Mochas with medicine and the revolution: Where Stanford and Berkeley unite

I have dreamed of a republic, such as the world would adore.
- Camille Desmoulins, French journalist, 1789

I am still feeling the buzz and the glow from my trip to Stanford and Berkeley this year - an incredbile homecoming. My two favorite universities in the world.. but back in the '90s it was a dream for a middle-class Indian student to be able to afford them, without a full scholarship.
 

I hung out with Camille Desmoulins and other journalist-revolutionaries in Berkeley’s cafes. It's smell was strong in the air. The dust, hoof beats and sound of cymbals. The streets were paved with rocks, aimed for the intifada. It was an interesting experience.. to hang out in cafes with professors from NPR and personal friends of Jon Stewart. Intellectual PhD students walked around with Lyapanov and control theory texts in their bags, while I deciphered the intricacies of calculus, as Coldplay played in the background. In my favorite 'Brewed Awakenings' cafe, tripping on their hot chocolate mocha. I could have written my entire Ph.D proposal there, with my pals in the Mech. and Bio. Engg. departments, but the practicalities of life.. At least I deciphered the clarity of my soul and academic dreams..As my dear friend M, calls it, my 'avant-garde French revolution' writing place. In Seattle, it's the 'B n Espresso' in buzzy Capitol Hill, but that's another story.

 

Beyond the poetic rhapsodization, I swung between Berkeley and Stanford in that one week and absorbed two worldviews..both equally lovable in a strange sense. Though they are traditionally supposed to be the classic rivals, ad infinitum.

Stanford is the Renaissance, with the arches and domes and furrowed students walking past the long promenades. Whenever I am there, I am dazzled by the dust in the air, emanating an air of regality/ elegance. The talks by the med school Professors on their literary genres and hanging out with my close friend R in the Stanford bookstore. buying 2 dollar Thomas Manns. He is my friend from Delhi and good old DU, who literally lives in the NASA center next door and caffeine and books. His work was part of the flight to Mars, so that was an incredible high in itself.

And Berkeley is the Paris of the 1780s..brewing coffees and 'intifadas' in its innumerable cafeterias, bookstores and meet-up clubs. Clubs. Clubs is where it all began. The French revolution began with the Jacobin Clubs, the Enlightenment version of the modern day 'meet up' where journalists, intellectuals and like-minded activists hung out.. and planned the overthrow of the European order. I was reminded of it from the innumerable AID meetings (Association for India's Development) to literary and film societies.. teeming all over the place, like rugs. I didn't have enough time to do justice to all of them, though I did hang out with one, at the 'Au Coco Lait' cafe in Berkeley - another caffeinated hub of the intellect and the arty avant-garde types.

The graduate programs in both places are equally intricate as a maze, but complement each other in incredible ways. The brilliant Alexandr Lyapunov and his systems theory is common to both of them, being some of the top centers of control theory in the world. Lyapunov is one of my heroes, intellectual, scientific and social. A Russian revolutionary in the true sense of the word. A brilliant mathematician and the father of modern control theory, an incredible social idealist - and romantic, who killed himself after the demise of his wife.

Systems biology, being the newest conceptual breakthoughs in science, which will change its face for the next century. A field which exquisitely combines science, math and medicine into one jigsaw whole. Peering into cells, molecules, entire body systems and diseases with calculus. Modeling pregnancies, TB and brain tumours - and developing some of the most cutting-edge medicines for them..already saving lives. How cool is that.. pure unadulterated math making medicine. With that excruciating calculus component which I am always trying to conquer, it fascinates me as the new face of science. Just as cell biology and quantum physcis were at the turn of the century.

My Ph.D and revolution and literary dreams linger there ..and the labs of UCSF, the other medical hub, smelling of cadavers which give life. A medical university which combines global health, social conscience and cutting-edge research, with some of best looking residents I have seen. Incredible dinners and parties on Embarcadero with conversations from bioscience and colonialism in the Middle East. UCSF smells of medicine. Pure, anatomical and cadaver-ridden, medicine. It reels your senses and is not for the faint-hearted. I interviewed in one of their labs for a corpus-callosum study on brain imaging..and the fragility of the grant system came through. Of places which fund the biotech hedge-funds of the world. How ironic, that capital markets live off the intellectual capital, of places that are deprived of capital.  But that is another story. To be continued..