The Peerless Joy of an Epistemic Contribution

For most of my graduate school life, I remained engrossed in studying the biology of the fruit fly. Fruit flies, as many would know, are those annoying insects that hover over rotting bananas or apples. My relatives and friends knew who Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton were; some had heard of Charles Darwin. Many had heard of mice or guinea pigs being used in the labs for “experiments”. A handful knew the scientific name of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. But no one could, for the life of them, fathom what use studying a fly would be. Some (the despicable ones) would warn me that I may turn into the archetypal mad scientist. The long and short of it is that I had a tough time trying to explain the essence and utility of what I was doing. The purpose of my research was to use the fruit fly and understand how different organs in the body of an animal coordinate among themselves and utilize nutrients to keep the metabolic machinery running. So, to play to the gallery, I would try to tell folks that I try to understand the biology of diabetes. That was, to some degree, right. We will look at. But there was much more to those years. We will look at that, too.

At its heart, diabetes (that dreadful disease that impacts over 422 million people worldwide, but which is not given the kind of urgent attention that, say, a cancerous disease is given) is our body’s metabolism gone berserk. Pancreas, which produces insulin to push glucose into the cells of the body under normal conditions, becomes as useless as Remo Fernandes in Bombay Velvet (anyone remembers that?). Simultaneously, the cells of the body also become less responsive (resistant) to insulin and progressively let in fewer amounts of glucose; a bit like how over time we become less responsive to our parents’ pleas for doing the dishes. So, simply put, diabetes is the inability of insulin to handle the glucose pressure and eventually giving in, right? Wrong.

Underneath the misleadingly simple relationship between the insulin-glucose mismatch is an entire universe of multiple organs failing to do their job. Organs such as the muscles, the brain, and everyone’s foe, the fat cells, are in the thick of the diabetes plot. This knowledge of “what” goes wrong in diabetes is well-understood. However, “how” does this go wrong, is less clear. And if the treatment of diabetes is to advance, this “how” needs to be understood better.

Here is what that 3-millimetre-long fruit fly, Drosophila, taught us about how we remain healthy (before we fall sick). We learnt that under normal conditions, the liver senses the metabolic needs of the body. It then communicates this information to the pancreas (imagine a WhatsApp message from the liver to the pancreas), which then releases insulin. The liver also communicates to the muscles (another WhatsApp message) and prepares it to receive the glucose that will knock on its doors in the presence of insulin. When things go wrong and the liver fails to sense the metabolic needs of the body, this love triangle among liver, pancreas, and muscles falls apart. And the tragic story ends as “metabolism gone rogue”.

That is all well and good, but this is in the fly. And, the last time we heard, we weren’t particularly buzzed about treating a fly. The idea that fruit flies visit the doctor to get their diabetes treated is comical at best and ludicrous at worst. But here’s the thing, the communication between liver, pancreas, muscles, and the brain in the fly is the same as in you and I (and the entire human race, so heal the world, make it a better place! Ok, off track again). This, it turns out, is one of the ways in which diabetes occurs in humans as well. This knowledge offers something of a treasure trove now. Multiple things can be done in the fly to see what can prevent the communication from going berserk or to restore a dysfunctional communication. These multiple things may, in the future, pave the way for some stunning treatment for diabetes.

What we learnt in this theatrical execution of biology is how biological systems are elegantly and impeccably designed. There is something purely magical in the way organs, not physically connected to each other, communicate a message and act collaboratively to ensure that the organism functions efficiently. But what it taught me is that discovering the truth of how anything works (aka creating knowledge) takes a lot of efforts.  To arrive at this conclusion, there were hundreds of hypotheses that were tested and discarded. Most of these hypotheses made perfect sense from a logical standpoint. But day after day, when you’re outsmarted by the natural world, you realise that just because things seem plausible and logical, they are not true. Discovering the truth is a long haul and involves self-criticism and scepticism. Truth is also not the bedfellow of authority; just because someone “important” says something, does not mean what is being said it true.

Many around us use as an argument that since most people believe in certain things or follow some practices, and since these people are not foolish, these beliefs or practices must be true. But then one is only to remind oneself that until about 600 years back the greatest of the minds thought that the sun revolves around the earth. The likes of intellectual giants such as Aristotle and Socrates believed that the sun revolves around the earth. But today, a 3-year-old knows better. So, by the end of the seven-odd years that I spent trying to understand the seemingly arcane question of how organs in a fly communicate, I learnt a thing or two about fighting the temptation of declaring the obvious as the truth. This, to me, was an inestimable benefit of my research. 

Humans are, as a species, curious. But very few have the fortune of creating knowledge. And, in a world that is oozing with information, the value of knowledge is perhaps underappreciated. But then, the purpose of knowledge has never quite been to seek appreciation. The value of creating knowledge, like the value of knowledge itself, is inestimable.