| Dorothy Watson Brar Observations on science and the human condition By Heidi M. Pascual |
| Contributions to science "I work on a large, long-term project that started in 1994, although I've only been working on this project for a year-and-a-half," Dorothy started enthusiastically. "It's called MIDUS, which stands for Mid-life in the U.S. This is a very large study that started in 1994 when they enrolled a group of 7,000 subjects from the ages of 25 on up. The goal was to study this big population of all sorts of people -- mostly healthy, some with health problems, from all different ethnic groups from all parts of the country -- and follow them over time, to find out what was going on in their lives, and which things influence other aspects of their lives." This project has five parts and Dorothy handles the part called "biological markers." She does three tests in the lab and sends specimens out for the rest of the tests. "I do more specimen management and data processing than I do lab work at this time, but I find it really fascinating," she confided, and beamed at the prospect of the results of this study getting published. "There are already indications that things that cause stress in people's lives weaken our immune system," she explained and further discussed the study's update. "They are coming up with some of these scales of stress, for example. They measure stress hormones (as well as their increase) in people, and from interviews, they can find out which people recently changed jobs, recently got demoted, got promoted, moved, got divorced, got married, and all of these things. Even the good things cause stress. Happy things that should make people happy. But then it's interesting to find out how these things impact their immune system, their blood chemistry, even their problem-solving ability." Dorothy is very modest about her "very small part" in the MIDUS project, but in the end, when this work is published, she will indeed realize that her "small involvement" made a huge difference. "Microbes, Infection and Public Health," is the title of Dorothy's book written while she taught at a medical school in India. In her book's preface, Dorothy clearly defined her reasons for writing the book: "to discuss agents of infection -- in terms of how they spread and what they do." She also wrote, based on her observation that health-science textbooks used in India were imported from other countries, "What I have attempted to write is a readable introductory textbook on microbiology which will be relevant to Indian students of medicine, nursing, and public health." Dorothy surely got some people in her field uneasy when she added, "(A)nother defect which I find in the teaching of microbiology in this country is its treatment as an isolated subject. The interdisciplinary subject known as epidemiology (disease ecology) is not included in the M.B.B.S. and B. Sc. (Nursing) courses, and students learn microbiology, not as an applied science, but as a basic science -- and rather a dull one at that." Observations on India in the '70s and the U.S. Dorothy has both good and bad observations and she was very open about them. "It's overwhelming going from one place to another place, especially when the environment is that different," Dorothy said matter-of-factly. "The one thing that I like about India and I still miss is -- in spite of the fact that they don't have a lot of the conveniences we have here and a lot of things that we just take for granted here -- people in India have more time. Even going shopping can be very tedious there. Here we're great at saving time; but I wish I knew what we did with all the time we saved because Americans seem to have a lot less time than people in India. We're always rushed, and in fact, that seems to be a great source of stress for people here. We seem to never have enough time." "Sexism," however, is one of the two things Dorothy said she didn't like. "Of course, you can find sexism all over the world; there's plenty of sexism in this country," she said. "But a woman just shopping or walking to somebody's house has to get used to hearing harassment and catcalls and so on. In this country, there's this proverbial construction worker; you know, a woman walking past a construction site may expect that sort of thing. In India, if there's a bunch of males, they may be highly educated males, they may be laborers, but a lot of them are going to be behaving the same way. This was very hard for me to ignore. I do know that most Indian women would not leave their homes alone. They'll go in groups if they want to visit somebody, and that's part of the problem. But just this idea that any woman is fair game for whoever wants to yell at her bothered me." The other thing that bothered Dorothy in India was the lack of privacy, but she explained that culture or how one has been brought up could cause one to look at the concept differently. "I think most Indians don't feel the need for privacy that most Americans feel," she noted. "That was 30 years ago, it might have changed. But actually, when I was in India I met Indian people who'd lived in the United States, and their complaint was that it's so lonely here. So, I realized that these are two different sides of the same issue. What we think of as privacy and time to ourselves, if you're from that culture, you might think of this as being lonely and isolated. So I guess it's a question of how you were brought up. If you grew up in this country, maybe you like to have more time to yourself, and if you're brought up there, you don't want that so much, you want company." Dorothy said she thinks there should be a balance. The importance of friendship is another value that Dorothy observed in India. "Friendship seems to be much more important than it is here," she thought, which she considers a very positive thing. "For a lot of Americans, they think it's important to have friends when they're growing up, when they're kids, and maybe when they're single, and once they get married and have their own kids and have a family, their personal friends either disappear altogether or they take a back seat. In India, it seems to me that there are friendships that just last for life." Her stay in India gave Dorothy another view of the U.S. in terms of its wastefulness. "When I came back from India, I realized how incredibly wasteful we are," she lamented with a big sigh. "You go in a grocery store and you see these Oscar Mayer's "Lunchables" with all this plastic and paper and foil packaging for a handful of crackers and a blob of cheese, for example. Or you buy frozen pancakes, or frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ("Crustables"), with all the wasteful packaging, all the energy that gets wasted, freezing this ridiculous stuff. Everything is disposable in this country, it seems. And just odd things like, you walk around in a supermarket, and areas for pet foods are much bigger than the areas where they have the baby foods, so I don't know what that says about our values." The woman beside her man As outspoken as Dorothy Brar is, she admits that she and Gurdip have a "custom-made relationship." "We've been married 30 years," she said. "I guess the longer people have been married, the more experiences they've had in common together. We've had experiences together that probably nobody else could be a part of or understand. I think we have become friends." Both love to cook things from scratch and try out new things. "He's a guinea pig for my cooking experiments, and I'm a guinea pig for his cooking experiments," she said with a big laugh. "We plan to reorganize our house someday. The kids moved out some years ago and we still have all sorts of clutter that we probably ought to go through and get rid of. But then, we both want to do some traveling and see more of the world. We also plan to have the four of us (our two kids) go on a vacation soon." Meanwhile, Dorothy gives Gurdip advice and pointers on how to actualize his latest project and get down to business. |
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| Dorothy Brar (left) poses with husband Gurdip during this interview. |
| Dorothy Watson has been married to Gurdip Brar for more than 30 years. They met at a fruit fly lab in California while pursuing different, but somehow related, science degrees. Gurdip was in genetics while Dorothy was in public health. Their professional lives took them to several places together until they finally decided to stay in Middleton, Wisconsin. This article will focus on Dorothy as a scientist, as a wife of another scientist, and her observations on some Indian practices while working in India for almost four years. She now works at the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a job which she enjoys very much. |
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