The killings of seven civilians in Srinagar in six days mark a grim turn in the situation in the Kashmir Valley. This vicious, mindless violence against commoners, owned up by a group that calls itself the Resistance Front — believed to be a shadow organisation of the Pakistan-based LeT — is yet another reminder of the pathological hatred transnational radical Islamism inspires. The victims include local Muslims who were branded traitors, but the targeting of the Hindu Pandit and Sikh minority communities is unmistakable. Srinagar’s prominent Kashmiri Pandit chemist, Makhan Lal Bindroo, whose decision to stay on through the violent 1990s was seen as a positive omen by the displaced community, was gunned down. The killers used epithets such as ‘RSS stooge’, ‘police informer’ and ‘traitor’ for the victims. Majid Ahmad Gojri and Mohammad Shafi Dar were killed on October 2. On October 7, a Sikh principal and a Kashmir Pandit who had returned to the Valley after taking up a job under the
This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry is for an efficient, “precise, cheap, fast and environmentally friendly” way to develop new molecules using a simple yet novel concept of catalysis — asymmetric organocatalysis. It was awarded to German scientist Benjamin List of the Max Planck Institute and Scotland-born scientist David W.C. MacMillan of Princeton University who independently developed the new way of catalysis in 2000. They came up with “a truly elegant tool for making molecules — simpler than one could ever imagine”. Since then, the process they evolved has led to a “gold rush” in the catalysis field. The multitudes of new organocatalysts developed have helped drive a variety of chemical reactions, in turn accelerating pharmaceutical drug research. The asymmetric organocatalysts have allowed researchers to efficiently produce new molecules with complete certainty of the 3-D orientation or handedness. Molecules naturally present and those synthesised can exist in two forms —
The triumphs of science are best appreciated when they make human lives easier or safer, or simply, offer hope. The first ever World Health Organization (WHO)-approved anti-malaria vaccine must count among those triumphs. The approval marks a milestone in a timeline that records a long and laborious process to grapple with malaria, and somehow make it less of a killer. The vaccine that WHO has approved — RTS,S — has been used in pilot programme participants (children and infants) in Africa from 2015 after it got a nod for this specific use from the European Medicines Agency. This triumph comes at a time of great scientific endeavour, yes, but also notably at a time when it was feared that the progress against malaria was flagging. With this vaccine, which will significantly reduce the severity of cases and prevent deaths, hope has sprung anew that humankind might retard in its tracks a pathogen that has stalked sub-Saharan Africa and several other parts of the world for years now. WHO