Parminder Singh

Never forget what you read… I share how, in today’s Economic Times.

@adityaverghese Haha! Sure!

@parrysingh I'm taking full credit for this! 😎

Those of you who insisted I don’t watch the Netflix show before reading this - thank you, excellent call! Now for the book. Not a casual read - it demands your attention, but rewards you with a heady cocktail of science, imagination, and philosophy. I can’t quite pinpoint why, but you come out of this… slightly altered.

@KiranManral Thanks for the suggestion - you were convincingly vocal!

@parrysingh So glad

Five step hotel pre-shower routine for those who wear glasses: 1. Step into the shower, squint to read labels - unsuccessfully. 2. Step out, wear glasses, step back in. 3. Memorise the sequence: left-shampoo, middle-conditioner, right-shower gel. 4. Step out to keep the glasses safely back. 5. Return… now to figure out how the shower knob works.

Indigo Stretch is quite a decent option for Singapore-Delhi, though inconsiderate co-passengers can undo even the best experience. Last night, even before take off, a young girl in the row ahead was watching something on her iPad at full volume. Her mother sat next to her, unfazed. I was in the last 150 pages of a gripping book - the kind you want to finish in one peaceful stretch. I had a plan - a spare pair of inexpensive headphones! I thought I’d lean forward after takeoff and say, “Excuse me, would you like to ask your daughter to use this?” Subtle! After take off, before I could make my move, the mother pulled out her own phone… and started a Hindi serial. Full volume. Now what? What if I proceed with my plan and she asks, “What about my earphones?” 😟 I resigned to my fate, put on my ear blockers and went back to my book. I’m still a few pages short, thanks to a steady background noise of saas-bahu drama and a youth influencer!

So, I’m being advised that “I should have objected.” Perhaps. Why didn’t I? It’s the NRI dilemma - you’re wary of judging people by norms that might be foreign. Just as honking or cutting lanes is routine in some places, acceptable behaviour changes across borders. So you’re not entirely sure where the line is, and tend to err on the side of politeness. Of course, now I know!

It’s the NRI dilemma - you’re wary of judging people by norms that might be unfamiliar. Just as honking or cutting lanes is routine in some places, acceptable behaviour changes across borders. So you’re never entirely sure where the line is, and tend to err on the side of politeness.

@parrysingh Why did you not ask the cabin crew to shut them down?

@sunnylifer My guess is most people are simply oblivious. The idea of personal space - and what counts as intrusion - is still evolving. Not long ago, peeking into someone’s newspaper or blasting loudspeakers all night was normal - maybe still is. So a few extra decibels don’t even register.

@parrysingh I’m at a loss of words at such behavior. I’m worried if I cause inconvenience to others even if I flinch but here this phones on full blast is a common occurrence these days. Are they oblivious/ arrogant/ insensitive/ entitled?

Listening to Art Garfunkel sing Scarborough Fair at 80 years old gave me goosebumps. That golden voice never fades… What a legend! 🫶🫶

I could swear Trump just moved into the house next door.

@panavi What’s wrong with living next to the White House?

@parrysingh You better change your home :-)

A tech consultant in Sydney spent $3,000 and two months to do what Moderna has spent billions trying to scale. Paul Conyngham adopted Rosie, a staffy-Shar Pei cross, from a shelter in 2019. In 2024, tumors started growing on her back leg. Mast cell cancer, the most common skin cancer in dogs. He tried surgery, chemo, immunotherapy. Nothing shrank the tumors. Just slowed them down while the bills stacked into the tens of thousands. So he opened ChatGPT and asked it how to cure his dog’s cancer. The AI didn’t cure anything. What it did was compress months of literature review into hours. It suggested genomic sequencing, walked him through neoantigen identification, helped him build a research pipeline that would normally require a postdoc and a lab budget. He paid $3,000 to sequence Rosie’s tumor DNA at UNSW’s Ramaciotti Centre, then ran the mutations through AlphaFold to model the protein structures. A computational biology professor at UNSW saw his analysis and was, in his own words, gobsmacked that someone with zero biology training had assembled the whole thing. Then came the part nobody expects. The science was the easy half. Australian ethics approval to run a drug trial on your own pet took three months. Two hours every night after work, filling out a 100-page application. The red tape was harder than designing the vaccine. Once he cleared that, Páll Thordarson at the UNSW RNA Institute built a custom mRNA vaccine from Conyngham’s data. Sequencing to finished vaccine: less than two months. Conyngham drove 10 hours to deliver Rosie for her first injection in December. One month later, the tennis-ball-sized tumor on her leg had shrunk 75%. Here’s where the numbers get interesting. Moderna and Merck just reported five-year data on their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma. It encodes up to 34 neoantigens per patient. The Phase III trial is fully enrolled. Projected cost per patient: $100,000 to $300,000. Their pipeline is worth an estimated $2.3 billion in annual sales by 2031. Conyngham did a version of the same workflow for his dog. Sequenced the tumor. Identified the neoantigens. Built a custom mRNA construct. Total cost: $3,000 for sequencing plus university lab time. The gap between those two numbers is where AI is about to rearrange the entire cost structure of precision medicine. The regulatory moat is real. Conyngham could do this because veterinary experimental treatments face lighter scrutiny than human medicine. There’s no FDA Phase I-III gauntlet for a one-off compassionate use case on a dog. But the technical workflow, tumor sequencing to neoantigen prediction to mRNA synthesis, is converging toward something a motivated person with the right AI tools can orchestrate in weeks instead of years. One guy, a rescue dog, and a $20/month ChatGPT subscription just produced a proof of concept that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a decade and billions of dollars building toward. The vaccine worked. The tumor shrank. And the only reason it happened is because a dog owner loved his dog enough to spend three months fighting paperwork.

You can tell a lot about a man by the people he backs - or the jokes he cracks.

@gs_sandhu79 @aparnaswarup And some Chandigarh chairs are found in Singapore.

@parrysingh @aparnaswarup The great Chandigarh chair is good story then, created for Babus by Pierre Jeanneret, cousin of the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier who planned Chandigarh ! We used to see them locked and disrespected as honestly there was nothing in it,till… vam.ac.uk/articles/the-c…

I absolutely love chairs and they’ve often been a leitmotif in my work. They symbolise Power&Purpose and often come with historical narrative and ancestral story telling. Am looking for unique pieces to photograph. Any leads would appreciate.

Nature put up a bit of theatre this morning. One of the sunbird chicks launched cleanly on its first attempt…but the other sat on the edge, hesitant. “Is this the one that had fallen earlier… the one we had placed back in the nest?” we wondered. “Did that fall weaken it?” Then suddenly it fluttered, lost balance, and dropped to the floor beside the French window. It just sat there for a few minutes, small and still, as if gathering its thoughts. Then it tried again. This time the flight was longer, steadier and it perched on the tree outside. And just like that, the whole family was gone. The nest is empty now. But it’s the sort of emptiness one can only feel happy about.

@aparnaswarup It’s in Chandigarh. Let me know when you’re there next.

@parrysingh Stunning! I liked it then, three years ago and I like it now:) I would have shot it if this was here.