3 50 920 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/416dac74e754f23e258c7cda74426c7f.jpg 290132909c61fe59a6b8933cf48945ed 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK and VR 2.png Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan and Veronica Rodrigues. Unknown date. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of K VijayRaghavan 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1c3981bbfdb9d7574f78b4452d1fe26d.jpg c6990fc11ccd5f7be1451736476ff011 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK 5.png Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan peering down a microscope, in his later years at TIFR 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/dbb2a2b1bd867f97044c989372b8828f.jpg 98d6d4ca437e553e7beedeb0dea8d587 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2014_J-Neurogenetics_KSK_Obit_1.pdf Description An account of the resource In this obituary for KS Krishnan, who passed away in 2014, his former students elegantly describe his research techniques and his ability to improvise and innovate. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Informa Healthcare 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a41d9de266b68fc03d34a79a1d7cb6f5.jpg d071fe1016a4d65bee4c5647e63bcc7c 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - pontecorvo.tif Description An account of the resource Guido Pontecorvo, Obaid Siddiqi's mentor and PhD advisor at the University of Glasgow. After Pontecorvo's demise, Siddiqi would write a detailed obituary in the Royal Society proceedings. 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9dca007a0c1b20f7c3fc79f9c16abab0.jpg 6549ce80c5173a5b6c422ecdf52780f6 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Obaid PhD thesis frontspiece.jpg Description An account of the resource PhD thesis of Obaid Siddiqi. April 1961 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Siddiqi Family 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/69bae66374356b00ce07b4bdb876e8a7.jpg c4ceb6ac0585bc79d6857e692f6d6e8e 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1985-05-07 VR to Champa from Goa - guruji - 1.tif Description An account of the resource A 1985 letter from Veronica Rodrigues to Champakali Ayyub, where Rodrigues addresses Obaid Siddiqi as guruji. It was common for the students to address Siddiqi in that manner, though it changed in later years. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Champakali Ayyub 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c405c7090c1788323d412094ba5f177a.jpg 92eb700302d6d8a64b02102805763e54 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1984 FRS Ponte To OS - 1.tif Description An account of the resource Letter from Guido Pontecorvo to Obaid Siddiqi congratulating him on being in the short list to be a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1984. He also congratulates the Society "for their wisdom". Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Siddiqi Family / NCBS Archives 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c56f9619ee5ca5dfdbeb437ec02fddbb.jpg 341334985efba9ab66c3b6ea3cc35f12 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1984 FRS Holliday To OS - 2.tif Description An account of the resource Letter from Robin Holliday to Obaid Siddiqi congratulating him on his nomination to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984. Holliday opines that the award "would do good" for Siddiqi's group. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Siddiqi Family / NCBS Archives 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3c1afb8e160d58b191fd0b091994e3b1.jpg a863026f1cf8c9d6f0f967968ef04c8a 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1984 FRS Holliday To OS - 1.tif Description An account of the resource Letter from Robin Holliday to Obaid Siddiqi congratulating him on his nomination to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984. Holliday opines that the award "would do good" for Siddiqi's group. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Siddiqi Family / NCBS Archives 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/100174fc5efc16c0613becbd3575121a.jpg eea3c0a896037f86c4b4e66295114657 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 PKM_Z_Lobo_Obit_2.pdf Description An account of the resource A joint obituary for PK Maitra and Zita Lobo, published in Yeast journal in 2008. Maitra joined TIFR's molecular biology unit as a young faculty member in 1963 and would go on to mentor many generations of students. Lobo joined as a research assistant and worked with Maitra for her PhD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Wiley Interscience 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/dce4bc28166c1ab794bdd597142feb53.jpg 32abc69463177a83e7c33228d32d0a52 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 PKM_Z_Lobo_Obit_1.pdf Description An account of the resource A joint obituary for PK Maitra and Zita Lobo, published in Yeast journal in 2008. Maitra joined TIFR's molecular biology unit as a young faculty member in 1963 and would go on to mentor many generations of students. Lobo joined as a research assistant and worked with Maitra for her PhD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Wiley Interscience 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/8598b553aadf36a11f7ee1bc96465e0f.jpg f9a6cb2777486ba2c9a9a62ccb1f9121 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1963 Nov 16 D-2004-01230-29(1 of 1) TIFR to PKM offer.pdf Description An account of the resource PK Maitra's offer letter to join TIFR as the second faculty member of the molecular biology unit after Obaid Siddiqi. 1963. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource TIFR Archives 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/fdd88a208d8b6d8b0db24234939928f6.jpg cd34662b7297fb4d779fd62e59d0cfa1 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 TIFR VR Obit.JPG Description An account of the resource The academic notice board at TIFR's molecular biology unit, 2016. 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/6f0cc2de6a53dcf643fe3f01c0f0240d.jpg de3472e860a4d9215d0243b81aae78b0 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1993-06-26 VR to Champa - discipline email.tif Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues' email to Champakali Ayyub in 1993. Rodrigues stresses the need to publish, saying that "It is good discipline to complete a job and let the world see it completed." Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Champakali Ayyub 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9461965478d7f04b41601c9a7f1d5cb5.jpg 03a4e6b6dd070649c89de1957e413579 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1990 VR to Physics Faculty - kumari ban.jpg Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues' note in response to gender biases at TIFR, where she admonishes the Institute on their habit of addressing women by their marital status in official correspondence. Of particular interest is also the handwritten institutional response. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/68941e8879821ffe90eebef19d354895.jpg 38889170745599ba3a11a7af178528df 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1989 OS Birla Award Speech - 3.tif Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi's speech after receiving the Birla Award in 1989. Siddiqi looks back at his career and acknowledges the variety of people who pushed him along in his career Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-15 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/228bee32af6d6aadff339dc35bb31966.jpg 6797959637479f93537f8f41415dfd20 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1989 OS Birla Award Speech - 2.tif Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi's speech after receiving the Birla Award in 1989. Siddiqi looks back at his career and acknowledges the variety of people who pushed him along in his career Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-14 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/418aea0ee3e1118d595a45f796a34533.jpg 0bfbf9ae27cfd1534b1387af1a3e292c 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1989 OS Birla Award Speech - 1.tif Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi's speech after receiving the Birla Award in 1989. Siddiqi looks back at his career and acknowledges the variety of people who pushed him along in his career Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-13 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/87a7c371e3e9ec93b97c6a1ccc9de193.jpg 88d3d1b4410d1f37446f6bd8d9e9b7a1 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Carlson_A Welcome to Drosophila Olfaction_1.pdf Description An account of the resource By the early 1980s, the molecular biology unit led by Obaid Siddiqi had gained worldwide reputation for their work on olfaction in Drosophila. The unit became a space for young scientists from around the world to come and learn. One of them, John Carlson, spent a few months at TIFR before heading to Yale, where he soon established himself in the field. An extract from his 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics article. 5-Mentor-PS1-12 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ecccd328fe4f0870b994e48d8fc8d8ae.jpg 8e098e4a5044c54f8c58b2fea036a4f5 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1970s OS with Brenner - Fr Babu.tif Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi with one of his mentors, Sydney Brenner, during one of Brenner's visits to TIFR (top photo). Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of P. Babu and Indira Chowdhury 5-Mentor-PS1-11 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f01e71330b257edece671a56dca1ac54.jpg 250c3e4af0ae7515d0b03674e006ccf3 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1957 Reayat Khan To OS - Reference.tif Description An account of the resource Reference letter for Obaid Siddiqi from Riayat Khan, who was his teacher at the Aligarh Muslim University. Siddiqi would then move to IARI, and then for a PhD in Glasgow. 1957. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Siddiqi Family / NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-10 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/d5d487a31a39c56620c2c3edbf31a092.jpg 5f5a6d0ca63e0325b16921e4a30dfc7c 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1957 IARI to OS - Reference.tif Description An account of the resource Reference letter for Obaid Siddiqi from his supervisor at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, where Siddiqi was doing research prior to his PhD in Glasgow. 1957. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Siddiqi Family / NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-9 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/cd0bec2567ab40fb39c2fca09ff172db.jpg 7f2429cfec5fd4414bf55e77f7bf98b3 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 VR-questionnaire-excerpt-student-exp_EDUCATION-MENTOR.tif Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues joined TIFR for her PhD in the late 1970s. Here, she summarizes her student experience in response to a questionnaire submitted by Indira Chowdhury. 5-Mentors-PS1-8 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/55c915643ff82aeb46215fb98c4b05f7.jpg 42b16f4c974aeacd017e355849e22adb 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - Veronica 2.png Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues at a tug-of-war event in TIFR, date unknown Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of K VijayRaghavan 5-Mentor-PS1-7 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7536bd9933ea444214119acaa940f3db.jpg 2488cb92585aa8a57e753db3eb6e1f89 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - Veronica - Graduation Dublin.tif Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues at her graduation in Dublin, 1976. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of K VijayRaghavan 5-Mentor-PS1-6 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/be9a287042793ebbfe536cd41f81205e.jpg 07a825d352e62772901f2a59ef27adda 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1988 VR to OS - citizenship appeal.jpg Description An account of the resource Veronica Rodrigues' appeal to Obaid Siddiqi in 1988 regarding her difficulty in obtaining Indian citizenship. Rodrigues was of Indian origin, grew up in Kenya and studied in Ireland before moving to India. The process was, she said, "proving to be a hurdle in my scientific career." Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/52fd06316461b9e1d9fa80fd9ebdf600.jpg 1a80a54170db43941ea0d88dd7d44d3e 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1976 TIFR application VR.jpg Description An account of the resource The registration sheet for Veronica Rodrigues at TIFR, filled at the time she was a research scholar at the institute. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/babaa00dd04ec31e691fe7cc273f11cb.jpg 245cd4e15d29650138cd34d9d91714e4 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1975 VR to OS PhD request letter.jpg Description An account of the resource After reading a paper by Vijay Sarathy and Obaid Siddiqi on bacterial recombination, Veronica Rodrigues, who was studying in Dublin, Ireland, sends a letter to Obaid Siddiqi expressing her interest in joining for a PhD. She would later build simple and elegant assays to study olfactory behaviour of Drosophila. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-PS1-3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/55428e86062c0343304713c7ddafe5ba.jpg 330f20c1a1f30be11e93ba031e334e02 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1988-10-27 Fr.PK Maitra To Jayant (By air Mail Letter).tif Description An account of the resource An October 1988 letter from PK Maitra to Jayant Udgaonkar, then a post-doctoral research at Stanford University. Maitra highlights that the new Bangalore Centre is likely to a "good place in the coming years", and an option Udgaonkar should seriously consider. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Jayant Udgaonkar 5-Mentor-PS1-2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/8ed889c7cd3484ba960581930aa01052.jpg 24cbd4c869b61f8d8dd19ae80560b6a4 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1963 PK Maitra TIFR Joining Application - Pic.jpg Description An account of the resource The registration sheet for PK Maitra at TIFR, filled at the time he joined as a young faculty member in the molecular biology unity at TIFR. 1963. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Indira Chowdhury 5-Mentor-PS1-1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/7248e7dbfd551a4e07e7e32b262ec33e.jpg 731fbe94b2f90ccfa04967537141bde1 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK and Beehive.png Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan was known for his ability to make friends with most people across the TIFR campus. Here, he convinced some people to bring down a hive off a tree, and then also put it into a case. When he moved to NCBS, he donated the case to Vidita Vaidya, a faculty member at TIFR. 5-Mentor-PS4-7 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/12665bc599e8b3561e32e9f35ecd8ff7.jpg 4b10f056559f8799025af7889e950011 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK 1.png Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan as a young researcher at TIFR 5-Mentor-PS4-6 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9e223fd92ab9fa4eafd8aabc900ca015.jpg e1a0757d97387e4f9d19d20f373eee67 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 KSK Cabin Snapshot.JPG Description An account of the resource A portion of KS Krishnan's bookshelf in his office at NCBS, giving a sample of his diverse interests. 5-Mentor-PS4-5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/dd23c8feae91663b6847f75de37b36a7.jpg da156eb5541b56082b0ee7d6a947176c 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK Brenner OS.png Description An account of the resource Sydney Brenner (left), KS Krishnan (middle) and Obaid Siddiqi, on the NCBS campus. Unknown date. 5-Mentor-PS4-4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/76fa5a60e6699b02243694900ea5d158.jpg 21fd320ad2b21f011e0cb99cd45eb654 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Profile - KSK and VR.png Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan and Veronica Rodrigues. Unknown date. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of K VijayRaghavan 5-Mentor-PS4-3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a50dcca2ef2054575ae14b9e0390f4da.jpg c782cbb32c66177090d0ec21765a76e8 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 KSK Cabin Equipment.JPG Description An account of the resource KS Krishnan's office at NCBS. On the left is a modified inebriometer, which he made to study anesthetics in Drosophila. 5-Mentor-PS4-2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a398a034381bc60e63cddd8f47ddb76c.jpg 7dd59035757a690ab4f9535cfa4a2942 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 Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Madhu lab notebook.JPG Description An account of the resource The lab notebook of KS Madhumala, a post doctoral researcher at NCBS. Madhumala was a student of Veronica Rodrigues and in her audio excerpt, she discusses how she may have been taken on as a research fellow at NCBS partly because of her lab notes. 5-Mentor-P1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1de9ce71633d7c440cd4ae038eb7a41c.jpg faf2dcc8598bbe0599c32cb705f98805 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 1998 Mayor - GPI anchored protein paper - Nature.jpg Description An account of the resource 1998 work by Satyajit Mayor and Rajat Varma, showing the organization of proteins at the cell surface, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6695/full/394798a0.html 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/adfe937b75ccde9c6fa5f2fca05725c6.jpg aff8294b9663eb0149b1ac10afbe7ffa 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2002 Shona - Amygdala - J Neuroscience.jpg Description An account of the resource The 2002 work of Sumantra Chattarji's group: Looking at the role of amygdala in chronic stress, http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/15/6810.full 4-Process-PS4-1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5ceadd363353289660944a0375e4c59c.jpg b1d35e437f4a379d0927c2282805e2ae 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Panicker - endogenous fluoroscence - stem cell reports.jpg Description An account of the resource The 2014 work of Mitradas Panicker's group: A Method to Identify and Isolate Pluripotent Human Stem Cells Using Fluorescence. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671114001453 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/324bd22273ee499f2e9731aeabb83af2.jpg 55274a8d67e251dcbfcc28283a9cb484 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2011 planaria - InStem - dasaradhi.jpg Description An account of the resource Image of a two headed planarian. The organism is known for its remarkable ability to regenerate itself, and it is used as a model organism at NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Vidyanand Sasidharan 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1deacb4750f7b391b5945ea74b6cd6e5.JPG 752785f6c6bda76e29321ac5acda6048 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Vemula - CSH - Lab notebook.JPG Description An account of the resource On keeping lab notes: From the walls of Praveen Vemula's office and lab at NCBS 4-Process-PS1-9 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9848c13d16ecfd28cea0ed14d62f744d.jpg 673633705468ad1d438091d6fa63c33b 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 TIFR Champa Lab - Fly.JPG Description An account of the resource Drosophila recipes and tubes are a common sight in most fly labs and faculty offices across TIFR and NCBS. This is at Champakali Ayyub's office in TIFR. Ayyub started as an assistant at TIFR, went on to do a PhD, and is now a scientific officer at TIFR's Department of Biological Sciences 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5febda0a84020c01acc8c482626ea625.jpg 61a27c9f02e4c3b3cdcf253d5f578367 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Swetha.JPG Description An account of the resource Swetha Bhashyam, an MSc Wildlife student, studying the winter feeding ecology of the stump-tailed macaque in the Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary, Assam. (2015-16) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of Ajith Kumar 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ba955eb830c6619e305d5d6917994f65.jpg 788af7154daff1fc350fd15f18dd16dd 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Lab - Hand drawn graphs.JPG Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi avoided computer-generated graphs as far as possible and expected his students to do the same. He would force them to draw curves by hand to get a feel of the trend in a particular experiment. 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/0e6aa66e5ac358dc8a5c2ebeec15c5cb.jpg 7dd59035757a690ab4f9535cfa4a2942 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 Madhu lab notebook.JPG Description An account of the resource The lab notebook of KS Madhumala, a post doctoral researcher at NCBS. Madhumala was a student of Veronica Rodrigues and feels she may have been taken on as a research fellow before her PhD at NCBS partly because of how she kept notes in her book. 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/61ea777538738ef162ef3bd05525e4bf.jpg d62b217fe96a660aa8dd6495dcaaddeb 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2014_J-Neurogenetics_KSK_Obit_1_3.pdf Description An account of the resource In this obituary for KS Krishnan, who passed away in 2014, his former students elegantly describe his research techniques and his ability to improvise and innovate. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Informa Healthcare 4-Process-PS1-10-PD3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/3f81f2d4cb408556aa3a2c3643bdccc8.jpg 4cf2fd54c0948514288b5b520ef783f9 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2014_J-Neurogenetics_KSK_Obit_1_2.pdf Description An account of the resource In this obituary for KS Krishnan, who passed away in 2014, his former students elegantly describe his research techniques and his ability to improvise and innovate. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Informa Healthcare 4-Process-PS1-10-PD2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9e90fb88948ef8b29cae83a68de563eb.jpg bb0130434af62ec46b40ab106e9122da 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2014_J-Neurogenetics_KSK_Obit_1_1.pdf Description An account of the resource In this obituary for KS Krishnan, who passed away in 2014, his former students elegantly describe his research techniques and his ability to improvise and innovate. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Informa Healthcare 4-Process-PS1-10-PD1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f43b55e6c363ea855523c038d4058691.jpg 5b2a0bfaa6b2e9d4c784780ce7935e64 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 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Still Image 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 2000s Process_Source-RDO_Ecology_Squirrel.pdf Description An account of the resource The campus has become an outdoor test site for research over the last 15 years, bringing with it an understanding of and connection to the natural world. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process