November 30, 2017 Thursday

Bedtime Story 

Algorithm of CRISPR/Cas Immune System

As I said last night that I will be culminating my story on CRISPR/Cas system since by now it has been well established the extreme similarity between digital information that uses codes of “0” and “1” and genetic information that uses code of four “A”, “G”, “C” and “T” or “U”.

Just as a departing demonstration, I will present you the algorithm that is used by the CRISPR/Cas system to provide immunity to microbes against the phages.

CRISPR.wander() – until encounter another molecule

If (new molecule contains DNA and DNA matches            CRISPR.DNA) CRISPR.cas9.grab() // nab the viral DNA

CRISPR.cas9.chop() // kill the virus!

Continue

In mere four lines, we have the secret to this novel (to us) immune system of bacteria and Archaea.

So I hope with this specific example of bacterial immune system against phages I was able to substantiate my claim that life is at its core digital information.

 

With this much, I would like to return back to the beginnings of digital technology and take you to something that is very much related to lambda calculus. 

 

Before I had digressed to the CRISPR/Cas system I had taken you through my journey into the world of combinatory logic and lambda calculus, and during that voyage I had briefly mentioned the concept of Turing machine.

I remember very specifically having asserted that both lambda calculus and Turing Machine are equivalent models of computation.

Any Turing Machine program can be translated into equivalent lambda calculus program and vice versa.

Besides, both have a common origin in the famous historical Entscheidungsproblem that was posed by Hilbert in 1928.

Turing machine caused a great confusion in me when I first came across it few years ago.

This was primarily because of the word “machine” in the name tag which is a complete misnomer.

There is no physical machine by the name of Turing that you will come across in any computer science museum.

Turing machine is an abstraction.

To be more precise it is a mathematical model of computation that according to the student and friend of Turing, Robin Gandy (pronounced as an Englishman would pronounce ‘Gandhi’) dates back to the idea of Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage.

Robin Gandy was himself a mathematician and logician and had made in in-depth study of the work of Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church.

Just to put the three men into their correct historical perspectives, Turing and Church were contemporaries while they were both a generation apart from Babbage.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 29, 2017 Wednesday

Bedtime Story 

CRISPR/Cas Immune System

I will continue with the abstract of Horvath’s 2007 paper:

“Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are a distinct feature of the genomes of most Bacteria and Archaea and are thought to be involved in resistance to bacteriophages.

We found that, after viral challenge, bacteria integrated new spacers derived from phage genomic sequences.

Removal or additional of particular spacers modified the phage-resistance phenotype of the cell.

Thus, CRISPR, together with the associated cas genes, provided resistance against phages, and resistance specificity is determined by spacer-phage sequence similarity.”

This was a top quality genetic twiddling exercise that proved beyond doubt that the strain of bacteria that had become resistant to phage infections (remember that to begin with they were all susceptible) did so because of the acquired phage-derived sequences into their spacers.            

The CRISPR story does not end here but I shall for now stop here because I think this much is enough to make the point that I wish to put forward.

We shall briefly summarize the working of the CRISPR/Cas immune system and see how closely it resembles digital technology and software programming.

Any bacteria or archaea with a CRISPR system (so far CRISPRs have been found in 50% of the sequenced bacterial genomes and in 90% of the sequenced archaea) represents a genetic code that was either itself or its ancestor once attacked by a foreign genetic code.

Moreover, not only the attacked genetic code managed to survive and fend off the attack but also managed to snip in a little bit of that alien parasitic code (viral DNA) and add it into its own genome.

It along with its progenies are then far better prepared by any future attacks by the same virus.

The Archaea or the bacteria would match the sequence of the attacking virus with the template in its CRISPR/Cas spacers.

If the sequence happens to be a match, the system generates or transcribes CRISPR-RNA or crRNA.

This crRNA associates with Cas proteins to form ribonucleotide complex that can recognize foreign nucleic acids.

Cas proteins are RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme that memorizes, and then later interrogates and if found alien, then cleaves the foreign DNA.

The Cas9 protein can cleave any sequence of invading DNA that is complimentary to the guide RNA for after all it is an endonuclease.

All this is so fantastically close to the way the digital technology works that one can even write an algorithm for CRISPR immunity which would read something like this.

We shall consider the algorithm in the nights to come.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 28, 2017 Tuesday

Bedtime Story 

Horvath and his Team Set up Experiment to Test Immunity Hypothesis

Horvath after returning from the conference in Holland where he came across the CRISPR for the first time in his life began to closely scrutinize his own collection for microbes for them.

Did his own microbes have in them these so called novel stuff called CRISPRs?

Yes, they did have in them this fascinating entity though of course, not all colonies had them.

Now Horvath had two sets of microbes with him – one set that had in their genome these CRIPSR elements and the other that didn’t.

This gave Horvath a chance to carry out another experiment as he could use one set as control group in relation to the other set.

Horvath now decided to study whether those that did have in possession this unique genetic makeup were more resistant to phage infections or not.

I will not go into the details of those experiments buy by 2004 he was convinced of the positive correlation of CRISPR elements with immunity to phage infections.

His findings were further corroborated by other researchers who we had discussed earlier.

In 2005 Horvath set up a team to directly test the hypothesis that CRISPR was an adaptive immune system of bacteria against phages.

His team included Rodolphe Barrangou, a young Ph.D. then employed with Danisco food company and Sylvain Moineau from the Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.

Moineau’s specialty was phage biology and he too had had a stint in the food industry working with Unilever Corporation before he decided that he preferred the environment of the academia far better.

These men started doing some serious genetic fiddling to prove that CRISPR did indeed provide immunity to microbes.

They chose a very specific strain of Streptococcus thermophilus that was well investigated and which was known to be susceptible to two specific bacteriophages.

What they did further is better explained in the abstract of the paper that was published in March 2007 issue of journal Science.

The paper was titled, “CRISPR provides acquired resistance against viruses in prokaryotes.”

The authors were Barrangou R, Fremaux C, Deveau H, Richards M, Boyaval P, Moineau S, Romero DA and of course Horvath P.

The short abstract precedes the paper as follows:

“Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) are a distinct feature of the genomes of most Bacteria and Archaea and are thought to be involved in resistance to bacteriophages.

We found that, after viral challenge, bacteria integrated new spacers derived from phage genomic sequences.

We shall continue with the abstract of this paper in the nights to come.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 27, 2017 Monday

Bedtime Story 

Horvath moves to Rhodia Food

Their love for acidic environment has even begotten these useful microbes the name Lactobacillus acidophilus.

You might ask an aside ask that such fully cured sauerkraut might carry the risk of food poisoning as they are shelved for months on ends in sealed containers.

That is a valid question but feel safe to eat these delicacies as sauerkraut that has been properly cured is so acidic that it becomes totally hostile for Clostridium botulinum to grow.

Horvath I guess was not too academically inclined as mid way he left his Ph.D. and joined the food company Rhodia Food that among the other things specialized in manufacturing bacterial starter cultures.

Perhaps he was in need of financial help which industries are far more capable of providing than university research grants, which are not only limited but also capricious and erratic year to year.

Rhodia Food needed Horvath because they were having microbiological issues in their industry.

       

The problem they were having in the food industry was this:

They were using another lactic acid bacteria Streptococcus thermophilus that is a fermentative facultative anaerobe and widely used by the dairy industry in the production of yogurt along with lactobacillus.

I had always known Streptococcus to be evil pathogens because it is one of the most taught pathogens in the medical schools, specifically the two species S. pneumonia and S. pyogenes.

Hence I was astonished to learn that according to the official statistics of 1998, 621 million kilograms of yogurt and more than 1.02 billion kilograms of mozzarella cheese were produced from S. thermophilus.

Rhodia Food was frequently encountering the problem of phage infections in their cultures of S. thermophilus and hence they had assigned Horvath the mission of overcoming these phage infections by DNA engineering.

Hence Horvath started studying and analyzing different strains of S. thermophilus.

His analysis showed that not all strains of this microbe were equally vulnerable to the phage infections; in fact, some showed a strong inherent resistance to these tiny viruses.

Analyzing the reason for this resistance now suddenly became critical for the food industry as it was earlier for pure researchers. 

Horvath at this very time of moving in to Rhodia Food happened to attend a scientific conference in Holland in 2002.

The conference was on lactic acid bacilli (it amazed me to know that there could be international conferences solely for this specific category of bacteria) where for the first time in his life he came to know about CRISPR concept.

For two years after his return from that conference, he genetically scrutinized his own strain of microbes for the presence of CRISPRs.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 26, 2017 Sunday

Bedtime Story 

From Hypothesis to Gathering Evidence

Even as late as the end of 2005, the role of CRISPR/Cas system in conferring immunity to the microbes remained a speculation or an educated guess at the best.

Strong evidence was still lacking. 

The idea of the CRISPR’s role in immunity was then at the stage of hypothesis or a theory.

Yet the material published in these three papers of 2005 was enough to send other microbiology and genetics labs rolling to seek out evidence for the hypothesis being proposed.

It did not take very long as the next major work that provided the lacking evidence came out in March 2007 in the journal Science.

The paper was titled “CRISPR provided acquired resistance against viruses in prokaryotes” and had eight authors namely Barrangou R, Fremaux C, Deveau H, Richards M, Boyaval P, Moineau S, Romero DA and Horvath P.

Philippe Horvath was a Ph.D. student at the University of Strasbourg which is the second largest university of France that supports 4000 researchers besides 46,000 students.

He was broadly interested in food science and was concentrating then on the genetics of a specific lactid-acid bacteria used in the manufacturing of sauerkraut.

If you are not a European or not of European descent you might not know what sauerkraut is; much like how a typical European may have no knowledge or even taste for delicious Indian masala dosa (type of thin crispy pancake made from fermented batter of rice and black gram) eaten with chutney and sambar (lentil based vegetable stew spiced up with tamarind broth).

Sauerkraut is essentially finely cut cabbage that is pickled by lactic-acid fermentation.

It essentially is to Europeans what pickles and spices are to South Asians.

The cabbage is finely shredded, salted and left to ferment.

The cabbage thus left to ferment gets fully fermented in three stages wherein the star of each stage is distinct bacteria.

The first stage of fermentation is carried out by the anaerobes such as Klebsiella and Enterobacter.

Acid begins to form and pH gradually falls.

As the acidity increases, the environment gets too hostile for many microbes and at this stage acid resistant microbes take over.

The acid resistant microbe that maximally drives fermentation at this stage is the Leuconostoc mesenteroides.

Finally in the third stage Lactobacillus takes over and ferments any leftover sugars making the environment even more acidic.

Lactobacillus is so remarkably resistant to acid that they thrive well even in the harsh acidic environs of our gut and female vagina and serve as useful commensals keeping out other microbes from growing there.

Their biofilms form the lining of our innermost and intimate parts.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 25, 2017 Saturday

Bedtime Story 

Alexander Bolotin Makes a Bold Assumption

It is not only hard but nearly impossible in defining what is wrong when almost hundred percent intellectuals of a certain society are forced to sell ice creams and leather jackets in the markets in freezing winter.

It is just that these very same intellectuals who made a pretty comfortable living at least by the third world standards suddenly feel as if the ground beneath them has been taken away and there is no edge to hold on.

It is that nightmarish sensation of free fall into the darkness with no bottom that the Russians must have felt; or at least that’s the way I thought about their feelings then.

Anyone who would have lived through those times would have realized how cruel total capitalism can be.  

  

In those times anyone there who desired to pursue science and mathematics simply had to leave the country that was becoming a capitalistic nightmare.

Both corruption and inflation rose not in percentages but in multiple of times.

Alexander Bolotin happened to one of such Russian expatriate who had found shelter in the Western nation of France and found himself a career working as a microbiologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.

 

The paper of which he was the first author was titled, “Clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats (CRISPRs) have spacers of extrachromosomal origin.”

If you read the abstract of this paper, it is far more blatant and less shy of proposing the new idea of cellular immunity being provided by the spacers in the CRISPR elements.

“CRISPR structures are found in the vicinity of four names named cas1 to cas4.

In silico analysis revealed another cluster of three genes associated with CRISPR structures associated with CRISPR structures in many bacterial species, named here as cas1B, cas5 and cas6, and also revealed a certain number of spacers that have homology with extant genes, most frequently derived from phages, but also derived from other extrachromosomal elements.

Sequence analysis of CRISPR structures from 24 strains of Streptococcus thermophilus and Streptococcus vestibularis confirmed the homology of spacers with extrachromsomal elements.

Phage sensitivity of S. thermophilus strains appears to be correlated with the number of spacers in the CRISPR locus the strain carries.

The authors suggest that the spacer elements are the traces of past invasions by extrachromosomal elements, and hypothesize that provide the cell immunity against phage infection, and more generally foreign DNA expression, by coding an anti-sense RNA.”

The last sentence clearly states that the team was making a hypothesis that the CRISPR-Cas system could be providing cellular immunity to the bacteria and Archaea microbes again viral attacks.

The speculation about the role of CRISPR in conferring immunity to the microbes possessing it turned out to be right though the mechanism proposed turned out to be wrong.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 24, 2017 Friday

Bedtime Story 

The Third Paper had a Russian Connection

What really fascinated the Vergnaud team was that many of these news spacers corresponded to prophage genome present in Y. pestis genome recovered during Vietnam War.          

     

I will quote just two or three important lines from the abstract of this paper:

“Interestingly, the most recently acquired spacers were found to have homologue at another locus in the genome, the majority of these inside an inactive prophage.

This is believed to be the first time that the origin of spacers in CRISPR elements has been explained.

CRISPRs may represent a memory of ‘past genetic aggressions’ ”

The authors here too implicate the genetic material in the CRISPR spaces to originate from phages though they were wrong in claiming that they were the first one to come up with this explanation.

They probably were not aware of the recent paper that came from Mojica lab.

That paper, in fact, had preceded them by just month and hence they can be forgiven for after all, they could not have been aware of the on goings of the Mojica lab at the time of the writing of their own paper.

Just like Mojica, Vergnaud found almost no journal ready to accept his paper.

Before the paper was finally accepted and got published in the journal Microbiology in March 2005, it was rejected by four journals namely Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Bacteriology, Nucleic Acids Research and Genome Research. 

Now let us look at the last paper that made the similar claim as made by these two papers.

The third and the last paper came out in the month of August of the same year whose authors were Bolotin A, Quinquis B, Sorokin A and Ehrlich SD from INRA research center at Juoy-en-Josas.

Alexander Bolotin was a Russian expatriate who was working as a microbiologist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.

After the dissolution of Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 in my presence pure scientific research took an insurmountable beating.

All of a sudden there was no need for scientists and doctors and scholars in the land that had newly acquired capitalism and freedom.

Everybody wanted or was forced to trade.

In a nation where students earlier wished to be astronauts in the line of Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova now overnight desired to be businessmen only to be sucked in a vortex of greed, depravity and loss of sensitivity towards fellow human apes.

It was not surprising to see medical students and even doctors going to market to stand in the freezing snow and sell ice-creams in boxes or fur coats and boots.

Of course, many would raise the question, “What is wrong in that?”

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 23, 2017 Thursday

Bedtime Story 

Vietnam as the French Indochina

Last night we were talking about the year 1964 and its connection to our story on Gilles Vergnaud with 61 samples of Yersinia pestis.

Well, as we saw that was the year when Lyndon Johnson found a great excuse to send 23,000 troops to South Vietnam, another battle field of the Cold War that would unfold in a third country.

It was an archetype Cold War-era proxy war.

War, as we know, does not only kill directly but death often accompanies it in the form of famines, diseases and outbreak of epidemics.

So it happened in Vietnam for conditions were perfect for microbes to flourish and bring immense suffering for poor innocent Vietnamese.

I am sure most of us who are not from Vietnam would not know about it, but the State of Vietnam was only created in 1949.

Just as South Asia was colony and under the rule of the British Empire, so was that part of East Asia a colony to France starting from early 17^th century.

There was a slight difference though in how the colonization started in the two places of Asia.

While in South Asia the Europeans came primarily for trading, in case of Vietnam the colonization started with religion.

A Catholic Priest from France by the name of Pierre de Behaine turned up in Vietnam in 1787, but instead of preaching religion he got involved into highest level of politics of Vietnam.

We shall not go into the details of it.

Suffice to say that the priests and missionaries were followed by gunships and troops armed with modern weapons that science and Industrial Revolution was providing European nations with.

By 1887, that part of East Asia which included Vietnam and Cambodia came to be known as French Indochina or sometimes more descriptively Federation of French Colonial Possessions.

So when the Vietnam War took place in the middle of the twentieth century the French were still there to gather the microbes when epidemic of plague broke out.

It was the samples of these bugs taken out during the Vietnam War that were provided to Gilles Vergnaud by the French Defense Department.

         

Vergnaud and his team compared the genetic sequence of these closely related organisms from Vietnam and found that their tandem repeat loci were identical.

The only places where these closely related samples were not identical were at the CRISPR loci which were discovered by his colleague Christine Pourcel.

Moreover, the difference was primarily in the new spacers at the “front” end of the CRISPR locus.

We will continue this interesting part in the nights to come.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg

November 22, 2017 Wednesday

Bedtime Story 

Source of Samples of Yersinia pestis for Gilles Vergnaud

Saddam Hussein was indeed developing biological weapons perhaps like many nations and so the fear of French Defense establishment was not unfounded.

The French Defense Ministry provided Gilles Vergnaud with 61 samples of Yersinia pestis that they had obtained from Vietnam in 1964-66.

What was so special about 1964?

I think you may very well know the answer though not in its completeness.

1964 was the year when the Gulf of Tonkin incident took place.

US was unofficially involved in Vietnam as early as 1950 when American military advisors began arriving in what was then French Indo China with American money supporting the French government who in turn considered this tiny Asian nation as their colony.

America got interested in it simply because communist giants Soviet Union and China were backing North Vietnam.

North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong wished to unify the two nations and they saw this as a colonial war to get rid of European invaders.

For ten years United States played what can be modestly put forth a fairly passive role and from 1961 onwards it began to unload and amass its troops there.

Its megaships were already patrolling the waters of Vietnam, and one them the destroyer USS Maddox happened to be patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin.

Gulf of Tonkin is a body of water that is located off the coast of Northern Vietnam and forms the northern arm of the South China Sea.

Lyndon Johnson made a claim (most likely a deliberate false one), that the destroyer USS Maddox was pursued by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats and then attacked with torpedoes and gun fire.

Strangely enough, in this so called provocation, no American lives were lost and yet six North Vietnamese sailors lost their lives and six more wounded.

Now gentleman, this indeed is a strange tale if we ever heard one.         

But it all makes sense if you knew what happened after this is so called Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The incident was politicized miles away in Washington DC where Congress passed the Gulf of Toknin Resolution on August 7, 1964.

This resolution granted President Lyndon Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian nation whose government faced the threat from “communist aggression”.

In short, it gave Lyndon Johnson complete freedom to deploy conventional military force in Southeast Asia without formally declaring war.

The American Empire was ready now to demonstrate its awesome military might against a tiny Southeast Asian country which would feature in almost all of the great movies that Hollywood would churn out for the next two or three decades.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                           

  

                

             

Advertisements

Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.

While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.

He started the participation of Indian students at the International Physics Olympiad.

Do visit him here:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com/

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edutainment and English education of your children, I recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd14DRdYKj454znayUIfcAg