Who Gives A Rat’s Ass

I remember back in Standard Four, when we first learned about Penicillin. We were told that some chap discovered it by extracting some stuff from mushrooms, and found it to be effective in killing bacteria.

But being 9-year-olds, this lesson on Penicillin naturally resulted in two things:

1) Chuckles and giggles in class to the reference of "Penisilin" as it was spelled in BM, because we spotted the "Penis" in "Penisilin". This was way before we were acquainted with Beavis and Butthead.

2) The desire to formulate our own penicillin.

One of the adventurous chaps who attempted the daring task of formulating his own penicillin was my childhood neighbour, Chelvam.

During recess, he went to every tree stump around our classroom block and collected mushrooms of all varieties. He placed them all in a jar and started jabbing the mushrooms with a pencil, and mixing the deadly concotion with water and other stuff. Pretty soon, he had a foul-smelling greenish-brown liquid in the jar. He claimed that this was ‘penicillin’.

To test the efficacy of his penicillin, he decided to see if has anti-bacterial properties. I’m not sure why, but for Standard Four kids, pests like cockroaches and snails are lumped into the same category as germs. So this enterprising guy, Chelvam, tested out his penicillin on some snails. When the snails retracted back into their shells, similar to how they appear when exposed to salt, he decided that his penicillin was working.

The next thing he did was to offer his marvellous invention to any willing taker. We were playing police-and-thief around the compound at that time, and as usual, we were bound to have bruises and scrapes on our elbows, palms and knees from falling down or rolling on the ground. Choon Kong had a particularly bad scrape on his knee. Chelvam promptly approached him (he called Choon Kong "Choon Toi" all the time):

"Eh, Choon Toi, lu ada luka ka? Mau ini, Penisilin!!", he said.
Choon Kong snapped back at him, "Tak mahu lah! Pergi jauh sikit!"
"Eh Choon Toi, marilah! Ini Penisilin, boleh sembuh lu punya luka!"
"Woi bodoh! Apa itu racun?? Tak mahu la!"
"Lu la bodoh! Tarak baca  sains ka? Ini penisilin la! Ubat!"
"Lu mau saya mati kah?!"

After that, Choon Kong kept his distance from Chelvam. Chelvam didn’t give up. He went around offering people his ‘penicillin’ to heal recess-time wounds and bruises, but there were no takers. Towards the end, he even tried to splash some on others’ wounds.

While Chelvam was the biologist/chemist of the lot, I was more into physics and electricity. Reading my brother’s books, I found out about transformers and how they can be used to step-up and step-down voltages. The radio back home had just malfunctioned, and upon taking it apart, I was delighted to find a 240v-to-6v transformer! Knowing that the dynamoes on our bicycles generated around 5 volts AC, I was hoping that I can step it up to around 200 volts by running it through this transformer!

Back then, I had no concept of current, charge, or electrical power. I didn’t know that it was the amperes that kill a person, not the voltage. But as far as I was concerned, if the 240 volts at home can kill someone, 200 volts ought to give them a nasty electric shock!

So I proceeded to hook up some wires from the bicycle dynamo to the transformer’s coils, and connecting the step-up side to a pair of rigid steel wires fastened to a wooden handle. My plan was to activate the dynamo, ride past some stranger and jab them on the arm or neck with this prod. I was hoping that they’ll fall to the ground, writhing and convulsing, typical of being electrocuted. But of course, I had no way of testing whether I was getting the necessary voltage out. I didn’t dared to touch the rods, for obvious reasons.

So when I finally set out with grand ideas to terrorize people via mobile electrocution, I was terribly disappointed that nothing happened! Nobody felt a thing. People didn’t get zapped unconcious. Nobody ended up at the side of the road with foam in their mouths. It was disappointing. All that happened was people getting pissed off at being prodded by a kid speeding past on a bicycle.

There were other instances of mad-scientist shenanigans among us. During the Chinese New Year, we had plenty of fireworks back then. We knew that some exploded while some displayed bright colours, but we weren’t really sure what set them apart. We had always thought that it’s due to the propellant or the flammable material within the firework that caused this distinction, i.e. some powders explode while others just burn.

So there was this time when a bunch of us got those ‘red crackers’, the ones that Chinese love to hang on their gates and ignite. We dilligently cracked open these firecrackers one by one, and emptied out the contents into a wheat germ bottle. We got the bottle half-full, and we used a shred of newspaper as the fuze. We lit it up and ran like hell.. we were expecting some serious explosions! But, to our surprise, there was a bright instantaneous flame with lots of smoke, and that was it.. no explosion, no bang.. nothing. We were certainly puzzled.. It wasn’t until later that we found out that something explodes if it’s sealed on all sides and the pressure has nowhere to go.

Another memorable experiment in pyrotechnics was performed by Veera and myself, back in Form Three. We had nicked a can of Mortein from the Bilik Sains Rumahtangga, and particularly proud of our achievement. We’d hold a lighter in front of the nozzle, and squeeze the head.. using it like a flamethrower. We tried to torch everything including phone booths, bus stops and school textbooks nicked from classmates’ bags.. typical of the vandals that we are at that age. We saw this old oil barrel, and kicked it over, and saw lots of insects and cockroaches inside the barrel! Veera lit a piece of newspaper and threw it into the barrel, and yelled "Jae Senn! Kill the bastards!!" and I gave a big squeeze on that can of Mortein.

The flame shot out and engulfed the insides of the barrel but, upon hitting the end of the barrel, it came back towards my face! This happened in a split-second. Next thing I know, Veera was telling me, "Macha.. your hair is burning, dei!!"

There were those other times in upper secondary when we overloaded on alumina during those Thermite experiments and made a big blast at the school lab.. and when some fools spilled a whole jar of bromium and everyone ran out of the lab yelling, as if we’ve been hit by a nerve gas attack (this was in 1995).. Asogan and I were yelling "Sarin! Sarin!", referring to the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks.

Random picture of the day

The word for today is GAG protein. Some viruses has a structure in them called GAG, which stands for Glycosamineglycan. In the HIV virus, this is one of the important structures.

Earlier this year, one of the more promising new technologies towards an AIDS antidote is the suppression of the CCR5 receptors which prevents the HIV virus from latching on to macrophages. However, a criticism of this method is that we’re targetting the body’s immune system itself for modification, not the virus. Suppression of CCR5 can lead to other problems (more minor than a HIV infection, admittedly) and might even present an selective pressure that forces HIV to mutate from an M-tropic state to a T-tropic state sooner, whereupon the total failure of the immune system will occur sooner.

The other method that’s being tried out is the disruption of the HIV virus’ GAG protein to affect RNA packaging, causing the virus to be defective in that it can’t transmit its genetic sequence to the targeted host. The GAG protein, upon maturation, will form the RNA capsid of the virus. By disrupting the formation of the RNA capsid, we are affecting the storage and transmission of the viral RNA.

Effectively, we won’t kill the virus, but the virus’ offsprings will be defective and easily killed by our own immune system. Collectively, this new class of drugs are known as "maturation inhibitors".