Genes, Adda and Other Inheritances

  Recently, I seem to have gone on a storytelling spree. Not stories about our research, or what we managed or not managed to achieve in the laboratory over the years, but stories about scientists whose discoveries have made an extraordinary difference to society. Scientists whose work has touched, and in some cases saved, millions of lives. After spending more than three decades teaching and doing research, I have discovered something rather amusing. It is perhaps more fun to tell stories about science than to give scientific talks. And even more fun when the stories are not about your own work! There is something fascinating about going back in time and discovering how a scientific breakthrough actually happened. What was the question that started it all? What prompted someone to ask that question in the first place? What obstacles did they encounter? Was it a brilliant idea, a chance observation, sheer persistence, or perhaps a bit of everything? The finished discovery, as we re...

  India celebrated the birth centenary of Prof. G P Talwar (Pran to his friends and colleagues), scientist, institution builder, lifelong researcher. Prof. Talwar was one of the founding faculty members of AIIMS (1956) and founded NII, the first of its kind for immunology. As AIIMS celebrated this milestone, I penned my memories of him when I was a child.  Happy 100th, Professor Pran Talwar My memories of Professor Pran Talwar are those of a child - some genuinely mine, and some probably kept alive  through repeated narration from my parents, Maharani and Debi. Most of these memories belong to the Guha Research Conference, or GRC, in its heyday. I was  a permanent fixture there till about the age of ten. Scientists came, scientists argued, scientists gave talks and I came along. I also met Professor Talwar occasionally when he visited BHU. What I do remember very clearly is that he was so charismatic that he was the only one I addressed as “Professor Talwar”. Everyon...

For the last decade or so, whenever I have asked a student to show me a gel picture, 99 per cent of the time I have been directed to the gel documentation system, a.k.a. the gel doc. The gel doc has become a repository of every picture taken: good, bad or indifferent. Most remain buried there until someone finally decides to clean up the hard drive. A few, of course, escape this fate and make their way into papers and thesis. The modern gel doc is a wonderfully convenient box. You place the gel inside, make a few adjustments, or simply accept whatever the machine suggests, click a picture and save it. Yet, many a times, the image produced by this magic box does not look quite like what one actually saw on the trans. The digital world has its advantages, but I feel, one needs to be trained to properly use it. We assume that digital technology is intuitive, that the machine knows best and that the default settings must therefore be correct. Having been trained in older methods of imaging...

  I knew this day would come. In fact, I have been preparing myself for it for almost a year. But when it finally did come—when the cartons appeared and our house slowly began disappearing into boxes—I felt something I had not quite expected. A feeling that is still difficult to put into words. South Campus has been our home for more than twenty-five years. And not just ours. For many of Kuku’s friends, this was also a second home. We became ma and dad to Jeena and Jo—to love, pamper and scold too. But perhaps no one claimed South Campus quite as naturally as Kinu did. When she could barely speak, almost every proposed outing had the same destination: “ South Campus ” She grew up here in many ways. Whenever she is back home, a stay in South Campus is always there. As it happens, she is here even now, doing an internship and staying on campus. The other evening she returned from work, opened the door and saw the house half packed. Her eyes filled up. She looked around and said simpl...

  I have often wondered how some research findings enter everyday classroom teaching, while others quietly slip out of the story. Mention DNA, and Watson and Crick arrive almost immediately. They have become inseparable from the double helix. But ask for example, about ribosomes and many of us will pause, look thoughtful, and hope someone else answers. Older textbooks carried more of the history of a discovery. They told us not only what was discovered, but also who discovered it, how the idea developed, and sometimes even who disagreed with whom. Today, textbooks have far more information to accommodate. Inevitably, many of these stories—and many of the names attached to them—have been pushed into the smaller print. But this blog is not really about why some names remain while others disappear. Open any molecular biology textbook—or simply ask Google—and it will tell you that amino acids are stitched together into proteins at the ribosome’s peptidyl transferase centre. It will als...

  As I was clearing up my office, I found a bunch of old slides dating back to my PhD, postdoc, and early South Campus days - the 90s. For a few moments, I just sat looking at them. These little square pieces of plastic, with tiny photographs trapped inside them,  suddenly opened a window into another time. It was a time that the present generation, brought up on laptops, PowerPoint, pen drives, and now even cloud links, may find difficult to imagine. Today, a presentation can be made sitting alone in a room. One can change fonts at midnight, add a graph at 2 AM, and insert a picture five minutes before the talk. In our days — I mean as students — a presentation was rarely such a private affair. It needed people. Sometimes too many people. My earliest memory goes back to my MSc days ('82- 83..at BHU...Zoology Dept), when our final year presentations were made using chalk, blackboard, and a majestic piece of equipment called an epidiascope. For the current Gen… who wouldn’t hav...