Kurt Vonnegut’s tips on writing

Wikipedia’s page on Kurt Vonnegut lists his eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I especially like 3, 6 and 7.


This blog post tries to apply the same principles to blogging. It takes each of the above points and then expounds on how that can help you with your blog post.

Vonnegut also has a longer write-up on How to write with style. That is also a great read.

The antibiotic before penicillin

Most of us think that penicillin was the first antibiotic, but Ashutosh gives us the story of sulfa which ushered in the “first herioc age age of antibiotics”. The post is actually a review of “The Demon Under the Microscope” a book by Thomas Hager which hopes to popularize this forgotten but extremely important story.

But at the time, there were almost no laws that required manufacturers to list such petty things as solvents on their bottles. The FDA was a skimpy and ineffectual agency at the time, with a few dozen agents scuttling around to mainly keep a check on excessive profit making. After the sulfa-ethylene glycol concoction was sold, a wave of death began that did not stop until several hundred people died, and public outrage changed the face of the FDA- and the way in which drugs are developed, manufactured and sold in the US- forever. After the tragedy, the FDA acquired new powers that it could have only dreamt of before. Of course, it took the thalidomide tragedy to have the kind of strict FDA regime that we have today, but the sulfa tragedy started it all, and made drugs substantially safer for the public.

Its an interesting article full of little interesting factoids. Long but worth reading.
Link.

India’s biotech industry emerging as world innovator, collaborator, competitor

A Canadian research paper submitted a few days back is reporting that India’s biotech industry is all set to emerge as a major global player buiding on cost efficiencies, innovation, and collaboration according to this interesting article.
The research points out standard stuff you would expect: for example, how Shantha Biotechnics of Hyderabad uses innovative and efficient manufacturing processes to produce a Hep-B vaccine at $0.50. This used to cost $15 earlier.

But it also points out other aspects that are more interesting. For example, the existence Indian “contract research organizations” which do specific research for and under the guidance of major western companies. Or that the Serum Institute of India in Pune supplies products to 138 different countries and claims to immunize half of the world’s children against several diseases.

But the paper also points out the danger that the Indian companies will focus too much on the lucrative western markets and neglect local illnesses and issues for which there is a pressing need to develop effective drugs locally. Historically, Indian companies have been the principal providers of vaccines and medicines for the major local killers like malaria and tuberculosis. And if these companies start producing Viagra, who will cater to the TB patients?

Read full article.