2 50 920 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e77ed82d612be73087b5fbcc3e9132d9.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 A name given to the resource Growth Description An account of the resource 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource nanjundiah_1976-80-IISc-TIFR_RESEARCH-COLLAB 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 3-Collab https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/866f354968352466a5627e58abcef04f.mp3 d209fb2bedd35a74a5df9e2cc4466ac5 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shobhona_lack-of-collab-tifr-funda_RESEARCH-COLLAB Description An account of the resource Shobhona Sharma, former student and current faculty member, TIFR: Thoughts on collaborations between the different disciplines at TIFR. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Collab https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/16cf815e0a6873da90e96ebd1ebc360b.mp3 8be780c87c64985220f9fb046cb0562e 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shaju_NCBS-start-1992-riots_INSTTN-CHAR Description An account of the resource Shaju Varghese, hospitality/security/canteen supervisor: His team's work in running a thinly-staffed canteen during the 1992 Bombay riots, and how it shaped his career. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5566f22ec89b1a0f8731dbc41a2b5e77.mp3 017512b842437abae89930eb6a044d79 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource gautam_confidence-xray_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource Prem Chandra Gautam, head, Instrumentation Division: On the hiring process in his group, and what he looks for in new hires. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7a2bd9744e12aac39b8bd3ea319e8a9e.mp3 58180bc98c3a52cb780c00857e44a9bb 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource krishnamurthy_staff-retrain-temp_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource H Krishnamurthy, scientific officer and head of imaging/cytometry, NCBS: On pushing his technical staff to enter into degree programs while working. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/4ba0f1352cd83ee157a4f4abd40be209.mp3 678fa4648b7e74f85cb2035402d11078 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource jayant_no-inbreeding-faculty_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On his concern regarding faculty inbreeding in research institutes and his own effort to prevent it at NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/835f88d022c8cc11834b95a2f17c2ae4.mp3 a0a1f96c417d8e5da8d345cad8ad342c 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource sowdhamini_neuroscience-1994_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource R Sowdhamini, faculty member at NCBS: On a delay in her hiring due to an NCBS faculty search in the mid 1990s for neuroscience researchers. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ca27420644bb318347b0ebc7b6806872.mp3 16033fdd352408b642dec4a01b8ef6fd 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource bhavsar_TIFR-interview_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource PN Bhavsar, scientific officer at TIFR from the 1960s till his retirement: On his interview process at TIFR in the 1960s for the position of a lab assistant. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/fc6a4b02fd5ad2ca73757367a8cb0959.mp3 a7d1548ceb40f915799a43e588a91956 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource bjrao_yale-letter-OS_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource BJ Rao, a faculty member at TIFR: On his conversation with Obaid Siddiqi regarding a move back to India in the 1980s, and the ensuing correspondence. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f17133adec9ce6f9be5553dcab2c3ac4.mp3 ba2e76e08e18af3d5bb716dd245aad9b 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource OS_hire-admin-no-mechanical_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: Cautionary note on the hiring process for administration Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource TIFR Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a0eb2109c68ccced42a9475a5c9b84cb.mp3 3fff72aebdd895f35be4fbe1b051e62d 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shantha_hiring-walk-IISc_GROWTH-HIRING Description An account of the resource N Shanthakumary, early hire in NCBS administration: Memories of entering the IISc campus for the first time in the early 1980s, and being hired into the system. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/34077c17b6fefdf721129b7cfa29df9d.mp3 5b4bfc9acc8aa8d1ac16b002bd0b2b32 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shona_coming-India-char-OS-KV-JU_INSTTN-BUILDING Description An account of the resource Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: Starting as a new NCBS member in the late 1990s, and the encounters with Obaid Siddiqi, K VijayRaghavan and Jayant Udgaonkar. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/0700717bac7ac52cd5c16efa6ae85d22.mp3 f55f47d4627471ac203dcddafe6ebc45 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource vijay_1980-proposal-student-offer_INSTTN-CHAR_INSTTN-PAPER Description An account of the resource K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: On being offered a position at the future NCBS while he was a PhD student at TIFR in the early 1980s. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Hiring https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/b0c8105b5c6aa41d208e5ad00aec87e0.mp3 ecd0a777078f54a536ef0e83a52638a3 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource vijay_scaling-future-fear_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: On the need for institutions to grow and being able to outlive their pasts. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling-A0 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1a7381ec3d49d5ebf20e14c5cb48b8b2.mp3 28968a7fcc66cd22bb3c85db9587c5fb 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource ashok_mid-level-mgmt-lacking_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource Ashok Rao, administrative officer: On his concern for lack of a robust mid-level management setup at NCBS as it keeps growing. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/6634a1f94ed4615bf022b58bcecdc831.mp3 f38d961b7b0bc8b0c0733cfff65a90e0 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource jitu_instnal-growth-no-pressure_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: His perspective on the sweet spot that NCBS is in today, with an ability to grow with thought and deliberation. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/14273702d790c8b99a55de5c0678e836.mp3 6e1a2fc5c821ef18ec3510de36df5f1a 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource Sudhir_TIFR-DAE-Model_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource Sudhir Krishna, faculty member at NCBS: The future of the NCBS funding structure as it grows and the need to consider the future of students studying at the institute. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/fd863608696100552be1d4b532331f2d.mp3 38868190957411c3ff3f3ec7260a7289 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource basha_ID-card-show_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource SN Basha, staff member of the NCBS security services: On the difficulties of keeping track of everyone on campus as it grows, and the need to request IDs of people who enter. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/704cc51d947ecce546ee559350095be9.mp3 e22982917199d644f9c5edf6d565dd80 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource jayant_InStem-dean-resign-adhoc_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On why he resigned as dean, and his concern about the "ad-hoc" measures implemented across campus Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ba6118b31beaa51b48c320592bce4203.mp3 a83409ad9af871f392cb9e212802581f 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource poornima_staff-ownership_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource UB Poornima, chief architect at NCBS: Reflecting on changes in staff attitudes as an institution grows. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/98bdd3ca07bb9a215b99c82d955108db.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 Growth Description An account of the resource 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource sahadevan_bureaucracy-audit_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource TM Sahadevan, long-time administrative architect at NCBS: On the concerns of the institute as it grows and a need to cut across red tape while following structure. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e49bb1f3fce0e6a750d3562203c8fc62.mp3 ae5787151598330d7a1c95f7f0366824 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shona_eqpt-ownership_INSTTN-BUILDING Description An account of the resource Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: Reflections on owernship of institutional facilities as a Centre grows. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9bfe4fdf9c8947b2d3519126ac4fd7a8.mp3 eb684bf9806bc1c02381c3cc42087d6e 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shona_scaling-too-big_GROWTH-SCALING Description An account of the resource Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: Cautionary thoughts on the risk of scaling up an institute's size. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Scaling https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/16b61e05eed72cad7e80ed95fd8901df.mp3 58d4fbb5f8d021d7480254e433d94f73 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource gautam_telephone-xchange_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource Prem Chandra Gautam, head, Instrumentation Division: On devising a way to build two parallel telephone exchanges with inter-operable numbers, based on his previous knowledge of telephone exchanges. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/07f3e23b10b45b51ce34ea0bd9eba6ab.mp3 b6a8cb87744b79012d085d30404ed4bb 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource mathew_IISc-reln-grant-money_INSTTN-BUILD Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: On the early days of NCBS, his role as a bridge between IISc and NCBS/TIFR Centre, and getting grant money for new research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7aec0e3986db5b5602c2c6c18518c4ea.mp3 f9d74863ca6dbccc1e179589fdb65701 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource jitu_seminar-uscope_GROWTH-STARTUP_IDENTITY-INDIA Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: The thought process prior to joining NCBS in the mid 1990s, the intense persuasion from NCBS and the immediate aftermath upon landing in Bangalore. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/33605e6eaf4c76fe828a76e723f02aa6.mp3 da23923314364d676eded5c3fa9ada91 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource vishalakshi_sci-typing_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource KS Vishalakshi, early NCBS hire for administration: Reflections on starting at the TIFR Centre as a daily wage worker and typing up 100s of theses for students. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/20252f175505d3ef92003e23c7544562.mp3 251d4f1ad100fa22cfb7ef9f8cffa058 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource ranjith_IISc-star-80fridge_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: Memories of working with students in the early days of NCBS, and taking ownership of instruments Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3722f9190ee5e7dc956312f7cf594349.mp3 2748481cdac0d400e7eea205a4b0d471 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource bhavsar_purchase-group-start_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource PN Bhavsar, scientific officer at TIFR from the 1960s till his retirement: On becoming a purchase officer for NCBS at its early stages in the mid 1990s. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c78ebc6c5b20e5cc7e93e9bc101e3644.mp3 12248e2ea49bd6700f812fe80e8e9639 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource jayant_camaraderie-early_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On the importance of camaraderie in the early years of NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c7ca9539ebf65fac421ce31a0a79aa34.mp3 6bb383ad19a32d743871041f64cdf9d4 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource mathew_xenopus-early-hire_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: The struggle to import Xenopus (a frog species) and the delay in the start of his experimental work at NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/922cdef7135845fb22c2a282cc5a6862.mp3 a7bf6ff01fef3461ab78e50d191e1296 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource ranjith_all-job-doer_INSTTN-BUILDING Description An account of the resource PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: Reflections on his role as someone who filled up many job positions in the early days of NCBS Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/4071f6ab5e06f92d3968e7b9efeebf3b.mp3 9812a3244459291d21885aa26d761996 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource ranjith_jitu-table-scope_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: Working with Satyajit Mayor to develop a vibration-free table in the mid 1990s. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/47d793381dc70e5b4366b7ce05d6fbb7.mp3 28ac931007b64cd1d19a251a09ce6912 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shaju_single-stove-hesitation_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource Shaju Varghese, hospitality/security/canteen supervisor: On the early days of the NCBS canteen at the TIFR Centre, IISc. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/13926463ac947870e77f0a1acf4d482f.mp3 cc7557bd64bf1747fd30580b4a0b8bab 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource shashi_post-doc-grant_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource L Shashidhara, early post-doctoral researcher at NCBS, faculty at IISER: Start-up days at NCBS in the mid 1990s and an ability to apply for grants independently. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/03ca54fecc43ce8002672ac2172ce254.mp3 7cab561a8987a835423df1b06a04f0a9 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource villoo_NCBS-start-avesthagen_GROWTH-STARTUP Description An account of the resource Villoo Patell, early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and entrepreneur: Reflections on starting a company in NCBS in the mid to late 1990s, and the research environment at the time. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Startup https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7c920b612bcf02007a25d9876105488d.mp3 81cbfc8a49abbee5bfd8c2fbc5c2bccb 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource Mukund_Signal-noise_GROWTH-STUDENT Description An account of the resource Mukund Thattai, a 'Young Investigator' NCBS hire and current faculty member: The struggle for research centres in finding the right students and ensuring both faculty and students benefit from the process of a PhD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/98103ac5775ae963aa654de263cdd3af.mp3 5087c47ee5bf24a6f56dda3b13619e63 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource vijay_enthusiasm-early-NCBS_GROWTH-STUDENT Description An account of the resource K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS: Reflecting that enthusiasm in the early faculty was a significant influencer for students to opt for NCBS when it started up. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/673aa8d442861b435c9de8aea3116c6a.mp3 7171af52599b5d9df83bfaa58587368e 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource aditi_new-student-paper_GROWTH-STUDENT Description An account of the resource Aditi Bhattacharya, research scientist and former student: On entering NCBS as a graduate student in the early 2000s with no experience reading research papers. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/40189758465491093e21af51854b5ef3.mp3 3b94b571a8d58061bfb90fbd424b5007 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource anubhab_new-student-experience_GROWTH-STUDENT Description An account of the resource Anubhab Khan, current NCBS student: On a few unusual hobbies, and his path to joining NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/fff84af56d5452f4d90e0dd41eb823c2.mp3 14247b26a5084b4331ad464a8c44ae32 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource debakshi_interview-insectivorous_GROWTH-STUDENT Description An account of the resource Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS: On her interview prior to entering NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/400eeaab570ba2e4ab1926f675cbbdc4.mp3 ea5ef0afbea1a27720cdacd0c47a9e03 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 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. 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. 3-Hiring-P1 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. 3-Hiring-A4 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. 3-Hiring-A5 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. 3-Hiring-PS1 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. 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. 3-Hiring-V1 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. 3-Hiring-A1 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. 3-Hiring-A2 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. 3-Hiring-A3 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. 3-Hiring-PS2 3-Startup-P1 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. 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). 3-Startup-A3 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. 3-Startup-PS1 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. 3-Startup-V1 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. 3-Startup-A2 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. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 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. 3-Startup-PS2 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>. 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. 3-Collab-P1 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. 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. 3-Collab-A1 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. 3-Collab-V1 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. 3-Collab-PS2 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. 3-Collab-A3 3-Collab-PS1 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. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4 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 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more. 3-Students-P1 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? Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5 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. 3-Student-V1 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. 3-Students-A3 3-Students-PS2 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. 3-Students-A2 (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). 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. 3-Students-PS1 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. 3-Students-A4 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. 3-Students-A1 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. 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. 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. Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4 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. 3-Scaling-A0 3-Scaling-PS4 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. 3-Scaling-A2 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. 3-Scaling-A3 3-Scaling-P1 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. 3-Scaling-A1 3-Scaling-PS1 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.” 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. 3-Scaling-PS2 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 A name given to the resource krishanu_student-interview_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Krishanu Ray, faculty member and former PhD student at TIFR: Memories of his PhD interview at TIFR, and comparing it to interviews today Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 3-Students https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ad330ab9c14be8d4f36cc171e5217e34.mp3 ab3684972ef131ea063f34d0509a5488 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource shona_amygdala_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Sumantra Chattarji, faculty member at NCBS: The back story for his group's 2002 Journal of Neuroscience paper on looking at chronic stress patterns in the amygdala, http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/15/6810.full Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A0 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ade05dba7d7e4de29609338d3bb72a28.mp3 24df14f6ad0c967066f21a20383b44a9 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource bhavsar_horse-blood-sulphuric-acid-1970_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource PN Bhavsar, scientific officer at TIFR from the 1960s till his retirement: Tales from the lab -- on drawing horse blood for scientific work, and on a ghastly sulphuric acid incident. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/219af8fc47787421c99d639287c968dc.mp3 65dc47f1b45d7ea4c1ab9704cac873b7 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource dasaradhi_planaria-intro_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty member at InStem: On starting research in India on planaria, and the story behind getting planaria into India Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/dc69f326f3f7135e78bb6fae582f8832.mp3 970dca587e30f1c8c5399995caa78c45 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource jitu_fluorofor-paper-backstory-rajat-pancho_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: The back story to his group's field-altering 1998 Nature paper, "GPI-anchored proteins are organized in submicron domains at the cell surface", http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6695/full/394798a0.html Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/602d2a884f71740b781a26c17a114c9e.mp3 0490b44e6c6615aaaa4944826d89aac0 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource panic_mouse-embryo_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Mitradas Panicker, faculty member at NCBS: Tales from the process - a story of problems with pregnant animals when they were shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/087db2eb37261fefd75aba303eb4000e.mp3 62a61c938db2c80f1aba9b388440aafa 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource sowdhamini_paper-publishing_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource R Sowdhamini, faculty member at NCBS: On her prolific record of publishing and her work ethic. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/0fc4dd98c477a6fd61778422c4ea18fd.mp3 7377fa0a00842aced315613c64ffac2f 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource Ajith_Braille_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and co-ordinator of MSc programme in Wildlife Biology: An explanation of why his 1982-83 field notes from the Anamalai Hills in Tamil Nadu are on Braille paper. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3166fb03d97447584d0a97b0d67fdf12.mp3 f141e3001d2888e2f5da430a42524d39 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 Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools 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 A name given to the resource mathew_paper-writing_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: Comparing how papers are written today and in the early days, and possible reasons for the differences. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process