Not spoony about this one!

Sure, you’d agree that there are burning issues in the world today waiting to be solved: the Iraq war, North Korea nuclear tests, polio eradication and obesity. But that's not to deter these researchers to perform a systematic longitudinal study researching a very common occurrence, a problem each one of us has faced at some point or the other, but rarely gone beyond lamenting and complaining about. Hats off to these guys who are path-breakers in the field of 'spoon' research. I'm talking about a paper published recently in the British Medical Journal about disappearing teaspoons!

Initially, I found it really amusing and a little absurd that anybody would waste time, money and manpower on such issues. But then I thought about research in general: the whole idea of research is to ask difficult questions, to scientifically explore the causation and thereby find solutions to problems. Its an answer to the intellectual man’s inherent and incessant inquisitiveness. As I analyzed this more, I became appreciative of the fact that schools (in the US and UK among some other countries) encourage this culture among students and scientists. Indeed , the sky is the limit for us to ask perplexing questions and find ways to research them. Why, then, shouldn’t we rightfully know where those teaspoons go from the spoon shelf? Why did I never think of doing a study like this?

Somewhere along this train of thought, I was thinking about the education system in India. There is no doubt that there are advantages in our system that has been producing top quality engineers and scientists who now lead many companies and institutes around the world. Keen sense of mathematics, multi-lingual capabilities and resourcefulness are all ingrained in most of us like nowhere else. But out-of-the-box and novel thinking lags behind in our priorities. For 12 years of schooling, most of us are burdened with heavy bags, homework and unrealistic expectations, to be the winner of a rat-race of sorts that leaves the real essence of life unexplored. Even hobbies are forced onto children by their parents with a vengeance of some kind (for all the things they themselves probably never attempted and achieved)! In all this, there is a huge possibility that one ends up without exploiting one’s special talents in trying forever to be just like everybody else.

To sum up the interesting results of the spoon study, they found that “the half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days). The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons' value. The incidence of teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years. At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons.”* Incredible!

*MSC Lim, ME Hellard, CK Aitken, BMJ 2005; 331:1498-1500