters with the afterlife had already given me a highly favourable impression of Singapore’s health system.

But these events, momentous as they were, could not have given me my present appreciation had I not gone through the process of trying to have a baby.

Well, actually it was my wife who was trying to have the baby, but I was very active in a supporting role, and rose to the occasion, so to speak, when called upon to do my bit…so to speak.

My wife has made me promise not to tell you about the surgery she needed for her endometriosis, so I won’t. I’ll just tell you that even getting ready to get pregnant was an ordeal. But the “ordealiness” of the situation would have been much worse if it were not for the remarkable care my wife received from her doctor, Ng Soon Chye.

When the second blue line on the little white stick provided proof positive that I was virile -- I mean, that my wife was pregnant -- she remained in Dr. Ng’s care. I accompanied my wife as often as I could on her visits to his clinic at Gleneagles Hospital, and was always impressed with his rare combination of professional excellence and warmness as a human being. We could not have been in better or more reassuring hands.

Little did I know through that relatively uneventful pregnancy (my wife will say that it was uneventful only for me) how much we would be relying on those hands to see our daughter Sophie brought into the world.

A month before delivery, Sophie was not yet wearing her umbilical cord like a scarf around her neck. In a tremendous feat of the opposite of imagination, I assumed that she would stay that way. We now know that Sophie managed to wrap the cord around her neck not once, but three times.

A week following her due date, Sophie showed no signs of checking out of the luxury resort on the dark side of her mother’s navel. An induction was scheduled for early on March 3rd. That morning began quite pleasantly, particularly so for me because I was not experiencing my wife’s painful contractions.

But soon enough, the nurse started paying extra attention to Sophie’s heartbeat. When Dr. Ng arrived, the seriousness with which he studied the readings made it difficult for me to maintain my nonchalance. Another moment and the decision was made: emergency caesarian section.

One instant I was the good 21st-century husband reminding myself that “we” were giving birth, and the next I was on the fringes of a blur of activity by a crack commando team of nurses and orderlies. In what seemed like seconds, my wife was prepared for surgery and wheeled out of the room. I accompanied her as far as the operating theatre, but could go no further. I blew her a kiss, the doors closed, and the wait began.

Over the next 20 minutes or so, the double doors opened several times to let patients and professionals in and out. Finally, the doors parted and a woman in scrubs was pushing a small trolley toward me. The trolley supported a bassinette big enough to hold a newborn baby.

I took a few steps forward and asked what I already knew: “Is it mine?” Yes, I know you’re not supposed to call the baby “it”, but that was all I could really manage at the time. I was feeling lightheaded and giddy, and seemed to be having the closest thing to a religious experience. One moment Sophie was not in the world, and then she was.

Through all the stages of Sophie’s journey toward terra firma and then during my wife’s recovery in the maternity ward, the care we received from Dr. S.C. Ng and his staff, Dr. William Yip, other doctors, nurses and orderlies -- everyone at Gleneagles -- was second to none. I am deeply grateful. Thank you all.

Singapore is no longer the same for me. She has given me a daughter. Home -- the home I call Singapore -- now embraces three of us.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He has lived in Singapore for almost three years.

Darwin, Durian, and Alfred Russel Wallace

2009-05-24T22:46:00.004+08:00

I recently had the great pleasure of writing for "What's Up", a kids' magazine published here in Singapore by one of my colleagues at NTU, Cherian George. Cherian patiently guided me through a few drafts as I learned how to write for older children in a way that was accessible and yet not condescending. Thank you, Cherian.

-----

Did you ever feel like your ideas were just as good as somebody else’s, but nobody listened to you because you were not as big, or cool, or good looking? You might be surprised to learn that scientists can also get overlooked, and for all the wrong reasons.

We see this in the surprising story of two naturalists, one famous, one not. If I say the name Charles Darwin, you will recognize it immediately. Everybody knows that Darwin is the father of the theory of evolution.

But if I say the name Alfred Russel Wallace, many people may respond, “Alfred who?” Well, that’s a shame, because the theory of evolution actually has not just one but two fathers, and the other one is -- you guessed it! -- Alfred Russel Wallace.

Darwin came from a rich, upper-class family and knew lots of important people. By contrast, Wallace was not well off, and did not have the same social connections. While Darwin was educated all the way through university, Wallace’s family could only afford to send him to elementary school for less than two years.

But the two men were very much alike in being great travellers. We’ve all heard about Darwin’s important trips to the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere aboard the HMS Beagle. For his part, Wallace first explored the Amazon. Sadly, he lost almost all his notes and collections from that trip in a shipwreck, and then spent ten days on the high seas in a leaking lifeboat before the crew of a passing ship rescued him. This didn’t put him off traveling, however, and he later spent a lot of time in the Malay Archipelago, the old term for what we now call Indonesia, Malaysia and...Singapore!

And it was here that Wallace realized how evolution works, and wrote down his theory. It’s exciting to think that our very own part of the world was the inspiration for such a blockbuster scientific breakthrough!

In 1858, Wallace sent his scientific paper describing his theory of evolution to Darwin. He probably did this hoping that Darwin, who knew so many scientists, would help him publish his paper in a scientific journal. For Darwin, Wallace’s paper was a huge shock. He had been working on his theory of evolution for 20 years, and thought he was the only one who had figured it out. Now he knew that he had competition.

It may sound funny to talk about scientists competing with each other, but they do. Why? Because you only get credit for a discovery if you publish it first. So it didn’t matter that Darwin had been working on the theory of evolution for longer than Wallace. Wallace would get all the credit if he published first. And Wallace’s paper was ready. Darwin was holding it in his hands!

What would you do if you were Darwin? I wonder if he was tempted to keep Wallace’s paper a secret, and then quickly write and publish his own. But you know what? Instead, Darwin was fair to Wallace while making sure that he protected his own work. He lost no time in writing down his theory and then gave both papers for publication in the same scientific journal.

So both Darwin and Wallace got credit for the theory of evolution, and the two of them became very famous. In fact, by the time Wallace died at the age of 91, he was probably the best known naturalist in Britain, even more so than Darwin.

So what happened? Why does no one remember Wallace while Darwin’s name is on everybody’s lips? That’s a tough question, and no one is quite sure. It seems that after their deaths, both Darwin and Wallace were forgotten for a little while because of a negative reaction to their theory. When evolution became popular again, only Darwin was brought back into the limelight.

This might be because Darwin had also published a very important book on evolution some time after his and Wallace’s paper appeared. This book, usually called The Origin of Species, was very popular, and may have seemed like a bigger or more important contribution to those who looked back in history. They may have given Darwin more credit, and eventually all the credit!

But this story has a happy ending. Recently, several books have set straight the story about Wallace and Darwin, and you can find lots of articles on the web that give Wallace his rightful place in history.

So a wrong is being righted, and there is no need to favour Darwin over Wallace any more. However, if you would like an excuse to cheer for one of them, here’s a bit of trivia for you: Wallace loved durian. Darwin did not.

The author is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University.

Canadian pizza, Singapore noodles

2009-05-24T22:43:00.003+08:00

I’m forgetting where, or perhaps who, I am. My first few months in Singapore passed with an acute sense of standing out like a sore, pink thumb. But with time, being surrounded by Asians day in and day out, interacting with them at work, in the neighbourhood, and at home (my wife is Chinese, and her parents now live in the same building), I have begun to assume I am one of them. As a result, my first reaction upon confronting my reflection in a mirror is, “Damn ang moh. So big-nose one.”

A variant of this occurs when faced with another white person in the MRT or shopping mall. After a reflexive, “God, I’m sure glad I don’t look like that…Wait. I do look like that,” I fleetingly experience a sense of camaraderie. This sentiment is quickly replaced by an embarrassed reassertion of my independence. I think to myself, “I don’t need an exchange of sympathetic smiles. I’m coping just fine. And I certainly don’t look as out of place as him!…I hope.” Clearly the other has thought something similar, and we pass with eyes averted, trying not to wince from the painful glare of our polished cheekbones.

For a Singaporean in Canada, I wonder what would be the abrupt reminders that she or he is no longer on home soil. Of course, there would be the frequent and annoying compliments from ignorant Canadians (like me) saying, “Your English is so good!” A Singaporean could be excused for retorting, “Why, thank you. So is yours.”

In Vancouver, she might assume that she had turned left when she should have turned right and ended up in Hong Kong. (There are so many Hong Kongers living in Vancouver, I suspect the city will soon hold a referendum seeking United Nations recognition as a suburb of Kowloon.) On the opposite side of the country, in St. John’s, a Singaporean would be amazed to see that drivers obsessively give the right of way to jaywalkers. I once paused on a St. John’s sidewalk to gaze across the street, only to have a car 50 metres up the road come to an abrupt halt. The driver wouldn’t continue until I conveyed through much hand signaling that I would not cross within the next 24 hours.

Our traveler would feel more at home in Montreal, where drivers are concerned about pedestrians the way a bowler is concerned about pins: knocking down as many as possible. But, accustomed to the immaculately kept roads of Singapore, she could be forgiven for thinking she had strayed into the Gaza strip. Montreal’s streets are a pock-marked moonscape of craters large enough to swallow an Austin Mini. These pits, caused by freeze-thaw cycles during the winter months, are affectionately known as “nids-de-poule” -- chicken nests -- the only explanation being that “brontosaurus nests” is harder to say.

After she stopped scanning the sky for bombers, our intrepid voyager would notice the use of French almost everywhere, and would be surprised to spy “nouilles Singapour” -- Singapore noodles -- on the menus of Chinese restaurants across the city. Her bewilderment would only increase when the dish arrived at the table. Char Kway Tiao it ain’t.

But Singapore has a great comeback: Canadian pizza. I suppose I should be used to this. In the USA, you can find a thing called “Canadian bacon.” Huh? Is that the fate of my overweight compatriots? And in France and Switzerland, a supper with friends at which everyone supplies a dish is called, “le buffet canadien” -- Canadian buffet. Do Europeans think this is standard in Canada? “We’d like to invite you for supper. Please bring your own food.”

I couldn’t imagine what this beast “Canadian pizza” might be. A crisp, thin crust topped with moose meat and maple syrup? Maybe with a side order of hockey puck? Turns out that it refers to two pizzas for the price of one.

Yes, we do have two-for-one pizzas in Canada. But don’t jump to conclusions. It doesn’t usually work like that. There are no two-for one deals on cars, houses, or heart transplants. I’ll have to check about Singapore noodles.

Mark Featherstone is Canadian, and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He has lived in Singapore for two and a half years. You can join him for supper, if you supply the pizza.

Catch Cancer Facts -- Yes You Can!

2009-05-24T21:43:00.009+08:00

This was a letter to the editor in response to a column by Dr. Andy Ho in the Straits Times. After it was published, it was pointed out, to my horror, that part of my letter could be interpreted to mean that only sexually promiscuous women get cervical cancer. So in my attempt to correct one misconception, I propagated another. Ah, pride does indeed go before a fall. The version below corrects and extends the letter.

There were other reactions to Ho's article, and reasoned responses to my letter from Dr. Yik Keng Yeong and angry doc, which you can find here and here.

-----

It takes long and patient striving to eliminate medical myths from the popular imagination. It is therefore dismaying that Mr. Andy Ho’s recent column (“Catch” cancer? Yes, you can) will have set back efforts to educate the public on the (non)infectivity of cancer.

Mr. Ho makes only the briefest of references to the core truth, which is that cancer itself is not contagious -- only the viruses that can help to provoke certain cancers. A number of key facts are then lost, overshadowed or misunderstood in the remainder of the article. Here is some of the crucial information missing from Mr. Ho’s column.

1. Very few types of cancers involve a virus. Mr. Ho mentions almost all of them. There are far more types of cancers that, to the best of our knowledge, have no viral or contagious involvement whatsoever.

2. With infections by cancer-facilitating viruses, it is always a minority of infections that result in cancer.

3. Many such cancer-causing viruses act very early in the development of cancer, and infectious virus may not even be detectable once the cancer is full blown, often years later.

4. Though certain strains of human papilloma virus (HPV) most definitely provoke cervical cancer, the cervical cancer cells themselves do NOT produce any virus. This is because the virus inactivates itself from the earliest steps in cancer progression. Therefore, cervical cancer is NOT infectious. Any woman can contract HPV and get cervical cancer, regardless of lifestyle. However, the greatest risk factor for cervical cancer is multiple sexual partners as this increases the probability of developing the sustained HPV infections that provoke the cancer. So a woman can decrease her risk of cervical cancer by limiting her sexual partners. But she will gain nothing by avoiding the company of someone who has the disease already for the simple reason that there is no risk in the first place.

5. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infections can, in a small percentage of cases, lead to the blood cancers noted by Mr. Ho. However, the development of Burkitt’s lymphoma requires that the patient have malaria at the same time as the EBV infection, something that most of us need not worry about. More importantly, EBV is an extremely common and widespread virus. Most of us have already been infected with EBV. In the United States, 95% of adults have had EBV infections. Therefore, if you haven’t had it already, your chances of contracting EBV are more likely to occur on an MRT train than in a cancer ward. Thus, the hospital dietitian was absolutely correct to say that there was no danger in sharing a meal with a patient with Hodgkin’s lymphoma (another cancer whose onset has been linked to EBV infection).

6. Kaposi’s sarcoma is a cancer that has been linked to infection with human herpesvirus 8 (HHV-8) in AIDS patients. I repeat, in AIDS patients. In other words, Kaposi’s sarcoma only arises in patients that have greatly debilitated immune systems. HHV-8 is widespread in some regions of the world without adverse effects. Promiscuous sexual activity increases the risk of contracting HHV-8, so the danger is not hanging out with AIDS patients, but rather lifestyle considerations. If you are infected, you will not be at any risk of developing the sarcoma if you are any where near to reasonably good health.

7. Mr. Ho’s statement that close to one in five cancers is caused by a virus is grossly misleading. The most frequent cancer types in Singapore (breast, colorectum, lung, prostate, ovary) have no viral component whatsoever. A proportion of some other cancers, such as liver and stomach, MAY involve an infection, but here the problem is not the virus (or bacteria), but rather the chronic state of inflammation associated with hepatitis and ulcers. Once again, hepatitis can be picked up in a food court. That’s why we get vaccinated. Cancer patients are not the problem.

From a biological point of view, the mechanisms by which some viruses facilitate cancer formation are fascinating, and provide valuable insights into the ways that cancer arises in uninfected individuals -- the vast majority of cases.

From a clinical perspective, viral involvement in cancer is restricted to a select minority of well-recognized cancers. Not one of these can cause a person to “catch” cancer in any meaningful use of the term.

If Mr. Ho’s article were to prevent a family member or friend from hugging or kissing a cancer patient, it would be a tragedy, since the chances of contracting cancer from the patient, in either the near or long term, are zero.

Mark Featherstone
Professor and lecturer in cancer biology
School of Biological Sciences
Nanyang Technological University

Queer Science

2009-05-24T20:59:00.032+08:00

.
In April and May of 2009, Singapore witnessed an interesting tussle between a well-established women's advocacy group known as AWARE and a group of evangelical Christian women. In a thoroughly sneaky and unchristian hostile takeover, the evangelicals had wrested control of AWARE during regular elections. The sin which apparently justified the takeover was AWARE's position that homosexuality is an acceptable sexual orientation.

The takeover mobilized a significant number of women to join AWARE and oust the evangelicals in a vote of no confidence. Sometimes life is good. During the heated deliberations leading up to the no-confidence vote, one of the evangelicals famously yelled at another woman to, "Shut up and sit down!" Hence, the closing line of the article.

With all the back and forth about homosexuality, I thought it would be timely to write for the Straits Times about what science does and does not say about sexual orientation. To my editor's credit, he encouraged me to work on it . Unfortunately, when my submission was reviewed higher up the chain of command, it was quashed. Apparently my piece would have been seen as "pro-gay", and that was not something the paper could afford at the time. I was miffed, but a recent editorial has given me some perspective.

I thought of the title "Queer Science" all by myself. ALL BY MYSELF, I tell you. Alas, it has already been used as the title of a book by Simon LeVay.

----

I hate bad science. Bad science is marked by poor design, poor execution, poor interpretation, and a lack of objectivity. Bad science knows the answer before the study has begun.

Unfortunately, the debate about homosexuality is a magnet for bad science, as revealed by a review of several controversial issues.

1) Is homosexuality unnatural?
If the term “unnatural” means “not found in nature”, then the answer is a resounding no. Homosexual behaviour is well documented in close to 500 animal species including lions, elephants, giraffes, bison, dolphins and our own group, the great apes. So, yes, “birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.”

Unnatural could also mean a perversion or illness. But two major health care associations in the US, the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) and The American Psychological Association (APA) have stated that homosexuality is not a mental illness.

2) Are homosexuals “born that way”?
There is clear evidence that genetics and the environment within the womb contribute to the likelihood of homosexual orientation.

The best support for a genetic basis comes from studies of identical twins. Investigators have also found that the greater the number of older brothers, the more likely a boy is to be gay. An intriguing but unproven explanation is that the mother produces antibodies to “maleness proteins” presented by her sons in the womb. Each time the mother carries a boy, the antibodies get stronger, and then act on subsequent sons during pregnancy to prevent fully male development. Still other research suggests an influence of hormones.

Twin studies also reveal that many homosexuals are not “born that way”, leaving us to conclude that other influences following birth are at least as important. I stress, however, that social contact with homosexuals is not one of these influences (see below).

3) Can children be influenced to become homosexual?
Not a single study has indicated that children are vulnerable to adopting a same-sex orientation as a result of exposure to the idea of homosexuality or even homosexual role models. Quite simply, the vast majority of children raised by heterosexual and homosexual couples alike grow up to be heterosexual. Pronouncements that it is otherwise are not based on fact. Bad science.

4) Can homosexuals become heterosexuals?
There is not a single study that concludes that sexual orientation is a choice. Assertions to the contrary are baseless. Because it is not a choice, attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation are futile at best, destructive at worst.

The issue is confused by reports of individuals who profess to have undergone a change in sexual orientation; however, the accuracy and credibility of such professions of reorientation are highly suspect. Most so-called conversions are within the evangelical Christian community. Any person wishing affirmation from this segment of society would be under enormous pressure to conform. Whether this “change” represents a true switch to a heterosexual preference, the suppression of same-sex attraction by a bisexual individual, or merely a retreat from sexual expression without acquiring any true heterosexual attraction, is open to debate. Until these valid criticisms are addressed, all we have left is bad science.

The American Psychiatric Association, “opposes any psychiatric treatment…based upon the assumption that homosexuality per se is a mental disorder, or based upon a prior assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual orientation.”

5) Has the integrity of the family suffered as a result of increased tolerance for homosexuality?
There is no evidence that children raised by homosexual couples suffer from an increased rate of emotional or mental problems. The American Psychological Association notes that, “[R]esearch has shown that the adjustment, development, and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation and that the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish.”

When Dr. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family, says that research has shown otherwise (Time magazine, December 12, 2006), he is misleading. He is not referring to comparisons of children of heterosexual vs homosexual parents, but rather to children of heterosexual two-parent households vs. one-parent households. So the studies in question say that it is better to live with two parents rather than one. They say nothing about the consequences of being raised by two homosexual parents. Bad science.

Nor has the family unit suffered in any way that can be traced to greater acceptance of homosexuality. Thus, contrary to the expectations of some, after same-sex marriage was legalized in Denmark, the frequency of heterosexual marriage actually increased.

The Weekly Standard (TWS), a conservative American publication, has proclaimed that more babies were born out of wedlock in the Netherlands after it approved same-sex marriages (TWS, May 31, 2004). They used this to argue that legalization of same-sex marriage causes heterosexuals to devalue marriage. However, a quick look at the data presented on TWS’s own pages reveals that the increase in out-of-wedlock births was already apparent long before the introduction of same-sex marriage. Bad science.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) has cited the report 'Violence Between Intimates,' published by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (November, 1994), as proof that violence is more common among homosexual couples. In fact, the report never addresses this issue, and the terms, homosexual, gay and lesbian are never used. The membership of the ACP, not to be confused with the AAP mentioned above, draws on a minority of American pediatricians, and its mission is to advocate for right-wing, conservative, and evangelical Christian ideology. Not a climate favourable to good science.

6) Are homosexuals more likely than heterosexuals to molest children?
The evidence for this insidious claim is non-existent. Extreme right-wing conservatives such as the Family Research Council have cited several studies as proving that homosexuals are more prevalent child molesters. In fact, a review of these studies by Dr. Gregory Herek , a renowned psychologist at the University of California at Davis, shows that most of them did not even address the issue, while the remaining studies have been misinterpreted. Interestingly, these conservative groups avoid citing studies that show homosexuals are not any more prone than heterosexuals to be child molesters. Bad science.

7) Who can you trust?
If a group uses terms like “traditional values” and “family values” to describe its stance, you should be on guard. These are the calling cards of the right-wing, conservative and evangelical Christian communities, groups that have a long history of crafting pseudo-science to justify their beliefs. Witness the fraudulent work they try to pass off as creation “science”.

Beware of anecdote and vague generalizations. Beware of organizations masquerading as authoritative professionals dispensing scientifically “proven” facts. Look closely at their mission statements and who they represent. Question whether they have reported accurately and interpreted objectively and with scientific rigour. And yes, you should apply all of these cautions to this article and to me.

So make it your business to know the credentials and prejudices of whoever is reporting -- and interpreting -- the results of studies on homosexuality. It doesn’t mean that you have to discount their views outright, but you should be aware.

Whatever you do, don’t shut up and sit down.

Mark Featherstone is a Professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He thanks Dr. Gregory Herek, Professor of Psychology, University of California at Davis, for responding to questions about family violence.

Related links
Change you can believe in? (part one)
...Change you can believe in? (part two)
...Change you can believe in? (part three)
...Change you can believe in? (part four)
...Change you can believe in? (clarification)
A Christian Critique of Homosexuality
Yawning Bread

What's a life worth?

2009-05-24T20:29:00.013+08:00

This column was written for the Ex-Pat Files but not published.

-----

Singapore’s roads have become less safe, the reason being that I have bought a car. Just ask the lorry drivers who almost flattened me last week as I inadvertently chose the most perilous trajectory possible to negotiate the traffic circle where the AYE meets Pioneer Road North.

Apart from my shortened life-span, driving has its advantages. One disadvantage, however, is that I no longer receive my daily insights from one of Singapore’s voluble cabbies. Even though Murphy’s Law dictated that taxi drivers would be most chatty when I most wanted to read in peace and quiet, their conversation was rarely a true annoyance. Singapore’s cabbies are a rich source of information and an even richer source of opinions on everything from NEWater to durians to the government. They taught me a lot, and I miss their willing attempts to educate me.

But there was one regular occurrence during my taxi rides that I will not miss: looking straight ahead at the seat-back in front of me, I would read a small sign stating that my failure to use a seat belt was punishable by a $100 fine. I would then shift my eyes by a few degrees and catch sight of an open-backed lorry packed with foreign workers. They would not be using any seat belts for the simple reason that they had none.

Our respective vehicles would be traveling down the highway at 60 to 110 km per hour. I knew that if I had an accident, I might walk away with bumps and scratches. But if similar trouble befell them, their skin would hit the pavement at a speed sure to sever life from limb. I was white. They were dark. If they were uncomfortable sitting on a hard metal floor, I, in my cushioned, seat-belted and enclosed security, was more so.

After some months of wondering how the transport of workers in the backs of open trucks could be condoned by the modern society I took Singapore to be, the inevitable happened. In August of 2007 a group of workers was flung from the back of a truck resulting in serious injury and the loss of one life.

The outpouring of concern and indignation on the part of many Singaporeans was heartening. The official response was not. One explanation as to why workers were permitted to travel in this dangerous fashion began, “Sir, to reduce business costs…” I couldn’t believe what I was reading. This was an open affirmation that worker safety was actively subordinated to profits. And whether by design or otherwise, it was not the safety of Singaporeans that was devalued in this manner, but of foreigners.

Perhaps around that time, I began to pay more attention to reports on worker safety, or lack thereof. News stories of deaths on Singaporean construction sites and shipyards appeared with alarming frequency. Invariably, those who lost their lives were foreign born.

But it is perhaps the plights of maids -- servants from Indonesia, the Philippines, India and elsewhere -- that struck me most forcibly. Among the many stories of maid-abuse in Singapore, one is particularly stark. An employer, along with her family and friends, implemented a medieval litany of atrocities on an Indonesian maid that included the violent extraction of two of her teeth, pouring scalding water on her private parts, dumping hot wax on her head, clubbing her ear with an iron rod, and caning.

As appalling as this is, the so-called penalties suffered by the perpetrators are more so. The stiffest sentence handed out to date is 26 months in jail. Excuse me? Is this the same country that hangs drug traffickers? Something is seriously out of whack. If we must have the death penalty, then I suggest a swap: drug traffickers should be given 26 months in jail and anyone caught torturing a maid should swing at the end of a rope.

This disparity between crime and punishment is reinforced by a recent incident in which a maid fell to her death from an upper story flat after having been ordered to clean the windows in a manner that put her life at risk. The penalty? A $5,000 fine. A quick calculation suggests that, in Singapore, the life of a maid is worth a large flat-screen TV.

This is not the Singapore I meet day to day. It is not a reflection of the caring and conscientious Singaporeans I work with. So why is worker safety allowed to languish in the ditherings of this or that committee? If Singapore wishes to pride itself as a developed nation, it must resolutely place worker safety above economic considerations, and put some muscle in penalties for imperiling the mental and physical health of foreign workers. Otherwise, whatever the official line might be, the facts speak for themselves: If you are dark-skinned and a foreigner, go sit in the back of the truck.

Postscript
I wrote this piece in February, 2009. Three months later, on May 18th, four foreign workers riding in the open back of a truck were killed in a collision in the Tuas region of Singapore.

Related links
Justice for workers, not quick fixes
migrant workers singapore
asiaone

Hello

2009-05-24T19:59:00.003+08:00

I write occasionally for the Straits Times, Singapore's major English-language daily. Until they get fed up with me, I am a regular columnist in their "Ex-Pat Files" space, to which I contribute every 4 to 5 weeks. I also write for the Straits Times on science-related topics, my sterling credentials being that I am a biologist.

While wearing one hat or the other -- columnist or science writer -- I have experienced the heartbreak of having one of my pieces rejected by the newspaper. Sometimes it is because I have chosen a topic that my editor deems already covered to death, and sometimes it is because I have crossed the line chalked around every Singaporean writer. Crossing that line is the unforgivable sin. To cross the line is to OFFEND SOMEBODY...thunder, lightning, great crashing chords of music, or maybe the shark's theme from "Jaws".

My various articles, accepted and rejected, will follow.