XI. Observations on Famine

American children growing up in the 1950’s, were often admonished for not finishing all of the food they were given with the stern, if misguided, warning that “there are children starving in India.” These were the first years after India gained independence, in 1947. There was then, and still is, a lot of ignorance about how other people ("they") live, why they do certain things, and what they feel. I don’t think that the adults at the time meant anything particularly cruel in saying what they said. Neither did they think much about the current reality on the other side of the world nor the historical underpinnings to the half truth that they spoke.

The fact is that 19th century India was the site of the largest famines the world had even known. I had been taught the half truth (in reflection, perhaps the 1/10th truth) that famine is caused by drought, overpopulation, or the combination of the two. There was just enough truth in the explanation for me, as a child, to believe it. Years later, when I was living in India in the 1970s and working in the slums of Madras (now Chennai), I knew that large-scale famines were a thing of the past and was struck by the fact that there were many times as many people then living in both Madras and in India than there had been in the 19th century. So, I knew darned well that the overpopulation argument was, put simply, rubbish.

As I do in my cancer research (and my favorite example is the insufficiency of tobacco as an explanation for causing squamous cell cancers of the esophagus in African Americans) is search for another plausible explanation. Well, this was pretty obvious. If overpopulation did not explain 19th century Indian famines, then drought must. This is where the accumulation of human knowledge comes into play. I was based at the University of Madras at the time and universities are keepers of this knowledge. It took me less than an afternoon to find out that India in the 19th century was no drier than in the 20th. Sure, there were variations in rainfall that appeared to roughly follow the 11- to 12-year periodicity of sunspot cycling, but this had continued through the entire several hundred-year period over which the records to which I had access had been kept.

The mind of a scientist should constantly be searching for the answers to real, specific, and important questions. In so doing, we must draw inferences from what we learn in relation to what others have discovered about our problem. In this recursive process of going from the specific to the general and back again, our minds dance between inductive and inductive reasoning to both solve a problem and deepen our understanding of the deeper truths in life. That is what distinguishes real scientists from mere technicians.