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 17th 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.
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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:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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