‘Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland’

Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland’s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, ‘Gondwana’ has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This prospectus sets out a program for a highly unusual ‘transnational’ project, involving scholars of India, Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa and South America. Unpredictably across the five continents of former Gondwanaland, the term itself signals depth of time and place across the spectrum of Indigenous land politics, coal-based extractive politics, and, paradoxically, nationalist environmental politics. All kinds of once-living Gondwanaland biota deliver us fossil fuels today – the ‘gifts of Gondwana’ some geologists call southern hemisphere coal, gas, petroleum – and so the modern history of Gondwanaland is also a substantive history of the Anthropocene

A myeloid program associated with COVID-19 severity is decreased by therapeutic blockade of IL-6 signaling

Altered myeloid inflammation and lymphopenia are hallmarks of severe infections. We identified the upregulated EN-RAGE gene program in airway and blood myeloid cells from patients with acute lung injury from SARS-CoV-2 or other causes across 7 cohorts. This program was associated with greater clinical severity and predicted future mechanical ventilation and death. EN-RAGEhi myeloid cells express features consistent with suppressor cell functionality, including low HLA-DR and high PD-L1. Sustained EN-RAGE program expression in airway and blood myeloid cells correlated with clinical severity and increasing expression of T cell dysfunction markers. IL-6 upregulated many EN-RAGE program genes in monocytes in vitro. IL-6 signaling blockade by tocilizumab in a placebo-controlled clinical trial led to rapid normalization of EN-RAGE and T cell gene expression. This identifies IL-6 as a key driver of myeloid dysregulation associated with worse clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients and provides insights into shared pathophysiological mechanisms in non-COVID-19 ARDS

“Signs of the Times”: Medicine and Nationhood in British India

Medical practice and research in colonial India historically had been an imperial preserve, dominated by the elite members of the Indian Medical Service. This was contested from the 1900s on by the emerging Indian nationalism. This essay studies debates about the establishment of a medical research institution and how actors imposed the political identities of nationalism on British colonial practices of medical science. At the same time, Indian nationalism was also drawing from other emerging ideas around health and social welfare. The Indian nationalists and doctors sought to build the identities of the new nation and its medicine around their own ideas of its geography, people, and welfare

Curing Cholera: Pathogens, Places and Poverty in South Asia

In this paper I will seek to provide a new understanding of endemicity of disease in India. Through a study of cholera research in the twentieth century I will argue that disease and its endemicity has to be understood in biological factors as well as within a wider social and economic context. I will discuss the medical efforts at locating the causality of cholera from the nineteenth century in Indian climate, water bodies and human anatomy to show that cholera is no more a biological phenomena than water is an ecological or environmental problem. Both are essentially political and economic questions