The problem is due to a person’s genetic make-up. Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant illness, meaning that only one copy of the abnormal gene is enough to cause it and an affected parent has a 50% chance of passing it to their child. A faulty gene (due to an original mutation) on the short arm of chromosome 4 is the cause of HD. The gene codes for the production of the huntingtin protein, HTT. HD is a tri-nucleotide repeat disorder, cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) repeats more than the normal range. According to the genetic code, CAG codes for the amino acid glutamine. Usually, a person who has fewer than 36 CAG repeats produces the normal huntingtin protein, while a person with over 36 CAG repeats produces mutant HTT. This mutant HTT, through a mechanism not clearly understood, increases the decay of medium spiny neurons, the latter representing approximately 90% of the neurons within the striatum of the basal ganglia (other areas like the substantia nigra and layers 3, 5, and 6 of the cerebral cortex are affected as well). This, as you know, plays a crucial role in the movement of body, limbs and even eyes. The repeat of CAG is directly proportional to the age of onset and rate of progression. A person with a high number of repeats will experience HD sooner and go through progression to the terminal phase more rapidly than a person with say, 39 CAG repeats.

In 1968, Alice and Nancy—Leonore Wexler’s daughters— were informed by their father, Milton Wexler about their mother’s illness and that they, too, had a 50-50 chance of succumbing to the ravaging disease. Milton set up the Hereditary Disease Foundation (HDF) to raise money and press the government for funding HD research. In the 1970’s Nancy Wexler molded herself as a geneticist and, like Optimus Prime taking on the decepticons, she took it upon herself to take on Huntington’s. In Watson’s book, he points out that Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela is a hotspot for HD, as there is a high incidence of the illness there, and the population is isolated. Back then, HD was not known beyond its symptoms, the hunt for the gene responsible for the disease was on. Nancy became one with the people of Lake Maracaibo since 1979. If you want, you can read about her team’s progress and triumph with the use of RFLP linkage; with the help of 150 scientists around the world, the gene was isolated in 1993. The technological advancement required to home in on the faulty gene was very important, it set up the stage for the human genome project.

Though we know the gene responsible for the disease, we are still a long way from a cure. Treatment is not available; we only have medicine which “alleviates” some of the symptoms. The illness is found in 1 of 20,000 persons of European descent, and in America, it is estimated that 1 in 10,000 people have HD. The symptoms typically begin when a person is between 30–50 years of age and progresses over a 10–25 year period. This is a scary aspect; one can lead a normal life and have children, only to find you are doomed to die relatively young and that you have likely condemned your children to the same fate. The earliest symptoms of HD are uncontrollable muscle movements, clumsiness, mood changes, and memory lapses. Later, difficulty in walking, talking, and of course, death. HD does not cause death directly but rather leaves the body compromised with complications and susceptible to things such as pneumonia and heart attack. High suicide rate is also not uncommon for this disease. The only answer I can think of to cure this disease is nanotechnology- nanobots checking DNA strands in cells, base by base, and cleaving the extra CAG repetitions in an HD patient’s chromosome 4. Unfortunately, that is well into the future. I have read that gene silencing may be more practical right now, silencing the mutant HTT, thus, thwarting the protein from gluing molecules in the brain and killing the medium spiny neurons. Finally, Stem cell therapy may also be a revolutionary way to counteract the illness by transplanting stem cells into affected regions of the brain, replenishing the lost neurons. Sadly, none of these options are easy things to do yet.

The other day, while pillaging information from Wiki, I stumbled upon an article- Six Degrees of Separation. According to the article:

Six degrees of separation (also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.

Being the semi-nerd that I am, I was immediately fascinated with this idea. No matter how big the world is, in theory, you are only six degrees of separation from another certain person in the world. I Guess this backs up the old saying, “it’s a small world.”

Moreover, this reminded me of the physics concepts of action at a distance and non-locality. The Copenhagen Interpretation asserts that quantum mechanic systems violate the locality principle (i.e. that distant objects cannot have direct influence on one another: an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings). In fact, experiments have shown that entangled quantum states do violate said principle, as entangled states collapse simultaneously upon measurement of one of their entangled components, regardless of the spatial distance between the two states. Gosh, that is a mouthful. Basically, non-locality allows for instantaneous action at a distance: the interaction of two objects which are separated by a space (it could be as large as half the universe or larger!) with no known arbitrator of the interaction. Einstein had a fit because it meant faster than light communication, violating special relativity! Einstein never really liked quantum mechanics anyway but the theory remains very powerful and useful today.

This leads me to think that the interaction of two individuals separated by a distance could be true even if those individuals are unaware of the interaction. Only six degrees of separation (at most) from any other human being that you don’t know? Wow. It would be neat if love could be the interaction. Is it possible that two minds are linked from the moment they are born, and no matter the distance one feels what the other feels? When they meet, do they share the bond of love? If it works for electrons in the same atomic system then it can work for us!

Today, while holding my Blackberry during lunchtime, my mind drifted. What I was wondering was if my Blackberry actually “touched” my hand as it laid on it. My brain told me it was touching my hand, and the brain was relayed this information by Merkel cells, Meissner’s corpuscles, and possibly Pacinian corpuscles. I think there is one more Mechanoreceptor but I don’t remember which right now. So, my brain was detecting light touch, but was I really holding the Blackberry?

If we could zoom in to the atomic level, the atoms composing the Blackberry and the atoms composing my hand, will they be “touching”? I do not think so, as the electrons from hand and phone would repel, there is electromagnetic repulsion among the electrons. Atoms cannot really touch even when they “collide”. Also, there is no chemical reaction occuring between my hand and phone. Gravity is pulling the phone down into my hand, and according to Newton’s Third Law, the phone is pushing into my hand, therefore, my hand presses equally and opposite into the phone. However, at the atomic level, classical physics breaks down and gravity no longer works, making the case that I cannot hold the phone. Biology tells me I was holding my phone, whereas Quantum physics tells me I could never touch it. What should I believe? What might bake your noodle later is… what if the phone is holding me?

Paul Dirac was born on August 08, 1902 and passed away rather recently, on October 20, 1984. Let’s start with what he accomplished. Paul Dirac was Great Britain’s intellectual representation during the revelation and revolution of quantum mechanics. It is sad that many people do not care about quantum mechanics, primarily due to ignorance, but quantum mechanics and special relativity is what makes our world the way it is today, technology wise. Quantum mechanics is the study of mechanical system whose dimensions are at an atomic scale, such as molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and other subatomic particles. Unlike people in these modern times, knowledge of the existence of atoms and their laws were not known at the turn of the late 1800s to the 1900s. Max Planck started it all while studying black body radiation, and Einstein followed, explaining the photoelectric effect. I can explain these theories at depth some other time, because the point here is to tell you about Dirac.

The birth of quantum mechanics ushered in some of the greatest minds to work on the mathematical foundations of this new theory. Let us take a minute to review the players. The country that started it all was Germany, and as such, it supplied gifted players. Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg represented Germany. Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger represented Austria. France supplied Louis de Broglie. Niels Bohr hailed from Denmark (and trust me, he was representation enough). Many others also contributed to quantum mechanics, but these I mention are the true fathers of the theory. Each one of them was more than a mere genius. They were the cutting edge of our frontal lobe.

From June 1925- June 1926, three complete versions of quantum theory were formulated: Heisenberg’s Matrix Mechanics, Schrödinger’s Wave Mechanics, and Dirac’s version, using quantum algebra or Dirac algebra. Though they were formulated, they were not properly understood. Heisenberg needed Pauli, Born, and a Pascual Jordan to help him interpret his version. With it, you could derive the spectrum of hydrogen and additional lines produced by electric and magnetic fields. Pauli showed Matrix Mechanics was correct, but the thing was, it was all numbers, there were no pretty pictures for one to see, like Bohr’s atom model. The difficult mathematics and the lack of a picture was extremely unpopular with the other great physicists. Particularly distressed was Erwin Schrödinger, a polymath and a lover (he was a notorious womanizer). Schrödinger was very moved by de Broglie’s idea that light particles may exhibit wave-like properties, in other words, light is both a particle and a wave, a duality, and all matter could also posses this characteristic. He set about to make a picture of the electron wave, as it travels in time on one of the Bohr orbits. The Schrödinger equation is an equation that describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes in time. Or, more generally, it is an equation which can be applied to any physical system, in which the mathematical form of energy is known. Schrödinger’s equation can describe atomic and subatomic systems, electrons and atoms and even large systems, like the universe.

Schrödinger’s wave equation has been hailed as one of the epitomes of 20th century thought, and eclipsed the abstract matrix mechanics. Physicists found it more appealing than Heisenberg’s model because the math was less difficult and provided a picture of atomic behavior with vibrating waves. Schrödinger and later, more elegantly, Paul Dirac showed both wave mechanics and matrix mechanics to be mathematically equivalent. Wave mechanics was here to stay. In 1930, at the tender age of 28, Paul Dirac published The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, arguably the best physics book since Newton’s Principia. In this book, he not only shows that Matrix Mechanics and Wave Mechanics are mathematical equivalent, but goes on and derives the beautiful Dirac Equation. This relativistic wave equation is even better than Schrodinger’s because it fuses special relativity and quantum mechanics to explain the behavior of elementary particles like electrons and other fermions. One of the most astonishing aspects of this equation is that it demands the existence of antiparticles (antimatter) and matter-antimatter annihilation. The electron, for example, has its anti-electron, an electron with a positive charge, which Dirac found in a sea of negativities. Dirac’s anti-electron was experimentally confirmed 2 years later, in 1932, by American physicist Carl D. Anderson at Caltech, and was named the positron. The ‘P’ in PET scan stands for positron, so we can easily link the importance this had in the world. The first existence of antimatter was thus, confirmed. Paul Dirac also started quantum electrodynamics (QED), which set the stage for Richard P. Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Shinichiro Tomonaga to further develop. For all these reasons aforementioned, Paul Dirac won the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics (which he shared with Schrödinger). Legendary!

Let us now investigate Paul Dirac, the person. He was born in Bristol, England. His father was a strict and authoritarian French teacher and apparently his early childhood was not a happy one. He completed a degree in electrical engineering fro the University of Bristol. He later received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In 1923, he gained a grant to conduct research at St. John’s College, Cambridge, under Ralph Fowler. When the talented Werner Heisenberg lectured at Cambridge over his theory of matrix mechanics in 1926, Fowler simply passed one of Heisenberg’s manuscripts to Dirac, with the instruction, “See what you think of this.” Dirac worked on them religiously. He was able to deduce Matrix Mechanics and was given a PhD by Cambridge. Dirac quickly became a member of the elite fathers of quantum mechanics with his subsequent work, and travelled to the major centers of quantum mechanics development, Gottingen, Munich, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Dirac was famous for being quiet. This is actually one of the reasons why he is not known well outside physics. His character differed from the other major physicists in that he was a recluse. He was also an atheist, in a Solvay conference he remarked: 

“I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and as scientists honesty is our precise duty—we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination…. I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another…”

At one time he stated, “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.” And one time while he was eating at a table, someone remarked that it was windy. Dirac stopped, got up, went to the door, came back, sat down, and said, “Yes, it is windy.” Even the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr could not escape Dirac’s nature. When Bohr was writing an article for publication in front of Dirac, he blurted out that he did not know how to finish a sentence. To this Dirac replied, “I was taught in school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it.” Pretty hilarious because he was not being mean, he was simply Dirac. There are many other quotes that I invite you to search for that can shed light on the personality of this great man. Dirac became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969, this position is currently held by Stephen Hawking and was held by Isaac Newton a long time ago. He married physicist Eugene Wigner’s sister, Margit, in 1937. He adopted Margit’s two children, Judith and Gabriel. Paul and Margit Dirac had two children together, both daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica. In the last 10 years of his life, Paul Dirac relocated to Florida to be near his daughter, Mary Elizabeth. He worked at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida and passed away in October 20, 1984. One of Dirac’s student, John Polkinghorne, a prominent British physicist, remembers that Dirac “was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.”

For those that do not know, science is not truth, it is merely the road to truth, a means to get there, and sometimes roads are closed or incomplete. As our frontal lobes evolved and we became more sophisticated and intelligent, people came out to explain laws of nature. Newton’s classical mechanics and James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory provided a way to see the “rules of the game” that govern nature. These rules still work, up to a certain point, and then break down. Newton’s laws break down at the atomic level, and hence, freaky smart physicists discovered something else. One was Paul Dirac who said, “It has been found possible to set up a new scheme, called quantum mechanics, which is more suitable for the description of phenomena on the atomic scale and which is in some respects more elegant and satisfying than the classical scheme.” So, now we have quantum mechanics and special relativity these days. And yet, science still is changing. There is stuff out there in the universe that neither quantum mechanics nor relativity can properly explain, like the expansion of the universe. New theories are in order, like Superstring theory which tries to unify the four forces of nature with vibrating “strings” and M-theory, a larger framework of string theory. These new approaches are still in development, and demand at least, an 11 dimensional universe (we only know 4).

I started reading into Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the increasing expansion of the universe and I started thinking, what exactly is pulling all the galaxies farther and farther away from each other? A physicist recently blew my mind away, telling me that the notion that we have that everything in the universe is made up of the ingredients found on the Periodic Table is wrong; it is estimated that only about 4% of the universe is made from the Periodic Table. There is other stuff out there, called dark matter. Dark matter is hypothetical matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic force, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. This matter accounts for a great deal of mass in the universe, 22%. This type of stuff shifts in and out of existence, disappearing and appearing in different dimensions. I, myself, always thought of getting a “cosmic” knife and cutting “reality”, cutting the air, prying open the “cut” and peeking inside at another dimension (s). I know, I must sound nuts, but I really think of stuff like that! Continuing, you might be wondering, what makes up the rest of the universe? Well, 74% is theorized to be Dark Energy which is even stranger, it is a bizarre form of energy that is located all over empty space. It is widely speculated that Dark Energy is responsible for the acceleration of the universe, which started approximately 5 billion years ago. According to a physics instructor, this vast energy supply, just a mini-mini-minimal amount can power entire civilizations. No more relying on fossil fuels. Maybe Obama has this in mind.

Not too long ago, I proposed a thought experiment to Caltech’s Kip Thorne, he is a very famous physicist, as you know, and a dear friend of Stephen Hawking. I proposed a Swiss-cheese or Dalmatian theory of the universe. I told him that the universe is shaped like a box, and on the walls, floor, and ceiling of this box there are holes, big holes. And each hole is a black hole larger than individual galaxies, (possibly powered by Dark Energy instead of Gravitation). These holes could be responsible for pulling space and galaxies farther apart. It kind of works, make a whole in a shoe box that contains a marble, stick a vacuum accessory in the hole and turn it on. If you have a good vacuum, it should have sucked up your marble, a.k.a-galaxy. Thorne liked my idea: “thanks for your thoughts, which are new and intriguing, but don’t seem very plausible to me: all the observational evidence we have suggests that the universe is virtually the same at the outer edge of where we can observe, as it is near us.” 
So, he sure told me, but I still continue to think crazy stuff! Maybe one day, I will get a medal!

Last night, I got a little drunk on Coronas and Cazadores Tequila mixed as margaritas. The occasion? Well, it was my oldest brother’s birthday. It was a nice evening, I was laying on our hammock that is attached to our two palm trees. I was resting there alone in the night, looking at the sky. The clouds were moving pretty fast and there were periods where I could see the stars and the moon. The stars were sprinkled in the night, pitch black with a glowing white dot all over. I like stars. I admire their beauty and power, the power to light up the darkness. At the same time, I felt so little and insignificant. It didn’t depress me, just made me aware of the truth; we are nothing in comparison to the rest of the universe. My mind recalled Arthur Eddington, the man who worked out where the Sun’s energy came from. It is said that he was out walking with a girlfriend one night. His girlfriend looked up at the stars and said how beautiful they were. He replied “yes, indeed, but tonight I’m the only one who understands how they shine”. He and later Hans Bethe and others contributed to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, how a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion, the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. In fact, all elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium were created by fusion reactions in stars, in our case, from the sun.

I was in awe, looking at those flickering distant lights in the night sky. All that we see with our eyes is but a glimpse of the past, we need light to see, and our cone and rod photoreceptors in our retina allow for phototransduction. Light travels at around 186, 282 miles per second, and light from distant stars take a long time to get here. For instance, if you were to look at a recent photograph of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy (our closest neighboring galaxy), what you will be looking at is a photograph of how the Andromeda looked millions of years ago. The light to make that photograph on M31 took a damn long time to arrive here. Even when you look around for the keys to your car, or the smile of that special someone in your life, what you are seeing is the immediate past, not the present. We can never see something as it really is happening. By the time light reaches your retina and goes through phototransduction, fractions of seconds have passed. Also, the visible electromagnetic spectrum is due to our proximity to the sun and the size of our sun. Any bigger difference and we would have seen in a different spectrum range.
I kept thinking all this fascinating stuff, when my brother approached me.
“Want a cigarette?”
“Sure, why the hell not?”
I am not crazy about smoking, in fact, I do not smoke, just on rare occasions. This happened to be one of them. I do not understand how people sign away their will to be a slave of cigarettes. It is not appealing to taste like an ash tray when you kiss. I got the Marlboro cigarette and he lighted it for me. My back was hurting all of a sudden and then I started thinking about someone special. Alcohol and cigarettes do not form a man, but the inward qualities of himself.