Recalling the desperate fight for life that used to be waged by juvenile diabetes patients, and commemorating the events of 1921 that inaugurated a new era of hope for them and their families, the New-York Historical Society will present the exhibition Breakthrough: The Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin from October 5, 2010 through January 31, 2011. Exploring the roles of science, government, higher education and industry in developing and distributing a life-saving drug, the exhibition will bring to life the personalities who discovered insulin and raced to bring it to the world and will tell the story of one extraordinary New York girl—Elizabeth Evans Hughes, daughter of the leading statesman and jurist Charles Evans Hughes—who was among the very first patients to be saved.

To lead visitors through this history, from the discovery of insulin in Toronto by Dr. Frederick Banting in 1921 and its first human trials in 1922 to its widespread use today, Breakthrough will feature digital interactives, film, artifacts and ephemera drawn from the Historical Society's own collections and from archives including those of the University of Toronto, Eli Lilly and Company, the Rockefeller Institute, the Joslin Clinic and the New York Academy of Medicine.

The first chapter will recount the excitement, and the clash of personalities, among the scientists whose research led to the discovery of insulin, beginning in May 1921. Also included in this chapter will be an account of the valiant but heartbreaking efforts of Dr. Frederick Allen in the years before the discovery to prolong the lives of diabetic children through the use of a starvation diet. The story of Elizabeth Evans Hughes, told in part through actual treatment charts and period letters, will bring to life the impact of insulin when it first became available. Because Elizabeth was the daughter of Charles Evans Hughes—Governor of New York (1907–1910), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1910–1916), United States Secretary of State (1921–1925) and Chief Justice of the United States (1930–1941)—her survival provided powerful testimony to the value of insulin, and helped bring the work of Dr. Allen and Dr. Banting to the world's stage.

The exhibition's second chapter will examine how insulin became available for widespread medical use through a partnership between the University of Toronto and Eli Lilly and Company—the first such collaboration between an academic institution and a drug company. Photographs from the Lilly archives will reveal the painstaking early method of manufacturing insulin in mass quantities—an innovative industrial process that ran from the slaughterhouse to the laboratory. Display cases of syringes, vials, testing kits for blood sugar and other equipment will take the story of insulin treatment from the 1920s up through today.

The exhibition's final chapter will tell about recent developments—notably the synthesis of insulin in the 1980s as the world's first biotechnology drug—and the current state of research, development, treatment and demography of diabetes. Included in this chapter will be information about the alarming increase in prevalence of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes in the past decade, and the ways in which individuals, families and institutions can address this health crisis. The exhibition will conclude with a presentation of Life for a Child, a documentary film produced by the International Diabetes Federation and Eli Lilly and Company to raise awareness of the devastating impact of the disease.

Breakthrough will be installed in the Historical Society's 1,300-square-foot temporary gallery, located just off the 77th Street entrance, while the remainder of the landmark Central Park West building undergoes a $60 million architectural renovation.

The tranche of documents uncovered recently has not only brought several stalwarts of Indian politics, cinema industry, and business tycoons under scanner but has also thrown up pertinent questions over the moral dilemmas of avoiding tax

The paradise in the Paradise Papers refers to tax havens of low or even no taxation. Such havens usually are shadowy and sleazy little countries and principalities such as the Cayman Islands, Lichtenstein and Monaco, and sometimes entities within countries like Jersey, Guernsey, Bermuda in the UK and Delaware and Puerto Rico in the USA. Then there are low taxation countries like Switzerland, Singapore and Dubai that assure secretive rich people of their privacy. 

Essentially a tax haven exists to cheat sovereign states of their lawful incomes. The Tax Justice Network campaign group estimates that corporate tax avoidance costs governments $500bn a year, while personal tax avoidance costs $200bn a year. This in effect means that anywhere between $20-30 trillion of business transactions are sheltered from taxations. Moody’s estimated that in 2016 giant American technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple were hoarding about $1.84 trillion cash in offshore havens. Clearly they are avoiding tax and as bending the rules of the tax system is not illegal unlike tax evasion; they are operating within the letter, but perhaps not the spirit, of the law.

In the early 1980’s, shaken up by the number of scandals in Wall Street, and by the number of its MBA graduates who were found wanting in ethical and moral values, the Harvard Business School made a course on “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” a core requirement. I am sure Jayant Sinha, a Harvard MBA, had to do this course and would have scored a high grade in it. Such courses now are in the core curriculum of the business schools attended by the other two young politicians also named in the Paradise Papers or capers if you will. Sachin Pilot graduated from the famous Wharton School of Business and Karti Chidambaram took his business masters from Texas and a law degree from Cambridge to boot.

Doing the required ethics course is one thing but it is quite something else to be able to resolve moral dilemmas of what John Kenneth Galbraith described as the “HBS’s ethical view of capitalism which derives straight out of the Protestant ethic and its transformational view of money, in which the ability to accumulate wealth is a reflection of one’s character.”

The charge against Jayant Sinha is that while acting as an Omidyar Network representative was on the board of a California company that made a loan to that company’s Cayman subsidiary. Usually such a loan to such a subsidiary suggests a fiddle. Whether Sinha knew this or did not know it is something else? Clearly the evidence does not suggest any malfeasance. But clearly there is room for skepticism. 

Omidyar Network proclaims its belief: “Just as eBay created the opportunity for millions of people to start their own businesses, we believe market forces can be a potent driver for positive social change.” Grand words but that hardly conceals the true goal that is to make bucks, sometimes fast ones too.  Again as Galbraith put it: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Jayant, then fresh out of one of the IIT’s, worked with me way back in the mid 1980’s on a paper that proposed the mass construction of smokeless challahs for rural homes as a profitable employment for hundreds of thousands of rural workers. I remember it as a bit of an elaborate scheme that also computed the savings due to improved health results. It was published in this newspaper and the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi took note of it. I was impressed enough to write a recommendation when he applied for a Masters in Energy Management at Pennsylvania. 

I next met him when I was serving as his fathers Advisor in the Finance Ministry. Jayant and his wife were both working with foreign companies investing in Indian stocks. He was apprehensive about a proposal made by me to disinvest PSU stocks by selling them to the governments banks for onward restructure and disinvestment. The minister had clearly spoken to him. At that time too I wondered if the HBS’s core business ethics course would have seen conflict of interest issues in it? The minister however had plenty of flex in him.

To my mind tax avoidance is just as reprehensible as tax evasion. Sinha was too junior in the Finance Ministry to have expressed views on this. It would have been unlikely though for that is not the HBS way. The previous Finance Minister, himself a Harvard MBA, would not have any left footprints for young Sinha to tread on. Neither would the present lawyer Finance Minister. 

The smog that has engulfed large swathes of Northern India has effectively brought the Northern Indian Railways to a standstill

Witnessing delays and cancellations due to the heavy smog that has descended over large parts of North India, several long-distance trains reaching stations such as New Delhi, Chandigarh and Lucknow and others have been held up by more than twelve hours. This disruption has caused several problems, many people have been stranded, unable to get to their workplaces on time, while others have been seen lying on the platform.

Trains that have been delayed:

According to the Northern Railways, over 25 trains were delayed in the Ambala division on Thursday. The morning Shatabdi, operating between Chandigarh and Delhi, was delayed by three hours and failed to reach at the scheduled time. “The trains are running late due to smog in Delhi and other parts of the northern states. On Thursday as well several trains were delayed. We don’t see any change in the coming days. The situation will improve only if the smoggy weather ends,” said an official to news agencies.

Several trains have been cancelled as well, which include: The Ajmer-Jammu Tavi Express, New Delhi-Amritsar Express, Allahabad-Saharanpur Express, Amritsar-Jai Nagar express, Malda-Delhi Farakka Express, Poorvottar Express from Amritsar to Silchar and Pooja Express from Jammu to Ajmer.

Smog disrupts Northern Railways