1
50
920
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c136775a9ae8b3c717ce39e42c461900.mp3
a9783481856de8848c6928d8294ae016
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
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Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
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jitu_genetic-diversity-india-model-sys_IDENTITY-INDIA
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Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: On his projections for the potential to leverage being in India for future areas of research for NCBS.
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NCBS Archives
1-India-A5
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3383c4502900bda477460755e8e1671c.mp3
692ca3846fd2a13b05c54b50cc013948
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An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Title
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shannon_india-biodiversity_IDENTITY-INDIA
Description
An account of the resource
Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS: On applying to NCBS, with no connection to India or its local research environment.
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NCBS Archives
1-India-A6
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/b10124affa7d7469b5851b5de2aa6692.mp3
7c4b995d4e84010e0f8cc294c040a630
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An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
shona_amygdala-India_IDENTITY-SCI-INDIA
Description
An account of the resource
Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: On his ability to do risky, more adventurous science in India compared to other parts of the world. He reflects on his experience from publishing a paper on stress in the amygdala in the late 1990s despite having no background in the field.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-India-A7
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5eabca267b110d2f7946b9e9df66a11e.mp3
51baa24825730daa2d64a0670e760044
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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sreekantan_1985-chandran-natl-centre_IDENTITY-INDIA
Description
An account of the resource
BV Sreekantan, former director of TIFR: The 1985 negotiations with the Planning Commission to set up national centres under TIFR to justify the scope of proposed programmes, including NCBS and GMRT.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-India-A8
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/49488eea70d1ceab236fd660b232712c.mp3
b76886474cd9fc5d2f42cc0d26bb768f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
shona_logo_IDENTITY-BRANDING
Description
An account of the resource
Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: The formation of the NCBS logo and building an identity for the Centre.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Recognition-A9
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5339c0b7667a7907bd500e0dd5baa278.mp3
be9afd1e5d98d0d31028e05b12a1d068
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound
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rath_NCBS-breakaway-brand-benchmark_IDENTITY-BRAND
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An account of the resource
Satyajit Rath, faculty member at NII: Assessing the effect of NCBS breaking away from TIFR and building a brand for itself.
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NCBS Archives
1-Recognition-A10
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/0c4bccf1bcb3e16ac4507ec0fcf7b475.mp3
5ff0453a16aeb8e1adcad342d1a50481
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An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
nanjundiah_NCBS-culture-risk-hi-money_IDENTITY-BRANDING
Description
An account of the resource
Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s: Reflections on the culture at NCBS today, comparisons to the climate at TIFR earlier.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Recognition-A11
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/647aa0373b345a4c4c5f8314012d6405.mp3
2cb854eac7555feeb11ddf6a1c7e9534
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Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
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Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
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Original Format
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Sound
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Title
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ranjith_IISc-Tata-Instt-NCBS_IDENTITY-BRANDING
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PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: On the difficulties in the mid 1990s of communicating to the outside world that there is a new NCBS.
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NCBS Archives
1-Recognition-A12
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3e22cd3b000eb2e075e6d8e6f3d60a45.mp3
0c5e66b926b7e19468592d97c59e060f
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound
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jayant_ctr-biological-sci_IDENTITY-BRANDING
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An account of the resource
Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On the actual name for NCBS, and his memories of changing the name to make it less of a mouthful.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Recognition
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/8c0de8c31228c84d8116862cf8058b27.mp3
76eb822f2a20cedc96c72ede9ab7c406
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
swarup_NCRA-TIFR_IDENTITY-BRANDING
Description
An account of the resource
Govind Swarup, former faculty member at TIFR: The distinction between NCBS and NCRA in how they view their autonomy from TIFR as shown in the naming.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Recognition
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/85543848348095da7c0388559f0ee7db.mp3
4910c21a2e6501c7d159130f90cc1961
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
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Title
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vijay_caltech-TIFR-fame_IDENTITY-BRANDING
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An account of the resource
K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: On the outsider's perception of TIFR that he saw while at Caltech.
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NCBS Archives
1-Recognition
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7695c8cf8e4d91e6a5590fa975f009f4.mp3
06ad1c9af3b6c9f26109f2c1db6a5863
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Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
vijay_scientific-method-questions_IDENTITY-REFLECTION
Description
An account of the resource
K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: An encounter with Guido Pontecorvo and thoughts on the scientific method.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Reflection-A13
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3057a068b4ec03f62482fb33bbbf4d89.mp3
8f5d39ebd73a47352cf1fe76d5b74804
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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gaiti_intuition-adventure-expt_IDENTITY-REFLECTION
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An account of the resource
Gaiti Hasan, faculty member at NCBS: On her approach to finding research questions and tackling the unknown
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NCBS Archives
1-Reflection-A14
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e099d2ec1308c8ad2d5e630e6a67e53f.mp3
f0409896e8dc0094102885c2a5dd98a2
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Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
OS_on-biology-complexity_IDENTITY-REFLECTION
Description
An account of the resource
Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: A perspective on what makes biology unique and different from other sciences and finding ways to bridge the work across disciplines.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
TIFR Archives
1-Reflection-A15
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/fb1ceaedfff9995a595b9f9d248d4ced.mp3
fb093df7d88feca68f24fbae4f256fae
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
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Original Format
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Sound
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Title
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sanjay_model-system-blinder_IDENTITY-REFLECTIONS
Description
An account of the resource
Sanjay Sane, faculty member and former student at NCBS: On the blinders one has on while working within a model system in biology.
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NCBS Archives
1-Reflection-A16
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ad8db47f7bee589af356dd00b9079822.mp3
0b43037a710ce0dc553505dc6e709892
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
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<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
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Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
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swaminathan_NBL_IDENTITY-SPACE
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An account of the resource
MS Swaminathan, member of Planning Commission in 1980: Reflecting on a 1960s proposal for a National Biological Laboratory, and seeing the TIFR-IISc joint biology centre proposal while in the Planning Commission in 1980.
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NCBS Archives
1-Space-A0
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/2c1e9985061fe402e705ca8d63e50a35.mp3
a64064d006546fe00ef22c8abe8623c6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound
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balaram_NBL-eukaryote_IDENTITY-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
P Balaram, professor and ex-director, IISc: On the unknown links between an idea -- National Biological Laboratory -- and three institutes, NCBS, CCMB and NII.
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NCBS Archives
1-Space-A1
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a9098161cae955b823c7fc8be038f853.mp3
8ddac07b1e994c72badd25765df1b208
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
nanjundiah_1976-80-IISc-TIFR_IDENTITY-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s: On his move from IISc to TIFR, and reflections on the newly proposed (c 1981) IISc-TIFR joint centre for biology.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Space-A2
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/10e370e6d19c0a19ede7080c9a312638.mp3
518408fe728cf8ef12fa203b70bf19e2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
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Sound
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The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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OS_ramaseshan_IDENTITY-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: Memories of conversations with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, to set up a separate centre for biology at IISc (c 1978).
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
TIFR Archives
1-Space-A3
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9e902d194fa8c1b737485c4091288906.mp3
c30b7eb08115f64813e61810b4d953fc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
vijay_TIFR-no-dynamism-1980-proposal_IDENTITY-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: Remarks on the reasons for the push in the early 1980s for an indepent centre for biology
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Space-A4
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/cd40012bf1975565d04d95649fd8120a.mp3
6bc555176cbf8086ef2001e2b0152dc3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Identity
Description
An account of the resource
<p style="text-align:left;">In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”</p>
<br /><p>The history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to." <br />– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.<br /><br /></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.<br /><br /></p>
<p>It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. <span>1-Space-A0</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS4</span><br /><p>The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a <a href="http://www.ccmb.res.in/" target="_blank">Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB)</a> in the late 1970s. And then, later, a <a href="http://www.nii.res.in/" target="_blank">National Institute of Immunology</a> and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. <span>1-Space-A1</span></p>
<br /><p>In the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.</p>
<span>1-Space-V1</span> <br /><br /><p>Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. <span>1-Space-A3</span> (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. <span>1-Space-A2</span></p>
<span>1-Space-P1</span> <br /><br /><p>The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).</p>
<span>1-Space-PS2</span> <br /><br /><p>Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.<br /><br /></p>
<p>The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. <span>1-Space-A4</span></p>
<span>1-Space-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.</p>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
<span>1-India-P1</span><br /><br /><p>The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.<br /><br /></p>
<p>But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.<br /><br /></p>
<p>However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. <span>1-India-A8</span></p>
<span>1-India-V1</span> <br /><br /><p><br />Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on "Biological Sciences in India".</p>
<span>1-India-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.</p>
<span>1-India-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching "evidence-based conservation" in 2003.</p>
<p><br />Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala <span>1-India-A7</span>, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world <span>1-India-A6</span>, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. <span>1-India-A5</span></p>
<p><br />Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.<br /><br /></p>
<p>Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.</p>
<p><br />This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. <span>1-Recognition-A12</span> To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. <span>1-Recognition-A9</span></p>
<p><br />Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.</p>
<span>1-Recognition-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”</p>
<span>1-Recognition-V1</span><br /><br /><p>In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. <span>1-Recognition-A10</span> And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. <span>1-Recognition-A11</span></p>
<p><br />More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.<br /><br /></p>
One of the romantic ideas behind much of science is that the different disciplines are connected to each other, and that the boundaries we draw only illustrate our inability to see the fluidity across the sciences.
<p><br />But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. <span>1-Reflection-A15</span></p>
<p><br />One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. <span>1-Reflection-A16</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-P1</span><br /><br /><p>Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science <span>1-Reflection-A13</span>, finding research questions <span>1-Reflection-A14</span> and the bridge between biology and society respectively. <span>1-Reflection-A17</span></p>
<span>1-Reflection-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.</p>
<p><br />One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space for biology, Science in India, Recognition, Reflections
Sound
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Original Format
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Sound
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jha_west-canteen-ncbs-hatching_IDENTITY-SPACE-BIOLOGY
Description
An account of the resource
Sudhanshu Jha, ex director of TIFR: On his memories of conversations with Obaid Siddiqi in TIFR's West Canteen in the 1970s. And reliving the talks on needing a space for biology
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Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
1-Space
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e93c25a7e226020a86ba0c7901564083.mp3
c55a253582cfbd561b33a027b7e9ffe7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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rewal_rasa-NCBS_INSTTN-ARCH
Description
An account of the resource
Raj Rewal, architect of the first phase of NCBS: Perspective on 'rasa' in architecture and his view of designing buildings for science.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Arch-A0
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/47385bd1ac7187494142722ba8195149.mp3
c1998fe7f3c83922853b5e5472edabdb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
poornima_dabba-aesthetic_INSTTN-ARCH
Description
An account of the resource
UB Poornima, chief architect at NCBS: On the philosophy guiding architectural design.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Arch-A1
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e06fbee253ba47633ffa3ba9a50464b4.mp3
d85b7b45cc1ad78e33a3abc91b27a025
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
poornima_library-wall_INSTTN-ARCH
Description
An account of the resource
UB Poornima, chief architect at NCBS: Memories of the design changes on the library wall (now Simons Centre at NCBS), conversations between Raj Rewal and Obaid Siddiqi, and follow-up effects.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Arch-A2
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c65ed8ca6310379f5413a3e752803310.mp3
61de0078b961fe857e7bbeafdfb60b4d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
shobhona_OS-adamant-desk_INSTTN-ARCH-CHAR
Description
An account of the resource
Shobhona Sharma, former student and current faculty member, TIFR: Memories of working with Obaid Siddiqi on building new lab spaces at TIFR.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Arch-A3
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1766f672b90a41aff3cf0eda64feef90.mp3
62e0d2c44fa9101a67126bcb96ab9998
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
OS_NCBS-bangalore_INSTTN-ARCH
Description
An account of the resource
Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: The early ideology behind setting up NCBS in Bangalore
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
TIFR Archives
2-Arch-A4
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/abcddaa08a35f3b13c74a146d853218b.mp3
c13f1bb0b7ed9642f867e088d89a8493
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
swarup_JRD-natl-centre_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Govind Swarup, former faculty member at TIFR: Recounting a story of a TIFR Council Meeting where JRD Tata advocated the setting up of many national centres under TIFR.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy-A0
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e56b734e51387cbb533a859c36cdf6ce.mp3
d85a2eb8da1391db892f26ccad547896
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
vidita_fighting-rules-breakaway_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR: Weighing in on the perception of NCBS as a rule breaker -- looking at the broader good rather than being bogged down by details
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy-A1
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e887ed232fe9465e16da4deda43dfa6d.mp3
28e186b3f22b1744e27eefa3d2ca3ec6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
shobhona_DBS-porter-building_INSTTN-SPACE_IDENTITY-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
Shobhona Sharma, former student and current faculty member, TIFR: The story behind TIFR's Department of Biological Sciences seeking more space with a new building at TIFR (c 1998-2014), and the roadblocks along the way.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy-A2
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/72eb04f9efc403a4f09e30ce315081e8.mp3
ee1ae2a3b49a1855f40ed78bcb1906da
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
ranjith_glue-autonomy-rules_INSTTN-BUILDING
Description
An account of the resource
PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: On building an efficient administrative process in the lab and working within the rules.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy-A3
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/22256b68cba86ef7f3b69b439d86ef81.mp3
1470eb077b2280c240dc2b37936e9cd7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
jha_rule-following_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Sudhanshu Jha, ex director of TIFR: On Homi Bhabha's administrative skills and the need to follow rules and process as an institution scales.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy-A4
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3eb82fe2c983857594a19c92fb825653.mp3
f947a1e458210a42de4c2d33b66138b9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
krishanu_TIFR-ncbs-freedom_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Krishanu Ray, faculty member and former PhD student at TIFR: On the idea of autonomy for research, with a comparison of TIFR's Department of Biological Sciences and NCBS.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/b876cebf48d2b8201a24b1c99270835d.mp3
dafa45815ac2e2b337a18fa116788907
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
mmjohri_NCBS-move-MBU-tussle_INSTTN-SPACE
Description
An account of the resource
Man Mohan Johri, retired faculty member from TIFR: Reflections on the start of NCBS, the conversations at the molecular biology unit and figuring out whether one makes the move to Bangalore.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/cca2ab4efe3e432fa53c5258df9ba55c.mp3
16575c4d7b660bebcc28d37b9f7c4a91
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
OS_director-role_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: Reflections on the role and limitations of a director of an institute
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
TIFR Archives
2-Autonomy
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/835daee7ec6eb25ea76afd87b6bc1c50.mp3
4209bbef2548e30376f5a7e7fec49c16
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
virendra-singh_tifr-ncbs-duality_INSTTN-AUTONOMY
Description
An account of the resource
Virendra Singh, former director of TIFR: On the need for NCBS autonomy and yet defining the link to TIFR.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Autonomy
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/132f16f29eaa01658f54194580988da2.mp3
45eaac2dd1d801c0600eb2313e7fedf4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
nanjundiah_sharat-chandra-gkvk-airport-land-1987-89_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s: Reflecting on the role of H Sharat Chandra in early negotiations for NCBS to get space in Bangalore
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper-A0
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9320123f56f47beda1b48119122a9a31.mp3
cad2aeb7a9a62a453110b2c224a9d1a1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
jayant_angry-letter-background_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On writing an angry letter to the then director of TIFR, after facing many delays in the setup of NCBS
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper-A1
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/35e6e881048ca03841ea5f5710e95520.mp3
9649dc33c3995be456740e1b019ba745
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
sahadevan_pune-blr-tussle_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
TM Sahadevan, long-time administrative architect at NCBS: Memories of the late 1980s period when NCBS was being offered land in Maharashtra while struggling to find land in Karnataka.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper-A2
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/35d0f65f3235cd7663451667d7e0825f.mp3
9b3470fd793571b376eac581581eb797
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
sreekantan_1987-ramanna-bvk-gkvk_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
BV Sreekantan, former director of TIFR: Reflecting on the search for land in Bangalore for NCBS, c 1987.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper-A3
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/180b6334ee9143c7dad5f2ff45e3ff68.mp3
d4fefbc127f12b2535a7ce75996aace3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
vijay_OS-JU-KV-NCBS-bureaucracy-88-91_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: Recounting the wading through bureaucracy in the late 1980s, and the different attitudes of the early NCBS faculty.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper-A4
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/56a92ddcd2da3f2045d90cb013a2d8b1.mp3
8a8b3023c5080ec6dfc5c179b05ad117
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
cnr_IISc-space-for-NCBS_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
CNR Rao, National Research Professor at JNCASR and former director, IISc: On the nature of scientific collaborations in the country.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/392c1f0dc2bde2f1feb996c6547e8cd0.mp3
be7c38925c634499fab23706e038fa9f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
sahadevan_OS-1985-survey-map_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
TM Sahadevan, long-time administrative architect at NCBS: First meeting with Obaid Siddiqi at the TIFR Centre, IISc, in the mid 1980s.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/adf01f55d9ac312295a6a9ff404ef9ab.mp3
51baa24825730daa2d64a0670e760044
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Institution Building
Description
An account of the resource
<p>A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.</p>
<p><br />But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.</p>
<p><br />The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-P1</span><br /><br /><p>In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).</p>
<p><br />The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as <a href="http://www.tifr.res.in/" target="_blank">separate research centres</a>. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR <span>2-Autonomy-A0</span>. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. <span>2-Autonomy-A2</span></p>
<span>2-Autonomy-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. <span>2-Autonomy-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. <span>2-Autonomy-A3</span></p>
<p><br />Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. <span>2-Autonomy-A1</span> And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.</p>
<span>2-Autonomy-V1</span><br /><br /><p>More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Paper-P1</span>
<p>In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.</p>
<p><br />In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.</p>
<span>2-Paper-A0</span> <span>2-Paper-PS4</span><br /><br /><p>The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS1</span><br /><br /><p>Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. <span>2-Paper-A3</span> But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.</p>
<span>2-Paper-PS2</span><br /><br /><p>Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. <span>2-Paper-A1</span> K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. <span>2-Paper-A4</span></p>
<p><br />At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. <span>2-Paper-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.</p>
<p><br />Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.<br /><br /></p>
<span>2-Arch-P1</span>
<p><br />It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the <em>full jaam</em>, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.</p>
<p><br />Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. <span>2-Architecture-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the <em>rasa</em> of architecture of a science institution.</p>
<span>2-Architecture-A0</span> <span>2-Arch-PS4</span>
<p><br />The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS1</span>
<p><br />Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. <span>2-Architecture-A3</span> And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. <span>2-Architecture-A2</span></p>
<p><br />Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. <span>2-Architecture-A4</span></p>
<p><br />In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.</p>
<span>2-Arch-PS2</span>
<p><br />The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.</p>
<p><br />Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these <em>chatris</em> on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the <em>chatris</em> today.</p>
<p><br />More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.<br /><br /></p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Space & Autonomy, Paper Trails, Architecture
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Sound
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
sreekantan_1985-chandran-natl-centre_INSTTN-PAPER
Description
An account of the resource
BV Sreekantan, former director of TIFR: The 1985 negotiations with the Planning Commission to set up national centres under TIFR to justify the scope of proposed programmes, including NCBS and GMRT.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
2-Paper
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f6dcbd6d821fb0f3279a9bd300efbfd9.mp3
1b286e71773d988b98440543e9f74037
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Growth
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-V1</span>
<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS2</span> <br /><br />
<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
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Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
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mathew_UAS-salt-uday_GROWTH-COLLAB
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MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: Early work with M. Udayakumar, a faculty member at the University of Agricultural Sciences, and, today, on drought tolerant rice.
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NCBS Archives
3-Collab-A1
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/85aadbeb9df10ca9cd27adc89252fe4a.mp3
333ed9224f078113164fcc9e99072f35
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Growth
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<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-V1</span>
<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS2</span> <br /><br />
<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
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Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
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cnr_early-non-collab_GROWTH-COLLAB
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CNR Rao, National Research Professor at JNCASR and former director, IISc: On the NCBS start-up at the TIFR Centre, IISc, while the main campus was being built.
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NCBS Archives
3-Collab-A2
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ca8401ff6ad67e86c9a47eca7a3b2a8c.mp3
e8753f531fce3cbe039aa7cdd64a0696
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Growth
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An account of the resource
<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-V1</span>
<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS2</span> <br /><br />
<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
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Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
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panic_stem-cell-fertility-reliance_GROWTH-COLLAB
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Mitradas Panicker, faculty member at NCBS: Memories of early stem cell work at NCBS in the late 1990s, including collaborations with a fertility clinic in Bombay.
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NCBS Archives
3-Collab-A3
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http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/193cf90b3bac7c3dd44b1ec2f4a64042.mp3
5cae1d23aedaa3c840336d8e061667e8
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Growth
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<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-V1</span>
<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS2</span> <br /><br />
<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
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Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
Sound
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dasaradhi_InStem_RESEARCH-COLLAB
Description
An account of the resource
Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty member at InStem: On a desire for more interaction and collaboration across the NCBS-InStem-C-CAMP bio-cluster.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
3-Collab-A4
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/8aeacbde00ca5d2577c8a6ccdc7d36df.mp3
0a9f6665dc96ae38df4645a25065faa6
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Growth
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-V1</span>
<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS2</span> <br /><br />
<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
A list of subunits of the resource.
Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Original Format
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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vijay_TIFR-no-bio-laziness_SCI-INDIA_GROWTH-COLLAB
Description
An account of the resource
K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: On the perceived hierarchy of disciplines within the TIFR system.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
NCBS Archives
3-Collab-A5
-
http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/78cdc489f13f4d32b6fb13b2c486ed5a.mp3
2bc943d0de029eac047ba88dd4bb33d1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Growth
Description
An account of the resource
<p>Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.</p>
<p><br />At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-P1</span>
<p><br />When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. <span>3-Hiring-A4</span></p>
<p><br />It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. <span>3-Hiring-A5</span></p>
<p><br />One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.</p>
<span>3-Hiring-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.</p>
<p><br />Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.</p>
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<p><br />The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. <span>3-Hiring-A1</span> And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. <span>3-Hiring-A2</span></p>
<p><br />The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. <span>3-Hiring-A3</span></p>
<p><br />The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.</p>
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<span>3-Startup-P1</span>
<p><br />Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.</p>
<p><br />K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). <span>3-Startup-A3</span></p>
<p><br />One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS1</span>
<p><br />Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.</p>
<span>3-Startup-V1</span>
<p><br />Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. <span>3-Startup-A2</span> Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. <span>3-Startup-A4</span> Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam <span>3-Startup-A1</span> and PP Ranjith <span>3-Startup-A5</span> did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.</p>
<span>3-Startup-PS2</span>
<p><br />Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, <a href="https://www.ncbs.res.in/faculty/jayant-looking-back-look-forward">“extreme optimism and mild jugaad”</a>.</p>
<p><br />More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.<br /><br /></p>
<span>3-Collab-P1</span>
<p><br />MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.</p>
<p><br />The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. <span>3-Collab-A1</span></p>
<p><br />Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.</p>
<span>3-Collab-V1</span>
<p><br />The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.</p>
<span>3-Collab-PS2</span>
<p><br />Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Collab-PS1</span>
<p><br />For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was "a great deal of collaboration and cooperation" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. <span>3-Collab-A2</span> And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. <span>3-Collab-A4</span></p>
<p><br />When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this <span>3-Collab-A5</span> and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.<br /><br /></p>
<p> </p>
<span>3-Students-P1</span>
<p><br />The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?</p>
<p><br />Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. <span>3-Students-A5</span></p>
<p><br />The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.</p>
<span>3-Student-V1</span>
<p><br />It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. <span>3-Students-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Students-PS2</span>
<p><br />When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. <span>3-Students-A2</span> (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).</p>
<p><br />Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.</p>
<span>3-Students-PS1</span>
<p><br />NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. <span>3-Students-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. <span>3-Students-A1</span></p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.</p>
<p><br />One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone. <br /><br />It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.</p>
<p><br />Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. <span>3-Scaling-A4</span></p>
<p><br />Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-A0</span> <span>3-Scaling-PS4</span>
<p><br />Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. <span>3-Scaling-A2</span> And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. <span>3-Scaling-A3</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-P1</span>
<p><br />Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. <span>3-Scaling-A1</span></p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS1</span>
<p><br />Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”</p>
<p><br />NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.</p>
<span>3-Scaling-PS2</span>
<p> </p>
Table Of Contents
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Hiring, Start-ups, Collaborations, Student Selections, Scaling
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msr_maths-bio-regard_RESEARCH-COLLAB
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MS Raghunathan, former mathematics faculty member and student, TIFR: Reflections on the collaborations -- or lack, thereof -- between physicists, mathematicians and biologists at TIFR.
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NCBS Archives
3-Collab