Chitra Ramkrishna had shared confidential info with an outsider she dubbed ‘Himalayan yogi’
Former National Stock Exchange (NSE) Chief Executive Chitra Ramkrishna, accused of grave irregularities at the stock market including sharing confidential information with an outsider she dubbed a “Himalayan yogi”, has been arrested by the CBI.
The arrest came just a day after a Delhi Court dismissed her request for pre-arrest bail plea and pulled up the Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI for inaction and being “lackadaisical” in the probe against her in the last four years.
Special Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal also observed that market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has been “too kind” to the accused, noting that she faced serious charges and her sustained custodial interrogation would be required to dig out the truth.
Last month, the mysterious “Himalayan yogi” who allegedly influenced Ms Ramkrishna’s decisions was outed as Anand Subramanian, also a former officer at the stock exchange arrested in a market manipulation case.
The former Chief Operating Officer of the NSE was the “yogi” who communicated with Chitra Ramkrishna through email, CBI sources said.
His controversial appointment was one of the decisions that Chitra Ramkrishna took under the so-called yogi’s influence, SEBI had said in a report.
SEBI has charged Chitra Ramkrishna and others with alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Mr Subramanian and his outsized promotion.
It has said NSE and its board were aware of the interactions with the controversial adviser, but had chosen to “keep the matter under wraps”.
The CBI is probing the alleged improper dissemination of information from the computer servers of the market exchanges to stockbrokers in what has come to be known as the “co-location scam”
Ms Ramakrishna and another former NSE CEO Ravi Narayan as well as two other officials have been fined by the SEBI for lapses in recruitment at the senior level.
Ravi Narain was the MD and CEO of the National Stock Exchange from April 1994 till March 2013, while Chitra Ramkrishna was the MD and CEO of the NSE from April 2013 to December 2016.
In response to public criticism, NSE said it was “committed to highest standards of governance and transparency”, and described the issue as being “almost six to nine years old”.
Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries.
Avalanches, flooding and other effects of the accelerating loss of ice imperil residents in India, Nepal and Bhutan and threaten to disrupt agriculture for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to the researchers. And since water from melting glaciers contributes to sea-level rise, glacial ice loss in the Himalayas also adds to the threat of inundation and related problems faced by coastal communities around the world.
A new kind of chemotherapy derived from a molecule found in a Himalayan fungus has been revealed as a potent anti-cancer agent, and may in the future provide a new treatment option for patients with cancer.
NUC-7738, synthesized by researchers at the University of Oxford in partnership with UK-based biopharmaceutical company NuCana, is still in the experimental testing stages and isn’t available as an anti-cancer medication yet – but newly reported clinical trial results bode well for the drug candidate.
The active ingredient in NUC-7738 is called cordycepin, which was first found in the parasitic fungus species Ophiocordyceps sinensis (also known as caterpillar fungus because it kills and mummifies moth larva), used as a herbal remedy in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries.
Cordycepin, also known as 3′-deoxyadenosine (or 3′-dA), is a naturally occurring nucleoside analogue, reported to offer a range of anti-cancer, anti-oxidant, and anti-inflammatory effects, which goes some way to explaining why the fungus is sometimes called the world’s most valuable parasite.
Naturally occurring cordycepin extracted from O. sinensis does have its drawbacks, however, including that it is broken down quickly in the bloodstream – with a half-life of 1.6 minutes in plasma – by the enzyme adenosine deaminase, or ADA. It also shows poor uptake into cells, meaning the molecule’s actual potency against tumor cells in the body is greatly diminished.
To amplify cordycepin’s potential as an anti-cancer agent, NUC-7738 makes use of a number of engineered advantages, allowing it to enter cells independently of nucleoside transporters, such as Human Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporter 1 (hENT1).
Unlike naturally occurring cordycepin, NUC-7738 doesn’t rely on hENT1 to gain access to cells, and other tweaks to the molecule mean it’s pre-activated (bypassing the need for the enzyme adenosine kinase), and is also resistant to breaking down in the bloodstream, with built-in protection against ADA.
According to a new study on NUC-7738, these changes make the drug candidate’s anti-cancer properties up to 40 times more potent than cordycepin when tested against a range of human cancer cell lines.
Moreover, early results from the first in-human clinical trial of NUC-7738 appear to be positive so far too. The Phase 1 trial, which began in 2019 and is still ongoing, has so far involved 28 patients with advanced tumors that were resistant to conventional treatment.
So far, weekly escalating doses of NUC-7738 given to this cohort have been tolerated well by the patients, who have shown “encouraging signals of anti-tumor activity and prolonged disease stabilization”, the researchers report in their paper.
“These findings provide proof of concept that NUC-7738 overcomes the cancer resistance mechanisms that limit the activity of 3′-dA and support the further clinical evaluation of NUC-7738 as a novel cancer treatment.”
While it’s certainly a promising start, it will still be some time before NUC-7738 becomes available to patients outside the trial.
Planning is currently underway for Phase 2 of the trial, once the safety of the drug has been more thoroughly demonstrated, and once the recommended regimen for Phase 2 patients has been identified.
The findings are reported in Clinical Cancer Research.
High in the Himalayas, a four-to-five-day trek from the nearest village, sits an unassuming glacial lake called Roopkund. The spot is beautiful, a dollop of jewel-toned water amid rough gravel and scree, but hardly out of the ordinary for the rugged landscape — except for the hundreds of human bones scattered within and around the lake.
These bones, belonging to between 300 and 800 people, have been a mystery since a forest ranger first reported them to the broader world in 1942. Lately, though, the mystery has only deepened. In 2019, a new genetic analysis of the ancient DNA in the bones, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, found that at least 14 of the people who died at the lake probably weren’t from South Asia. Instead, their genes match those of modern-day people of the eastern Mediterranean.
Related: 11 famous places that are littered with dead bodies
What’s more, these bones were far newer than most of the others at the lake, which date to around 800; the people with apparent Mediterranean heritage seem to instead have died around 1800. So what on Earth was a group from the Mediterranean doing above 16,500 feet (5,029 meters) in a far-flung corner of the Himalayas? And how did they die?
Roopkund lake is a relatively small body of water, spanning about 130 feet (40 meters) across, but it has a big story attached to it. (Image credit: Awanish Tirkey/Shutterstock)
Deadly ridge
Those questions are at the heart of a new article in The New Yorker by Douglas Preston, as well as a subsequent webinar discussion led by Preston and Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes and hosted by the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico.
The story of Roopkund illustrates the need for multiple lines of evidence when investigating the past. The bones alone are mystifying: They belong to both men and women, mostly young adults, who seem to have died in several bouts, perhaps over dozens or hundreds of years.
Roopkund is a glacial lake, shown here frozen over. (Image credit: Shubham Magdum/Shutterstock)
Oral histories passed down by the villagers near Roopkund offer more illumination. The lake is on a pilgrimage trail for Nanda Devi, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. According to local legend, a distant king once angered Nanda Devi, causing her to unleash drought upon his kingdom. To appease the goddess, the king set off on a pilgrimage that took him and his entourage past Roopkund. But the foolish king brought dancers and other luxuries on the trek, intensifying Nanda Devi’s rage. She conjured a terrible hailstorm and killed the entire party, the legend goes.
Related: 25 grisly archaeological discoveries
This tale may not be far from the truth. Some of the victims at Roopkund have skull fractures that look like the result of blunt-force trauma, research has found. The current best guess for what happened to most of the dead? They were caught on the ridge above the lake in horrendous storms, some of which may have included deadly hail. Most of the victims likely died of exposure and hypothermia; they ended up in and around the lake because their bodies either rolled downhill or their remains sloughed down the hillside in the frequent mini-avalanches common on the slope.
Ongoing mystery
Trekkers on their way to Roopkund lake, which lies on a pilgrimage trail for Nanda Devi, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. (Image credit: Vishwas Krishnamurthy/Shutterstock)
There’s no consensus, however, on what a group of people of apparent Mediterranean heritage was doing in such a remote corner of the Himalayas around 1800; there’s no historical record of a long-range expedition to the region then, Preston said.
The finding hints at the limits of ancient DNA analysis, Fuentes said in the Feb. 3 webinar. The analysis compared the DNA of the skeletons at the lake with the DNA of modern-day populations. But people have moved around quite a lot in the intervening 200-plus years, making it a little difficult to say exactly where the dead at the lake came from. They may not have hailed directly from the eastern Mediterranean, Fuentes said; they could have been from closer to Roopkund but shared common ancestors with the people who ended up populating the eastern Mediterranean.
There is non-DNA evidence that the people in the mystery group weren’t like the others who died at the lakes, though. The 2019 analysis also found that this group had a different diet, with less millet, than the people whose genetics suggested a South Asian origin.
One theory is that the mysterious dead at Roopkund could have been from an isolated population of Central Asians who descended from Alexander the Great and his armies. The Kalash, an ethnic group in Pakistan, owe some of their ancestry to these conquerors, Harvard University geneticist David Reich and his colleagues wrote in their 2019 paper. But the mystery dead don’t have genetics like the Kalash, which mix eastern Mediterranean genetic markers with South Asian markers, and they don’t show any of the signs of inbreeding that would be evident if they didn’t mix with the wider South Asian population around them.
“Combining different lines of evidence, the data suggest instead that what we have sampled is a group of unrelated men and women who were born in the eastern Mediterranean during the period of Ottoman political control,” the researchers wrote. “As suggested by their consumption of a predominantly terrestrial, rather than marine-based, diet, they may have lived in an inland location, eventually traveling to and dying in the Himalayas. Whether they were participating in a pilgrimage, or were drawn to Roopkund Lake for other reasons, is a mystery.”
Part of the reason this mystery persists, Preston said, is that Roopkund has not actually been well studied. The lake is on a relatively popular trekking route, and hikers over the decades have moved bones, stacked them and even stolen them. Because of the tempestuous weather and high elevation, no systematic studies of the remains and their location have been done.
Some day, though, that might change. For his article in The New Yorker, Preston interviewed Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, a bioarchaeologist at Deccan College in India who hopes to investigate Roopkund scientifically. It’s likely that there are bodies within the lake that haven’t been disturbed, Mushrif-Tripathy told Preston. Soft tissue and artifacts might even be preserved in the cold water. If researchers can launch such an expedition, they might be able to illuminate the lives of some of those who died at the lake.