On my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a leather-bound journal with my name embossed in gold on the front cover. I stared blankly at the blank pages with pale pinstripe lines traveling end to end, crowned with a fleur-de-lis watermark.

I sat in my oversized wicker butterfly chair, my legs crisscrossed tightly and forming a natural table, trying to think of something to write, only to end up tossing the journal on the top shelf of my closet, waiting for dust to cover it.

When the pandemic first made headlines, I thought, “now what?” I had already been through so much.

Fewer than four years before, my husband had died from pancreatic cancer. Initially, his prognosis was grim. He was given one year to live, an overwhelming reality for a man in the prime of his life. Five weeks later, he collapsed and passed away in our living room in the middle of the night.

There is a type of silence that permeates the air in the aftermath of a tragedy. It’s palpable. In those first few minutes, that silence engulfed me. I felt a pain as if something had been physically drawn out of me. All alone, I kissed him for the last time before dropping my head and crying, “What do I do, now?”

I needed to find a strength that was not in my nature. We had three children. My priority was never to let this define their character, never to use their father’s death as a crutch or have it hang like an anchor around their necks.

Losing my spouse left me confused. How does the coffee maker work? Is today trash day? I had not realized how much I depended upon him. It’s not that I was subservient to him—quite the opposite. We were equals. But I had gotten lazy. It was easier to let him handle it all. Honestly, the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. I didn’t know the individual passwords to our accounts, making it impossible to pay the bills. Without a paper trail, I didn’t know what bills we owed. I’m embarrassed to say I was unaware of the amount of money we had in our savings account. I found out it wasn’t very much.

From that day forward, I busied myself, often to the point of exhaustion. I functioned at high speed; I had a job to do. As a single mother, time rapidly became my enemy. I was trying to cram too many things into a day, coming up short, always late to games and social events. Notorious for being on the phone during my kids’ games, multi-tasking was my mantra. Everything got my full 25% attention. I took pride in walking the dog while talking on the phone and still listening to a podcast. My mind was always somewhere else, daydreaming of a different situation.

Even if you have never lost someone, you can imagine how it feels. We have all seen enough Hallmark movies. What I was not prepared for was getting smacked when I least expected it. There I was standing in the local market’s produce section when our wedding song played over the loudspeaker. Suddenly, I burst into gut-wrenching sobs, so severe I had to rush out of the store, pushing my way through the sea of pitying stares. I still had to go back inside because I needed milk and eggs.

Eventually, without his income to support us, my children and I had to move back into my childhood home. My mother had passed away years ago, but I still looked for her to protect us. It was a rough time in our lives. We yearned for life to be the way it had been.

It took all three years, but we healed. I went back to working full time. Our aching hearts lessened; this house took on our personalities. In February, my daughter celebrated her sixteenth birthday in grand style with a party. My son had graduated college and launched his new life. I felt joy for the first time, realizing we had come through that dark time, and we were back on track.

Then the pandemic hit. Like some at first, I believed it was just the flu—that it couldn’t hurt me.

Major work events were canceled, cities went into lockdown, the numbers staggering. Friends were testing positive. Some were getting sick. I was laid off from my job. My oldest son moved back home, putting his life on hold, and at-home virtual learning became a real thing. I felt like we were spiraling backward, our arms and legs flailing. Once again, I was overcome with a fear I hadn’t felt for years. The ground beneath us that we had worked so hard to strengthen was giving way.

I was living from my paycheck to paycheck, with very little savings as a cushion.

On the evening news, a woman about my age, with long blonde hair and blue eyes, was interviewed in her car while waiting in a food line, her kids in the back seat. “I have never needed to do anything like this before,” she told the interviewer.

The resemblance to me was uncanny. Our closeness to that situation made me quiver. I knew the look on my face registered my horror just by my kids’ frightened expressions.

“We’re okay,” I reassured them.

The pandemic wasn’t the only crisis looming over me. Without carpools, activities, and events, I was faced with an abundance of time. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I embraced being able to spend time with my children, and they had to spend time with me, trapped on this island together. We streamed shows and played games—board and VR, which frankly made me want to throw up. We laughed. More than that, we talked, we talked about their Dad and the old house and this house. I was relieved to hear they liked this house just as much. We remembered the fun times in this house with their grandmother. I had never taken the time to sit quietly and listen to them before.

I was not the type to put together a puzzle, nor could I create international meals or strive to bake the perfect sourdough bread. I did like to garden.

Although everyone thought I was crazy, I was inspired to build a vegetable garden on our hill. The hillside was transformed from a downward slope to terraced, level areas. We built raised planting beds, filled them with soil, planted seeds in neat rows, and marked each row with hand-painted signs nailed onto old pieces of wood.

Every night my body ached; my arms were sore. The sun had tanned my skin in odd patterns depending on what clothes I wore. My manicured nails were becoming those of a gardener with the paint chipped, broken, and cracked. When I was putting gas into the tiller, some dripped on my hand, removing what little polish was left. I soaked a rag and finished the job.

And yet, I always felt fearful of what could happen to us. Would we end up in long food lines? I found myself up nights, bombarded by a litany of what-ifs: What if we get sick? What if we become homeless? What if? What if? Always circling back to the same belief: if only my husband were here, he would know what to do.

My mother used to say, “if the same thing keeps happening, it’s because you didn’t learn your lesson.”

One hot afternoon while I was sitting outside, my sixteen-year-old daughter handed me that old journal of mine. “Here, I found this in my room,” she said.

Having forgotten all about its existence, I opened it to the first page. In my mother’s handwriting was this:

You are stronger than you think you are.
When you experience and survive your biggest fear, you will become stronger. If what you thought would break you didn’t break you, then you will be prepared for another storm.

The pandemic was the perfect storm.

The words my mother had written may have meant nothing to me when I first read them, but on that afternoon, they meant everything to me. What were the chances of this journal showing up?

I sat in my backyard, without a to-do list at hand, without the responsibility of watching kids in the pool. I. Simply. Sat. In. My. Yard. Quiet.

There were hummingbirds, large ones that sounded like helicopters as they hovered in my backyard. Was I that hummingbird, continually moving, only stopping for a second to eat?

When you can’t go out to dinner, you can’t go to people’s houses, and friends can’t come to your home, the only place you can go is inside. And that’s precisely where I went, inside my mind. The scariest place I’ve ever been. Stopping frightened me. On the outside, I appeared strong, but why not on the inside?

I had already experienced and survived my biggest fear with my husband’s death and losing our house. I asked myself over and over, “Am I prepared for this storm? Am I strong enough?”

That’s when it hit me. Trust in yourself. Your strength has been inside you all along. You have it in you to thrive.

If I hadn’t been forced to be quiet, I never would have heard what I needed to hear or learn what I needed to know or take stock of myself. I’m not naïve to think bad things won’t happen again, but now I have the tools to handle them.

Like my garden, it was time to plant seeds and sow a new life for when all this passes and things return to normal.

This pandemic has given me a gift, a second chance. I opened the journal to a clean page and wrote one sentence:

I am present.

Viruses Can Steal Our Genetic Code to Form New Genes

Ho JSY et al. Hybrid Gene Origination Creates Human-Virus Chimeric Proteins during Infection. Cell, June 2020;

Viruses have the ability to inflict their hosts with a multitude of dreadful, and often deadly, diseases. Humans have dealt with deadly viral diseases for millennia ranging from smallpox to the Spanish flu and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most fascinating features of these tiny, deadly organisms is that they cannot even build their own proteins. They depend entirely on their host to build their proteins for them. When a virus infects a host cell, it uses the cell’s transcription and translation machinery in order to produce its proteins and to generate copies of itself. A new paper describes a previously unknown mechanism that can occur during this process wherein viruses steal genetic signals from their hosts to expand their own genomes. This allows viruses to make hybrids of host mRNAs with their own genes thereby producing novel hybrid proteins named “UFO” (Upstream Frankenstein Open reading frame) proteins. As a proof-of-principle, scientists showed that at least 10% of influenza A viruses had these hybrid UFO proteins. Furthermore, UFO proteins can be detected by our immune systems and may even modulate virulence. Further studies are still needed to understand this novel class of proteins and the implications of their pervasive expression by many of the RNA viruses that cause epidemics and pandemics. UFO proteins can potentially alter the course of viral infections and could very well be positively exploited for new, and more effective, vaccines.

Superhuman Antibodies Can Protect Against COVID-19

Rogers TF et al. Isolation of potent SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies and protection from disease in a small animal model. Science, June 2020.

Development of a treatment, or vaccine, for COVID-19 is currently the world’s top public health priority. Globally, about 8 million people have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection, and more than 400,000 have died. The daily toll of new infections is still rising. Amid an international race to find a vaccine for COVID-19, researchers have discovered a subset of antibodies, in the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients, that provide powerful protection against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease. Researchers first took blood samples from patients who had recovered from mild-to-severe COVID-19. Then, they tested whether antibody-containing blood from these patients could bind to the virus and strongly block it from infecting test human cells that express ACE2, the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect human cells. Initial experiments led to the isolation of 1000 distinct antibodies produced by immune cells, each of which showed a distinct anti-SARS-CoV-2 affinity. Among those antibodies, the team identified several antibodies that could successfully block the virus and protect hamsters against heavy viral exposure. These super-strength neutralizing antibodies are found to target spike proteins of the Coronavirus that are localized at the viral surface and are essential for the virus to attach itself to human cells. These antibodies effectively keep the virus from entering human cells and could essentially knock out the infection. Interestingly, while non-neutralizing Coronavirus antibodies are found in 75% of patients, neutralizing antibodies are only found in fewer than 5% of patients. The current strategy involves cloning the immune cells that produce these super antibodies in order to mass-produce them and reinject them into sick patients. Scientists predict that if further safety tests in animals and clinical trials in people go as expected, the antibodies could potentially be used in clinical settings as early as next January. This new study proposes a paradigm of swift reaction to an emergent and deadly viral pandemic and sets the stage for clinical trials and additional tests of the antibodies.

Living Environments Are the Key to Longevity

Bhardwaj R. et al. Environmental Correlates of Reaching a Centenarian Age: Analysis of 144,665 Deaths in Washington State for 2011−2015. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. April, 2020.

Growing evidence indicates that while good genes can help us live longer, they do not tell the full story when it comes to what it takes to live a long and healthy life. A new study found that where you live has a substantial impact on the likelihood that you will reach centenarian (100+ years old) age. Researchers examined the data of 145,000 Washington residents who died at the age of 75 or older between 2011-2015. Survival analysis derived from these data showed that neighborhood walkability, higher socioeconomic status, and a high percentage of working age populations were found to be positively correlated with reaching 100 years of age. One important indication from this study is that mixed-age communities where streets are more conducive for walking makes exercise more accessible for older adults and thus makes it easier for them to access medical care and grocery stores. Moreover, older adults are less likely to experience isolation, and receive important community support in these settings. Past studies estimated that heritable factors only explain about roughly 20% to 35% of an individual’s chances of reaching centenarian age. This study supports the idea that you can modify your susceptibility to different genetic diseases through your behavior. In other words, if you live in environments that support healthy aging, it will likely impact your ability to beat your genetic odds through lifestyle changes.

Many yearly rituals of Ramadan will continue even as some change in deference to our social responsibility to respect God’s laws in the universe. 

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan will be different this year. Around the world, mosques will be closed, when they would normally have worshipers spilling out onto the street. Extended families will remain apart, when they would typically gather for Iftar to break the fast and share homemade treats. And shopping malls, cafes and streets will be eerily quiet, when they would normally come alive after dark.

Ramadan still began on Thursday evening, though, and in the early hours on Friday morning, households gathered, as they have for centuries, to share a sleepy suhur — the pre-dawn meal.

Even as the world grapples with COVID-19, the yearly rituals of Ramadan will continue. Throughout the holy month, most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims will fast between dawn and sunset, spend time in Quranic recitation, self-reflection and prayer in an effort to become closer to God, and give thanks for our blessings. But this year, the prescribed exceptions from fasting for young children, travelers, pregnant mothers and anyone who is sick will now be extended to those feeling symptoms of COVID-19.

And this year, our prayers will include special emphasis on the health care workers, emergency workers and other essential employees who are on the front lines of the fight to protect our communities. In the eyes of God, saving human lives and benefitting humanity are most noble endeavors: The Quran likens saving a life to saving the whole of humanity, and the Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be God’s peace and blessings) says that the best of humans are those who benefit other humans.

Our obligation to help and support those in need also takes on added meaning this year as our neighbors and communities face sickness, grief, economic hardship and the loneliness of self-isolation.

Perhaps the most difficult obligation for many, though, will be forgoing the long-planned gatherings of the season, in order to comply with precautions issued by authorities. But following these measures is a duty of our citizenship and a necessity of our social responsibility to respect God’s laws in the universe. For instance, the Prophet Muhammad — whose belief and trust in God was beyond description — even advised quarantining a town in the event of an infectious disease.

Each of us should take the extra time and space afforded by the pandemic’s social distancing measures as an opportunity for further examination of our connection with God, our families and our core values. This time offers a mandatory retreat from the busy nature of our daily lives and a chance to turn toward God, deepening our faith, knowledge and practice. I hope that imams will offer reminders about these opportunities to their congregations.

This period also forces us to rely on the internet and the technologies built upon it. Our young generations have been well-versed in these technologies ahead of their parents. Throughout history, messengers of God and those who strive for the enlightenment of humanity always used the available cultural tools and practices to spread their messages. We also must take this time to connect with our communities in new ways, including making our spiritual resources accessible to younger generations using their language and their familiar technologies.

The challenges of responding to the pandemic and altering our lives might push some of us to seek people to blame or to criticize. As we enter Ramadan, it is paramount that we devote ourselves to helping those in need, rather than finding others to blame. Even as people, groups or nations with whom we have had past differences may be suffering, each of us must reject as inhumane the thought that anyone deserved a calamity.

In a globalized world, nobody is isolated from a potent problem, be it environmental, medical or economic. This is a time to share data, and to collaborate to find solutions. This is a time to realize our interdependence as nations, as communities and as inhabitants of a global ecosystem — a time to recognize that we all are members of the human family and each have the opportunity to show the true potential of humanity.

As we enter this holy month, it is crucial that we look forward with hope and not despair, which stifles people and progress. Humanity has overcome great challenges in the past, and we will find ways to overcome this challenge, too. If we focus on the opportunities this pandemic presents, we will be able to keep our spirits high and reach the end of this tunnel much quicker.

Our observance of Ramadan will necessarily be different this year. But in many ways it will be like any other year: We will fast, we will pray, we will recite our holy book and we will take time for reflection and charity throughout the holy month. May God enable us to benefit fully from the feast of bounty in Ramadan.

This article has first been published on NBC News

Translated by Alp Aslandogan, the executive director of the Alliance for Shared Values.

Original article: Kim P. et al, ACS Nano (2012, online ahead of print)

Frost formation on aircrafts at high altitudes poses major safety threats and high-maintenance costs. Now, Joanna Aizenberg with her research team present a solution in their recent publication reporting on outstanding capabilities of a surface coating to prevent frost formation on metal surfaces. The technology called SLIPS (Slippery, Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) was inspired by the slippery surface of the carnivorous pitcher plant, which enables the plant to capture insects. “Some of the most extreme examples in biology can provide the most amazing and unexpected ideas…” says Aizenberg, who is a professor at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Rendering surfaces slippery is not new to scientists, and the earlier inspirations also came from biology. Mimicking the surface of the leaf of another plant (Nelumbo nucifera, or commonly known as the Lotus plant), scientists have been successful in fabricating surface coatings that would repel water-based dirt, but Lotus-inspired coatings failed for oily substances. On the other hand, Aizenberg’s SLIPS technology offers a single solution for repelling any type of accumulated unwanted material. The pitcher plant thus offers a solution that virtually proves to be the “silver bullet” in generating non-sticky coatings as described again in Aizenberg’s own words: “In following its example, we should be able to develop a platform that works for almost any sticky problem, no matter how seemingly unrelated, whether it’s ice accumulation, bacterial attachment, environmental contamination, clogging of pipes, marine biofouling, or graffiti, rather than having to come up with a host of individual solutions.” Thanks to the wondrous design in the pitcher plant, it looks like doctors will be delivered from replacing bacteria-contaminated arterial stents, and we can all give a kiss goodbye to frosty freezers.

2- Airborne bird flu virus possesses a great risk

Original articles: Herfst S. et al, Science 336, 1534 & Russell C.A. et al, Science 336, 1541.

Science magazine recently published a special issue (June 22, 2012 issue) on the H5N1 infection (a.k.a. bird flu) with two reports revealing the pandemic (a disease prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world, such as AIDS) potential of bird flu. Bird flu virus has so far killed millions of birds and many more millions of birds were culled to stop the propagation of the virus. Thankfully, this virus has not yet caused a pandemic in humans mainly because of its inability to spread easily among humans. One mechanism that makes viruses highly contagious is their ability to spread through air, such as through the nose and mouths of people when they cough and sneeze. Viruses that spread through air are called airborne viruses. One big difference between bird flu virus and the more recent swine flu virus (H1N1) was that swine flu is an airborne virus and bird flu is not, and therefore swine flu caused a mild pandemic in 2009. As reported in these studies, researchers identified several genetic mutations that will cause bird flu virus to become airborne. Viruses undergo mutations all the time and unfortunately some of these identified mutations have already started taking place in circulating virus strains. This poses a great risk. One important aspect of these reports is that they were written about a year ago but withheld since now, because of concerns about misuse of this information to pose a threat to humanity. Now that the information is public, our hope is that it will be used to monitor the virus closely and be prepared if bird flu virus transforms into an airborne virus.

3- Not all bacteria are the same after all

Original article: Chung H. et al, Cell 149, 1578 (2012)

The impact of our own bacteria on human life has been intensely researched in recent years. One of the common ground is that humans acquire many useful bacteria over their existence. However, this microbial flora constantly changes as the conditions do. Therefore, the real number of 500 to 1000 microbial species inhabiting mammals is anybody’s guess. Nonetheless, some scientists did not shy away predicting a connection between having a specific microbial flora to avoid certain diseases. A recent article by Chung et al presented an interesting clue why constant change in microbial flora, especially if that leads to a loss of important bacteria, may be linked to the increase in human autoimmune disorders. “For every cell in your body that is you, that contains your specific genetic information, there are approximately nine foreign bacterial cells, primarily in your digestive tract and even on your skin,” said Dennis Kasper, professor at Harvard Medical School and senior author on the paper. To address the question if microbial affects immune system development, authors compared two groups of mice, both of which had never had bacteria in their intestine before the experiment. One group of mice received mice microbial flora and the other received human microbial flora. Both groups had similar number of bacteria in their digestive tracks. However, authors observed a stark contrast between the two groups in terms of the level of immune cells in intestinal tissues. Mice that received human flora had surprisingly low number of immune cells compared to the mice that received mouse flora, which is native to mice. When this experiment was repeated with rat microbial flora, astonishingly, similar immune deficiency was observed. “I was very surprised to see that. I would have expected more of a half-way response,” Chung said, considering how closely rats and mice are related. The study points out that we really need to preserve our own microbial flora that has been tailored for us. Disrupting this balance by means of current antibiotics overuse may have detrimental effects in the future.